Montreal’s Chinese communities celebrate the new lunar year, the year of the tiger, but this year, the future of the city’s historic Chinatown is paramount.
The neighborhood has always been a jumble of cultures.
“The history of Chinatown is also truly the history of the Montreal settlement,” Karen Cho told Global News. The filmmaker documents disappearing Chinatowns across the continent.
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She is also a member of the Chinatown Working Group that works for the area.
The neighborhood is just north of Old Montreal between Viger Avenue in the south and Rene Levesque Boulevard in the north. It is mainly a mixture of restaurants and shops, mostly Chinese, and has long been an attraction for tourists.
However, the Chinese community did not always live there.
“So many different immigrant groups have moved through this area,” Cho pointed out, citing Scottish, Irish, French and Jewish communities.
A building at 110-112 de la Gouchetière St. which once housed a synagogue and later a Chinese hospital still stands.
Another building on the same block, built in 1826, was once the British and Canadian schools. This is now the Wing’s noodle factory.
“This school was the first public school in Montreal,” explains Taika Baillargeon, Heritage Montreal’s assistant director of policy. “It was public, it was bilingual, it was mixed.”
The school closed in 1894, just around the time the first Chinese immigrants began arriving in Montreal, according to files in Montreal Archives.
They included Cho’s great-grandfather Woo Yuen Koo from Guangdong Province, China, who immigrated to British Columbia in 1898.
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“This is also how my grandfather, who was born in Vancouver’s Chinatown, ended up here with his brother because they could not find work,” she said.
Many Chinese immigrated from China to BC to work in mines and the railroad. But some, mostly men, have fled eastward to escape racism only to find it here as well, according to Timothy Chan, Montreal Chinese historian.
He noted, for example, that Chinese businessmen who owned laundries were being discriminated against by authorities.
“Because the city of Montreal charged the Chinese laundries $ 50 in taxes,” he explained.
According to information in Montreal archives, that $ 50 came down to four months’ work for a laundry worker. Chan said some who refused to pay the tax were sent to jail.
Chan said the residents have pooled resources to buy property in the area, creating their own community a sanctuary of racism.
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Cho said the community has evolved over a period of decades into a vibrant neighborhood.
“(In) the 1980s, when there was a lot of influx of people from Hong Kong, it was a very busy neighborhood,” she said.
Just a week before the new lunar year, Quebec announced that the neighborhood will get heritage status.
While they say the status quo is a step in the right direction, people like May Chu say they are still worried about the future of Chinatown.
“If we do not preserve the physical space,” she argued, “then the Chinese community is basically homeless. Do you know where else we are going? This is our home and we must defend it and we must fight for it.”
She and other advocates are calling for even more protection.
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Reference-globalnews.ca