We are pleased to present Harry Deng’s essay on Vancouver’s Chinatown, written for a fourth-year undergraduate history course at UBC. Deng’s essay was awarded the British Columbia Historical Federation W. Kaye Lamb Award for the Best Student work in 2020.
In his application letter, Deng stated that “knowing the history of the province in which I grew up in and knowing the stories of the places I have visited creates a deeper, more meaningful connection with the space. Moreover, this knowledge has provided me with different perspectives of not only the land and its physical features, but also the people who inhabit this land and call it home.”
Traditional narratives of British Columbian Chinatowns during the late 19th and early 20th centuries have usually depicted them as racially segregated forbidden enclaves. They have been portrayed as a home away from home for Chinese immigrants who landed in British Columbia in search of either work or gold and where cultural comforts were imported to this new land. These cultural comforts lay at the centre of the supposedly forbidden nature of British Columbia’s Chinatowns.
It is possible to take another perspective, one that does not rely on the “Chinese-ness” of the community, but rather one that In other words, this approach views Chinatowns as a conceptualization of white European attitudes.
