My French cousin Olivier was in Hong Kong, so we decided to go up together to our ancestral village of Ge’an (葛岸村/Got’ngon in Cantonese), up in the Pearl River Delta, just kilometers south of Guangzhou (Canton). Ge’an is now completely gobbled up by the city of Foshan (佛山市/Fotsan), a satellite of the provincial capital. It is in Lecong Town (樂從鎮) of Shunde District (順德區/Shundak) in Foshan City.

I visited our village for the first time in 2005, and more recently talked about it on this blog back in 2008. The town changed a lot in 6 years, and so did I. I didn’t live in South China and my Cantonese was not up to today’s level. I couldn’t properly communicate with Uncle Chi Tong (my dad’s cousin). For instance, I only fully understood this time around that this uncle, who was slightly younger than my dad was actually born here. He immigrated to Madagascar before turning 2, and grew up in Hong Kong afterwards.

My grandpa was apparently the more adventurous one, of the two brothers who lived under this house. Uncle Chi Tong’s father stayed in China until the mid-1950s, before joining his brother in Tananarive (now Antananarivo), Madagascar, to operate in the grocery store business.

Our family later left Madagascar entirely. The younger brother (my paternal grandfather) joined my dad in Canada. The older brother went to Hong Kong. Unwittingly, my mom’s family also comes from the agglomeration of Foshan, but after passing through Vietnam…

My cousin initiated the trip, because he had never travelled to China before, let alone visit his ancestral village. My impressions was that the house will one day crumble, but that it was very well preserved despite not having anyone live there for about half a century (maybe squatters?). The home even had some wiring for electricity, so it may have been less than half a century.

So, we went inside the house, and unlike last time, even ventured on the top floor. We must say that the house is in pretty bad shape, and that the walls are cracking all over the place. Non-renovated wood floors in subtropical climate equals accelerated decay. There were pots stored, chairs and other simple furniture like stools and some chairs and drawers. I thought we should’ve taken something, because we wouldn’t have a chance to go back soon. But we didn’t, perhaps too busy taking photos.

The house could’ve been anymore, since there were no indication that it was ours, except that we knew the address. But we picked up some pieces of paper from my uncle’s parents’ drawers clearly identifying our family. There were letters to Tananarive that were never sent (the address on the envelope was in French! Which is probably pretty neat for South Chinese peasants of the time), my grand-aunt’s talc powder and some of my uncle’s official papers (he was surprised to find them too) with passport-size photos of his family members.

Also, we found dog shit all over the place, and there were some small paper cups left near a bottle of moonshine. There were also construction materials left near the house’s entrance, perhaps by workers who thought the house abandoned (as it was so).

Surely now with the improved state of public transportation in the region, we could find our way back there pretty easily. A metro line was just built between Guangzhou and Foshan, and the travel time between Central in Hong Kong to Foshan a tiny two hours, if you don’t count the time at the border and waiting between trains. Yep.

Mon frère participera avec son équipe à un grand tournoi de volleyball qui réunira à Montréal plus de 1500 joueurs d’origine chinoise de partout en Amérique du Nord, lors de la fin de semaine de la fête du travail.

L’histoire de cet événement est très intéressante. Le tournoi avait d’abord été fondé par des travailleurs d’origine chinoise de Boston et de Providence en 1935. Des équipes de partout aux États-Unis et au Canada ont joint la compétition au fil des années. En 1986, Montréal a accueilli son premier tournoi, marquant le début d’une rotation entre six villes.

Le fait qui frappe le plus? Pour être admise au tournoi, deux-tiers des joueurs d’une équipe doivent être “100% chinois”.

J’étais déjà assez fasciné lorsque mon frère m’a dit que le tournoi avait réquisitionné le Palais des congrès de Montréal. Ce n’est pas quelque chose qui m’attire d’emblée (étant tellement un grand sportif), mais je ressens une certaine fierté de savoir que Montréal a une communauté chinoise jeune (que je ne connais pas vraiment), et qui a les reins assez solides pour organiser un événement d’une telle ampleur.

