Jan 5
About Us / Me
Hi everyone,
Happy New Year to everyone who is still following this page. We appreciate you still being here, learning with us, sharing the journey of this page and joining us in the fight against the gentrification of Chinatown. We have been on hiatus for so long we were so close to just jumping ship because we couldn’t see an end to this fight.
However, we thought we would muster the courage, and to open up about “us” to everyone here. First off, we have to dispel the “we”. We are one person, it’s really an I. I have been emotionally and physically exhausted for the past year, as anyone normal would be with the plight of the pandemic. Anyone who knows me personally would attest to this! I am a second generation Asian person who’s lived in Montreal for almost two decades and have frequented Chinatown ever since I moved to Montreal as a child. My history with Chinatown Montreal started with: Tong Por, it was the only dim sum restaurant we liked as a family. Chinatown was where we got most of our trinkets and other goods from surrounding markets. Upon hearing the news of Tong Por’s relocation to Ville St-Laurent, something struck in me that something was not right. Rent increases, or needing a bigger space, so on so forth.
Years later, I learned about gentrification, businesses closing, communities being uplifted and moved to other parts of town or getting completely separated from their essential services. All this tied with a slow housing crisis and wage disparity among minimum wage earners, I felt a rage and fight inside me to do something about it. During this time, I was in my early twenties still finishing my undergraduate degree where one racial incident caused me to spiral further into a depressive episode where I had connected racism to everything. Thus, increased the rage and fight.
I found out about Progressive Chinese Quebeckers, and by extension, the Chinatown Working Group. I volunteered with these groups, before it became as big as it is now. I learned so much from these groups and they’re great people who have worked tirelessly and hard on aiming to preserve Chinatown. As I left to do mychinatownmtl, I recognize the important of a team, hopefully one where everyone’s intentions and goals align. Now-a-days more and more people are becoming involved with activism and the fight to preserve Chinatown, which is a great beginning to hopefully see and end to this fight — whatever that will look like. Please get involved with either Progressive Chinese Quebeckers or Chinatown Working Group! OR, if you want to come join me, DM me ;).
With that said, I want to give a prelude to the projects I neglected last year and are looking to restart:
- I recorded some interviews last year of some aspiring activist in Chinatown. My interview with the great William Dere is the first of these series. We will be posting these once in a while throughout the year.
- An infograph / pamphlet on how to talk to your parents about abolishing the police.
- Some new historical facts and figures I recently found that wasn’t taught to us, due to the poor education system in Quebec. We get it, fReNCH is unDER aTTaCK. Welcome to the club of language obsolescence.
- We are hopefully doing more collabs with other folks in the community to bring you some interesting stuff. So Stay TUNED!
