Letter from Toronto: Changing Chinatowns

Neither of us is much of a gambler, so after soaking in the spray at Niagara Falls, we drive two hours north to Toronto, reaching the city at dusk. We decide to follow the street signs into Chinatown for dinner before heading back to Buffalo. After parking the car, we wander the streets, stepping into a local supermarket to ogle the goods. Further down the street, lacquered duck and barbecued pork knees beckon from the restaurant windows. We finally settle on a nearby noodle shop with an oddly futuristic decor, all recessed lighting and black wall panels.

Every Chinatown I've been to seems to have a founding figure, mythical or otherwise, and Toronto's is no exception: here the honor goes to a certain Sam Ching, who opened a laundry business on Adelaide Street in 1878; he is mentioned in a wonderful little essay about the history of Chinese laundries in Toronto that once ran in Polyphony. Like Manhattan's Chinatown, this neighborhood started growing in earnest when the Chinese "coolies" who worked on the national railroads moved east in search of opportunities -- in the case of Toronto, they arrived in the 1880s from Western provinces like British Columbia.

Over time, the neighborhood moniker has become a bit of a misnomer: Chinatown is now a multiethnic enclave, a colorful mix of Chinese, Vietnamese, Laotian and other immigrant groups (and their descendants) as well as white professionals. Despite immigration controls against Chinese imposed by the Canadian government in the late 1800s, the city's Chinatown continue to grow well into the mid-1900s. Over the past decades, however, as younger Asian-Canadians move out into the suburbs and the population of Chinatown ages, businesses have been declining, with restaurants and shops closing by the dozen each year. Enthnic enclaves like this were once the bedrock of immigrant communities, providing families with a familiar surrounding and dense social networks that eased their transition into a new world and. I believe that social ties based on geographic proximity and in-person interaction will always be more useful and desirable to immigrants than electronic ones, but I wonder whether in this age of telecommunications enclaves like this Chinatown have lost some of their function.

I wish we had more time to explore Toronto's Chinatown, but the drive to Buffalo is over two hours, so we decide to head back. In the car I jot down a reminder to myself to look for a copy of a book on Chinatowns that I've been meaning to read for a while: Peter Kwong's The New Chinatown. I am intrigued not just by the ties of solidarity that emerge in these ethnic enclaves -- the springboards for so much mobility among immigrant families -- but also by the darker side of Chinatown societies: their long and colorful history of gang warfare. I'll be posting more about them after re-visiting Manhattan's MOCA: The Museum of Chinese in America, which is currently closed for relocation to another building in Chinatown.