Before leaving for Hong Kong, I brought with me this copy of an “official guidebook” distributed by the Hong Kong Tourist Association (香港旅遊協會), the precursor of the Hong Kong Tourism Board (香港旅遊發展局). My dad had given it to me some time ago when he was digging up his junk, and presumably picked it up when he and my mom got married in 1977, at the Lee Gardens Hotel, where the Manulife Plaza now stands (see map).

Flipping through it, I saw that the exchange rate was HK$4.70 for each US$1, compared with the HK$7.77 pegged rate today. It was during a short period of nine years when the Hong Kong dollar floated.

Lee Gardens Hotel, Causeway Bay, Hong Kong (circa 1973)

View of the Harbour in late 1973

“Because only Pan Am fly the new Boeing 747SP”

Visit places like Tiger Balm Gardens in Tai Hang

And now the racier parts

Hong Kong Night Life

54 D’Aguilar Street, that’s at the middle of today’s Lan Kwai Fong

Do I need to say that this is an official guidebook produced for and endorsed by a government-funded organisation?

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The Nikkormat EL was Nikon’s first electronic camera…

…but my dad was actually a fan of Minolta and had one similar to the one in this advert. On the right, Braun also made video cameras with sound…

Wearing real fur in the 1970s was still very politically correct. I mean, look at this, it’s imported from Scandinavia!

The Dark Side

View of Kowloon in the 1970s

“Public transport in the 80s.” The Cross-Harbour tunnel and the MTR were still just a project… Wikipedia has a clearer map of the first MTR line that would open in 1979 between Central (Chater) and Kwun Tong. Other retro station names: Waterloo (Yau Ma Tei) and Argyle (Mong Kok).

Finally, we found that the publishers of the booklet, Kwun Tong based A-O-A Offset Press Limited is in business!

If you are in Toronto on September 12th and are interested about the history of its Chinatown, be sure not to miss Mapping Chinatown, a Walkabout around Toronto’s Downtown Chinatown.

In the same theme, that of Toronto’s old Chinatown, I recently found out about East Chinatown (in Riverdale), which I read about on Spacing Toronto.

Montreal’s own Chinatown is changing. In this past decade and a half, a new Chinatown has emerged further west, close to Concordia University. My uncle and aunt who were visiting Montreal this summer, after being abroad in Hong Kong for more than 10 years now, told me that they were not aware of this second Chinatown. When she was a student at Concordia, my aunt never noticed such concentration of Chinese-owned restaurants and boutiques. (It was also a time when they could watch Hong Kong films in a movie theatre in Chinatown and see big Cantopop stars perform in the city.)

I’m very curious to see what Plaza Swatow, what seems to be the largest Chinese commercial centre in Montreal ever, will bring to our Chinatown(s) in the coming year.

When I visited China in the spring of last year, one of my most vibrant memories was of the old town west of Kaiping City named Chikan (赤坎) (Google Maps).

Yes, the Kaiping region is well-known for its diaolou, like Zili village, but the Chikan township, under a typical southern China with a thick summer rain pouring on us while we visited, was perhaps less spectacular, but a lot more “familiar”.

Chikan looks like a movie set — and I think there is a film studio built on the outskirts of the historical town. Buildings are darkened with mold, but the businesses look nonetheless thriving. My friend Tiffany, whose ancestral town is Kaiping, and I were the only “tourists” in that town on that particular day it seemed. Kaiping may be a UNESCO site, but Chikan seemed particularly thin in terms of out-of-towners when we visited.

There was a wet market, where the word “wet” took all its sense. Vendors were literally selling their foodstuffs on the ground, over old pieces of styrofoam/cardboard. The fresh produce looked amazingly fresh. There was also a “meat counter” that was exactly that: a table with pieces of meat that the butcher could chop for you.

Shops on the main street of Chikan (you can walk the whole town in 30 minutes) were pretty diverse, and included shoe shops, cellular phone dealers, rice vendors and coffin makers. There was one convenience shop — kind-of the Wal-Mart of Chikan.

