Changing Chinatown SHAVONNE YU ENDS 220
At A Glance Statues of lions and golden dragons look on as I pass through the Millennium gate of Vancouver’s Chinatown. Awash in a sea of red lamp posts, I hear sounds of heavy traffic, overpowering any other ambient noise. But if I listen closely, I can hear the static of a radio, and the shuffle of feet as women dance to music nearby. A few years prior, I thought Chinatown owed its existence to an appreciation of culture. While I may have been naïve, I grew up being told to avoid that area entirely due to its proximity to the Downtown East Side. Never finding a reason to spend my time there, it wasn’t until I begun to learn about Vancouver’s history that I discovered that it was founded on a desire to segregate the working Chinese men from the rest of the city in the early 1900s (Greater Vancouver Hotels).