Opinion: Vancouver’s Chinese communities are speaking up this election

A long line of Chinese seniors at an advanced voting station in Chinatown for the 2022 Vancouver civic election. (submitted)

Written for Daily Hive Urbanized by Adam Zivo, an international journalist and LGBTQ activist. He is best known for his weekly National Post column, his coverage of the war in Ukraine, and for founding the LoveisLoveisLove campaign. Zivo’s work has also appeared in the Washington Examiner, Xtra Magazine, and Ottawa Citizen, among other publications.

A prolonged surge in anti-Asian hate, combined with skyrocketing street violence in Chinatown, has galvanized Vancouver’s Chinese communities this municipal election. Shirking their usual political disengagement, Chinese Canadians want politicians to know that their voices matter.

The mood shift is conspicuous in Chinatown, where residents are fed up with endemic street crime. Random stabbings and violent assaults have become regular occurrences, scaring off visitors and leaving local residents — especially low-income seniors — terrified of leaving their homes. But fear and anger appear to be fuelling a political awakening.

“People in Chinatown are becoming more mobilized. Normally there aren’t any political signs in Chinatown showing who people support. Now you’re seeing it all over here — who people want on council. We’ve often been just polite and kept our heads down and haven’t made enough of a ruckus. We need to make more of a ruckus,” says Tracy To, whose family-run business, Forum Home Appliances, has operated in Chinatown for over 25 years.

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Over the past year, To has witnessed several legacy businesses close along her block. She said that “lawlessness” has left residents “cautious and scared” and that this has had a tremendous impact on local businesses.

Many of her customers are seniors and have told her that their children either forbid them from regularly visiting Chinatown or insist on driving them to the neighbourhood — no one wants to see their parents attacked. Just this Wednesday, yet another random assault left a 93-year-old hospitalized with a broken hip.

If crime is left unaddressed, To worries that Chinatown’s remaining legacy businesses — which imbue the neighbourhood with its unique culture, history, and sense of community — will close down. “We all need each other to survive. It’s a small ecosystem and we all co-exist together.”

For To, the stakes of the upcoming municipal election could not be higher. “This time it’s really a make or break type of deal — if things don’t change, if we don’t see changes in city council, we may not survive. Chinatown might not survive. Our businesses may not survive.” She says that if Chinatown withers away it would be a “huge” blow to Vancouver’s Chinese Canadian community, as the neighbourhood is “our history” and “shows how resilient we are as a community.”

To does not believe that Chinatown is being ignored due to anti-Asian racism. However, Lorraine Lowe, executive director of Chinatown’s Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden, feels differently.

Like To, Lowe cherishes Chinatown. “The neighbourhood symbolizes how our people struggled, endured hardships, and carved out a special place to create a community we can call home. But the neighbourhood is facing constant external threats enabled by bureaucratic decisions based on dogmatic ideological theories.” She believes that crime has been allowed to percolate in Chinatown because of anti-Asian sentiments. Politicians seem oddly complacent with crime when it’s concentrated in Chinatown, rather than in white neighbourhoods — who cares when Chinese Canadians are the ones dealing with violence, right?

These frustrations with anti-Asian prejudice are understandable. Since the pandemic, anti-Asian hate exploded in Vancouver.

In 2020, there were more anti-Asian hate crimes in Vancouver, a city of nearly 700,000 people, than in the 10 most populous US cities combined — a statistic which led the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University San Bernardino to publish data christening Vancouver “The Anti-Asian Hate Crime Capital of North America.” However, these hate crimes seem to be abating lately.

Lowe feels betrayed by social justice activists who seem disinterested in, if not outright hostile to, Chinese Canadian struggles. Pro-encampment activists have routinely tried to gaslight Chinese Canadians about violence happening in Chinatown, and some have even tried to retaliate against residents and businesses that speak up about feeling unsafe.

For example, Pivot Legal Society representative Meenakshi Mannoe advocated for a boycott of Forum Home Appliances, Tracey To’s family business, after To pleaded for help at a public safety meeting. When not harassing Chinese businesses, Mannoe, who is not Chinese, lectures Chinese Canadians on Twitter about how to stop anti-Asian racism (her solution: deflect attention to other issues instead of addressing crime). It’s a common tactic within the radical activist crowd, which believes that minority communities should only be listened to if they adopt far-left political views. Racial justice advocacy means dictating to minority groups what to think, apparently.

This is the same #chinatownyvr family business that @pivotlegal rep @mmeenaakshii urged people NOT to patronize after the owners pleaded for help at the last public safety meeting. https://t.co/OPQpPouniW pic.twitter.com/PmSaMfgbgq

— Peter Meiszner ABC candidate for council 裴智勵/裴智励 (@PeterMeiszner) May 10, 2022

Anti-policing attitudes don’t make people pro-racism. But supporting more cops when they are gunning down Black, Indigenous & Asian people in the streets certainly does. Do the Asian people beaten & murdered by #VPD not belong in #StopAsianHate? https://t.co/ARgX5CSzOd

— meenakshl (@mmeenaakshii) October 10, 2022

Activist blindness towards Asian (and especially Chinese) struggles has been noted before. A Bloomberg article on anti-Asian hate crimes in Vancouver explored how rich immigrants from mainland China, along with television shows and other cultural products that spotlight ultra-rich Asians, created an association between the Chinese community and wealth, inadvertently erasing the struggles of low-income Chinese Canadians.

Similarly, in January, Macleans published a long-form article investigating how low-income Asian seniors were being racially profiled and discriminated against at food banks. Some food bank volunteers would shoo away Asian seniors or give them inferior produce due to the mistaken belief that Asian seniors could not experience genuine marginalization.

“I think that the whole BIPOC movement forgets about marginalized Asians. We’re not seen as minorities, but we are. We’re ethnic. There’s some sort of resentment that seems to be part of it. They just see us all as the same, like we’re all money launderers. They don’t see poverty-stricken immigrant elders,” said Lowe.

However, now that Chinatown’s residents, along with their relatives, are losing patience and making their voices known, perhaps Vancouver’s politicians and activists will finally see and hear them. Asian marginalization matters, as do Chinese Canadian demands for basic public safety.

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