It looks like Old Shanghai in that movie set that they used for Lust, Caution, and reused for a bunch of movies (like that razzie with Rene Liu, Fan Bingbing and Leon Lai), but also a bit like the Melaka old town (perhaps because it was built by Chinese? Or endured the same colonial influence?). It definitely makes me think that one of my ancestors could have lived in this type of house (but no, they were actually peasants).

From Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Ferry, Kaiping is extremely accessible, on speed foil, with a few hundred RMB and a valid passport. You can stay at the Ever Joint Hotel, a five-star hotel, for something like 300 RMB a night. We left the city by bus to Shenzhen, at the bus terminal, just on the island north of the hotel, across the river. For transportation, we hired a taxi that took us to Zili Village, and then Chikan. But taking the city bus back to Kaiping City (a 20-minute ride) is definitely the economical and adventurous way of doing things. I absolutely recommend that. It’s even more adventurous if you go around without a map on you.

Almost naturally, Parc Sun-Yat-Sen, also called Zhongshan Park by some, was the location of Montreal’s presumably only public commemoration of 6/4, known as the Tiananmen Square events in the West. The park is in fact more of a square in the middle of Chinatown and is often partly occupied by Falun Gong practitionners, alongside tourists and senior citizens living in the area.

Today was a special anniversary of 6/4, as it marked the 20th year after the sad events. When I visited Parc Sun-Yat-Sen this afternoon, two distinct groups were present, namely Amnesty International and the Falun Gong (FLG). Although they didn’t brand themselves as FLG, upon reading some of the posters, bearing slogans that cursed the Chinese Communist Party’s, one immediately recognizes the FLG’s particular style (which the Amnesty group confirmed).

On the other side of the park, the representative from Amnesty told me that their group has had a presence in Montreal’s Chinatown every June 4th since 1989, except on one occasion. They created a space with an improvised tombstone where passersby could mourn the victims of 6/4. The man from Amnesty said that Tiananmen Mothers, a group led by Ding Zilin, whose own son died in Tiananmen Square during the protests, were forbidden to mourn on Beijing’s most famous public space and this was a way to pay them tribute.

Standing out was a visual artist name Liu Yi (Louie) WANG, who told me that he was present in Beijing, in Tiananmen Square, when the tanks rolled in. The diminutive man brought with him to Parc Sun-Yat-Sen various paintings that he made of scenes that he witnessed on that fateful June 4th, like one of people surrounding a bicycle that had gotten rifles shots earlier on.

My friend Derrick Chang, aka maskofchina, lives in Hong Kong and was present at the yearly 6/4 (Tiananmen events) memorial at Victoria Park:

150,000 people attended the candlelight Vigil to mark the 20th anniversary the victims of the June 4th, 1989 Massacre in Beijing. Hong Kong is the only place in the People’s Republic of China that is allowed to hold remembrance services for this sad occasion.

See the Flickr set (with more photos to come later).

L’équipe chinoise de Radio Centre-Ville diffusera une émission spéciale en direct ce jeudi, 4 juin, de 22h30 à 23h30. (Écoutez en direct)

Nous aurons des commentaires de la part de Raymond Wong Yuk Man, politicien et activiste très connu à Hong Kong (finalement pas non plus), et de Loïc Tassé, chargé de cours au département de Science politique de l’Université de Montréal, et fréquent commentateur des questions chinoises sur les grands médias (qui nous parlera de son séjour à Beijing avant et pendant 6/4) (finalement pas).

De plus, nous recevrons Trevor Fraser qui aura organisé avec QPIRG McGill un événement à la mémoire de 6/4. Je ferai également partie d’un panel en compagnie des animateurs habituels des émissions en mandarin et en cantonais (l’émission sera d’ailleurs multilingue, surtout en chinois, mais également avec des bouts en français et en anglais).

