CHINATOWN
AND ITS METAPHORS

Reviewing Karen Cho’s Big Fight In Little Chinatown

Growing up Chinese-Canadian in the early 2000s, my childhood was marked by ghosts. 

Coming from a small town in Southern Ontario, most of my Chinese heritage was negotiated in biannual trips to Toronto Chinatown’s banquet halls—specifically the Bright Pearl Restaurant, where the women’s bathroom was said to be haunted.

Legend has it that the restaurant, located in the Hsin Kuang Centre, was built upon a Chinese funeral parlor and morgue. As a bustling dimsum spot by day and wedding venue by night, this didn’t deter anyone from visiting. Until its demolition in 2018, the Centre was one of the most iconic structures in Chinatown. Its sloped green roof tiles and bright yellow siding were a splash of life, complete with two gruff lion statues guarding its entranceway. I’d never encountered anything spooky myself, but got shivers passing the makeshift altar in the bathroom.

In 2018, the colourful heritage building was destroyed to make way for a sleek monochrome office building. Chinatown had been shrinking for a while, but the destruction of the Bright Pearl was visibly stark—yellow and green textures replaced by a hulking black mass. The restaurant’s ghosts are nowhere to be seen, but it’s a haunting sight nonetheless.

This loss is echoed in Karen Cho’s documentary Big Fight in Little Chinatown (2022), moving with a sense of urgency as it chronicles the displacement and gentrification of Chinatowns across North America with a particular focus on Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver and New York. Filmed by a small crew during the peak of COVID, her film shines light on a community fighting to stay rooted against condo developers and racist urban planning. 

By interviewing a diverse cast of Chinatown workers and community organizers, Cho’s film successfully captures the gravity of the situation. When her camera pans the streets of Toronto, she’s not just advocating to support the businesses surrounding Spadina and Dundas — she’s calling to save affordable housing, community centres for new immigrants, doctors offices that communicate with elders, funeral parlors, public parks where you don’t have to spend money, and dimsum spots inhabited by ghosts for almost a century. Tearing your eyes from the film makes you fear losing another restaurant, building, or entire city block like the Bright Pearl.

Yet, the fight to save Chinatown does not resonate equally across the Chinese community in North America. Historically a place for the marginalized, Chinatown holds differing significance for each class of hyphenated Asians existing around it, from Cantonese to Vietnamese, young to old, rich to poor, first generation to fifth generation.

Chinatown is not a place I grew up in, or even near. I didn’t need to use services there, nor could I communicate with anyone. I’d follow my family around supermarkets, waiting to be fed English translations and pineapple buns as I learned what it meant to be Chinese.

Big Fight tears away the idea of Chinatown as solely a marker of identity, as is often the case when it appears in diasporic cinema. It’s rare to find a Chinatown that isn’t bogged down by nostalgia, but Cho’s intent is to bear witness to the cultural, physical, and economic loss that has tangible effects right now. Her interview subjects don’t offer up easy answers, nor do they paint it in a fine light: Chinatowns are changing from places where people live and communities congregate to places where people visit for a few hours, take pictures, and leave. 

“Cho’s moving portraits of Chinatown residents, workers, and community organizers ground the space in its gritty reality: unless we organize as a community, Chinatown will continue to disappear.”

For Cho, Chinatown is a metaphor for the fight against gentrification that’s largely playing out in marginalized neighbourhoods across North America. Chinatown, like many other working-class and racialized communities, faces extinction due to capitalist structures and corporate greed highlighted by the pandemic. Throwing up a few colourful murals doesn’t change the fact that people are being priced out of their own homes, sometimes by the overseas Chinese community themselves.

For Chinese-Canadians like me, gentrification poses a threat to my identity rather than livelihood or community. My anger over seeing the Hsin Kuang Centre torn down is coloured by childhood nostalgia, rather than devastating effects upon my home or business. Chinatown is a metaphor for my Chineseness, abstracted from any physical implications in the neighbourhood. In contrast, Cho’s moving portraits of Chinatown residents, workers, and community organizers ground the space in its gritty reality: unless we organize as a community, Chinatown will continue to disappear.

Until then, Big Fight carves out a concrete space for the Chinatown community, proving that it’s here to stay. Perhaps if more people understood its strength, there would be no metaphor for Chinatown as disposable, cheap, or easily discarded.

According to Google Maps, the site of the former Bright Pearl Restaurant is still a lifeless modern block with a FOR LEASE sign in its windows. It’s dated as June 2021, three years after the demolition of the building. A friend said that there might be a hotpot restaurant occupying the ground level now, but she isn’t entirely sure.

Whether a new eatery stands in its place or not, it’s nothing as memorable as the detailed, sloping green roof that once stood on its corner. For the restaurant’s sake, I hope the ghost likes its new bathroom.

 

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