CBC News recently featured photos of Vancouver Chinatown from artist and photographer Morris Lum in a piece on Lum’s new book:
Since 2012, the Toronto-based artist has photographed 20 Chinatowns across Canada and the U.S, from Ottawa to Oakland, Calif. Through businesses, community centres and clan associations, Lum explores these enclaves as living sites of cultural heritage shaped by waves of migration.
A new book titled Chinatowns: Tong Yan Gaaicatalogues the photographer’s ambitious, multi-city, decade-plus study with more than 120 artworks. It arrives at a time when headlines suggest North American Chinatowns are at risk of disappearing. And while Lum’s photos observe the effects of pressures like gentrification and rising rental costs, they also provide a picture of resilient communities that have persisted through continual transformation — not in spite of it.
The piece features three images of Daisy Garden (142 East Pender Street), which in the last 10 years closed due to a fire, was demolished and subsequently rebuilt and reopened, and closed again, with the site now home to Golden Smell Mee, a Malaysian and Singaporean restaurant returning to its roots in the neighbourhood.
To close the article, Lum gives his take on the future of Chinatowns:
“Chinatown was a place of refuge, but it was also a place of violence,” he says. “Chinese folks were put in these little sectors of the city, and they couldn’t really be anywhere outside of that. But through that experience, they built a sense of community.
“My hope for Chinatown is that it continues to be a place for community and a place where people can feel comfortable, where people feel like they can have a home.”
“Not only a physical home,” he adds, but a place where people can always say: “Let’s all meet up at the restaurant and hang out.”
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