Écrivez à l’équipe si vous avez des suggestions ou questions: chinois@radiocentreville.com

Presented by QPIRG McGill, Twenty Years After June 4th is a memorial for the event of Tian’anmen Square in 1989, commonly known as “6/4″ in the Chinese-speaking world. The animated NFB film Sunrise Over Tiananmen Square by Chinese-Canadian director WANG Shuibo will be screened.

Memorial: Wed June 3rd, 2009, 2-7PM
Screening of “Sunrise Over Tiananment Square” & discussion: Wed June 3rd, 2009, 5PM
Address: 3480 rue McTavish
Infos: QPIRG (514-398-7432)

A friend of mine, Trevor Fraser, organised a historical tour of Chinatown last summer for a few of us. Starting at where the Palais des congrès plaza currently is, he explained that the Catholic Centre on Viger was built after the city signified that they were going to destroy the church on De la Gauchetière and Jeanne-Mance. Of course, the church is still where it should be, as the city reversed its decision, but the Centre was built anyways and still used today.

On our way there, we stopped by a strip of buildings facing the infamous Guy-Favreau building, which was constructed at the cost of a block of Montreal Chinatown (as seen on Radio-Canada’s digital archives website).

Back on De la Gauchetière, we noticed the names of the people/families that built the houses, on panels holding on top of the buildings.

Trevor Fraser

Here are notes (Google Docs format) that Trevor provided us with.

Le site des Archives de Radio-Canada recèle de nombreux petits trésors, dont ce clip vidéo sans narration de sept minutes, datant de 1963 et qui traite du parc Belmont. Le célèbre parc d’attractions était situé à Cartierville au nord-ouest de Montréal et ferma définitivement ses portes en 1983, après 60 années d’existence.

Les problèmes du parc Belmont débutent dès la création de La Ronde, lors de l’exposition universelle de 1967. Malgré une année record, en 1972, de 750 000 entrées, le nombre de visiteurs diminue progressivement. Même l’arrivée de nouveaux manèges ne suffit plus à maintenir l’achalandage. En 1979, l’accident du manège « paratrooper » blesse deux enfants et ruine l’image de l’institution. Elle vieillit mal. L’été avant sa fermeture, le parc Belmont n’obtient que 316 000 entrées.

Avec les plaintes d’un voisinage résidentiel, une descente de police, qui nuit à sa réputation, et une hausse des taxes, le parc Belmont est condamné à fermer ses portes le 13 octobre 1983.

Je n’ai aucune mémoire du parc Belmont, étant né que quelques années avant sa fermeture finale. Des lieux comme le Belmont exercent une certaine fascination chez moi, peut-être parce qu’ils témoignent d’une époque révolue, celle de l’amusement par des moyens technologiques qui ont peut-être fait leur temps, comme la maison hantée et les montagnes russes, maintenant remplacées par un bon jeu vidéo à la Half-Life, ou le dernier Indiana Jones.

Ailleurs dans le monde, on peut aussi à l’occasion rencontrer des parcs d’amusements abandonnés sur son chemin. Cette photo fût prise au début du mois de mai, et provient du parc Changsha (长沙公园) dans la ville de Kaiping, province du Guangdong, dans le sud de la Chine. Le Changsha est un parc boisé de la taille de notre Carré St-Louis, en plein centre-ville (deux blocs à l’est du terminal de bus inter-cité), et qui a maintenant l’air de servir de parc public.

Parmi les manèges abandonnés (ça m’étonnerait qu’on les époussète juste à chaque année l’été venu) – un carrousel, des navettes rotatives, et une arène d’autos tamponneuses, sans autos tamponneuses – se trouvait aussi un centre d’activités municipal dont on se servait encore, vu les jeunes qui en sortaient, alors que nous passions dans le parc.

Lors d’un voyage précédent en Asie, au printemps 2005, cette fois-ci à Hong Kong, j’avais été à une exposition photographique intitulée « Hong Kong Four-Cast » au Musée de l’Université de Hong Kong et dont un recueil fût publié à la suite.

