1. INTRODUCTION

Niagara Falls had a Chinatown? I didn't know that - a common response when I began to tell non-Chinese Niagara Falls residents about my research. Ostensibly, I had returned to Niagara Falls in June 2017 to mark Ching Ming - a time to pay respects to ancestors and tidy their graves. But inside, I wanted to know anew the place where I grew up.

How does one learn:
about belonging when the existence of place has been denied?
about a place no longer there?
when those whom you belonged to and with have passed on?

Chinatown in Cantonese is called tong yan gaai; translated literally means "Chinese people street". And so it was with the Niagara Falls Chinatown of my childhood except it was more like two streets - Park Street and Erie Avenue - rather than one.

The last Chinatown buildings were demolished in 2014. My parents and brother are deceased. Only a few Chinese who knew Chinatown and/or are willing/able to talk about their experiences remain.

Yet, I want to: understand my childhood in that place, record individual experiences, and create a collective memory of Chinese in Niagara Falls. 

Thus, these blogs are caught in a spiral - circling forward and back.  

A journey of a thousand li 
starts with a single step (Confucius).
  So, onwards.

Chinatowns

According to the Canada Chinatown Series, Chinatowns emerged during the nineteenth-early twentieth centuries in response to the shared political, economic, and social needs of men who immigrated from China's Pearl River Delta to live in overseas cities. In contrast, Professor Kay J. Anderson (1987) proposes that Chinatown (Vancouver's in particular) is a European construct intended to define Chinese identity and place in society (The Idea of Chinatown: The Power of Place and Institutional Practice in the Making of a Racial Category). In other words, Chinatown is a ghetto based on race.

As evidenced in the British Columbia cases of Barkerville, Cumberland and Victoria, Chinatowns indeed occupied less valued real estate - implying a less than desirable position in broader society. However, Professor David Chuenan Lai (1988) believes "Chinatown is an ill-defined perceptual area because its characteristics, structures, images, and townscape have changed over time."

What are the perceptions of Chinatown?
Have they changed?

The title of one of Lai's work - The Forbidden City within Victoria (1991) - conjures notions of Victoria's Chinatown as being exotic, dangerous, and exclusive. Media have melted similar associations into a public consciousness. Chinatown with its vibrant red lanterns glowing in a perpetual gray-dark, be it day or night; unseen children tossing firecrackers onto littered streets; barbecued pork and duck hanging inside shop windows above an outside array of woven baskets piled high with unknown greens; alleyways echoing with a harsh tonal language lead to foreboding blackness: crowded gambling halls, sleepy opium dens, backrooms abounding in flying kung fu experts or wizened old men scooping rice into toothless mouths.

These stereotypes have been cultivated, reinforced, and continue to be readily identifiable in TV/movie representations be they past, present, or even a future in post-apocalyptic times. So, when I tell non-Chinese Niagara Falls residents that I am researching Chinatown and its past residents, I should not be surprised that they do not know it.

Chinese Identity

What does a young child remember and understand
about growing up in Niagara Falls Chinatown?
What does a child, know about being Chinese in the first place?

My mother arrived in Canada in 1948 and until her death in 2010, never learned to speak English. We spoke Hoisanhua, a dialect of Cantonese, at home. Other people around me spoke Chinese. We looked similar in that we all had black hair and skin that looked like we had been out in the sun.
We were different from the people outside our compact neighbourhood. If they spoke to me, they talked in English.

In school, I met a whole class of kids who looked more like the Dick and Jane in our readers than I ever would. My classmates used yellow, brown, blue and sometimes, green crayons to draw their families who lived in peaked-roof houses. I used black and brown crayons for my family who lived with a bunch of male boarders in a flat-roofed old furniture warehouse.

I likely could not have explained how I felt - this otherness - but for sure I knew it had to do with being Chinese. Perhaps all children feel an individual difference at one time or another but a difference of ethnicity - growing up as a visible minority - shaped my early life and perpetuates in how, even as an adult, I stand in the world be it as a person of a different colour or in the midst of a sea of Chinese faces.

For what seems like an eternity, there were no Chinese kids - other than my older brother - in my neighbourhood or in my school. In grade one, my mother dressed me in a cheongsam for the school Hallowe'en parade. Meanwhile, my brother, in grade four, was Davey Crockett. I may have believed Chinese was a costume you could put on, take off, or perhaps a superficial difference that was easily masked.

I do not recall if Miss Lothian, the children's librarian at the public library, introduced me to the Five Chinese Brothers or if it was not until later on that I realized the resemblance between the book illustrations and Bonanza's  Hop Sing on TV. Chinese had a certain appearance: almond eyes, pigtail, shuffling walk, halting English.

At school, China/Chinese had a place. In the grade five Social Studies Pirates and Pathfinders text, China and its people were the uncharted backdrop for Marco Polo's explorations and discoveries.

These were the explicit and implicit messages the world outside Chinatown sent me as a child. In my own home, in Chinatown, though, I saw aging bachelors, few families, and my parents' endless labour and frugality. As an adolescent, I was too busy looking elsewhere to see what was in front of me. Now as a senior, I want to know about the Chinese of Niagara Falls: ah bak, sook, gong, goh, mui, ye, je - the uncles, aunties, and elders - who populated Chinatown. We were not just part of a waiting scenery. We shaped our own lives and influenced those around us.