Les pièces les plus marquantes pour moi furent celles du défunt Lai Chi Kok Amusement Park, ou Lai Yuen (荔園) pour les intimes. La photographe hongkongaise Wong Wo-bik avait alors pris des clichés du parc d’attractions et zoo à la veille de sa destruction en 1997, alors qu’il était déjà abandonné depuis quelques mois.

Lai Yuen était encore au début des années 80 le château des illusions et de l’épouvante où des milliers d’enfants et d’adultes se pressaient. Wong Wo Bik a ainsi recueilli ces vestiges et a par juxtaposition ou autres procédés recréé ces images : Des lieux éphémères plein d’imagerie populaire qui ont compté dans la vie des Hongkongais et ont disparu sans laisser aucune trace. C’est un passé recréé pourrait-on arguer, mais tout passé est recréé par la mémoire humaine qui le transforme continuellement en fonction du présent.

(Suite au site de l’Alliance Française de Hong Kong)

Situé alors dans le Nouveau Kowloon, autrefois loin des principaux centres urbains de Hong Kong, le Lai Yuen était un des endroits favoris des excursions de fin de semaine des Hongkongais. Les développements résidentiels se succédèrent, jusqu’à ce que le Lai Yuen lui-même se fasse gober par un projet d’habitation.

Cet article fût publié le 17 juin 2008 dans Spacing Montréal.

Such a post, I am torn between doing it in English (larger audience) or French, because I am venturing the guess that many descendants of the village I will be talking about have immigrated to France, Canada, or another French-speaking country. This is because this village, Ge’an in Putonghua or Got’ngon in Cantonese dialect (葛岸 in Chinese characters), is where my paternal grandfather was born, before he left China for Antananarivo (Tananarive), Madagascar, where my father grew up before immigrating to Montreal, Canada. Like it’s frequently the case with immigration patterns, many of my grandfather’s fellow villagers settled in Madagascar and then moved on to somewhere else (just like how the Taishan wikipedia page claims that 75% of all Overseas Chinese in North America came from that small locality of now 1 million).

In 2005, I visited the village accompanied by one of my dad’s cousins living in Hong Kong. My first impression was that I would probably be willing to fork out a few thousand dollars to renovate the house, if I could make it into some sort of out-of-town chalet, if I were to live in Hong Kong one day (with as many “ifs”, you aren’t getting nowhere). The village is surrounded by fields, but outside the village proper, passes a highway. A few kilometres out, it was the city, and the Pearl River Delta Region, one of China’s most dynamic economic zone (because of Hong Kong, and money/influence from Overseas Chinese). We had late lunch in a restaurant in nearby town Lecong (樂從/乐从)

After the visit, I did not think of looking for the village again. Last spring, when I visited China, and Hong Kong, I ventured with the possibility of just dropping by. I did not, and went to Kaiping instead, on my three-day visit to Guangdong, and then the Shenzhen/Dongguan area.

Why I did not? Probably because it was just too much hassle asking relatives to show you around, and how to get there. This is certainly until I found out that Google Maps released detailed maps in China, sometime in July 2008, when Google teamed up with Chinese firm MapABC.com. It was the first time that users of Google Maps could see more than cities with no streets (with no names).

When my father went to China for the first time ever last year, he also snapped a picture in Ge’an of a public announcement board with the village name’s Chinese characters. With a little character-engineering with Zhongwen.com (don’t know any site for breaking down Chinese characters yet), I managed to find the pinyin for Ge’an (which I knew just approximately as “Cot’ngon”), and figured out how to input the characters on my computer. At that time, a year ago, I found a website at geanren.org (URL means basically “People of Ge’an”) that may not always be up, but which is a lousy-looking Java-backed site run by a dude whose last name is the same as mine…

Before then, we were always generally told that we came from Shunde (Seondak in Cantonese), a city of roughly 1.1 million, according to 2002 census data.

Incidentally, my maternal grandfather, who immigrated to Vietnam, came from a csomewhere in the city of Foshan, which is today the same administrative mega-city that gobbled up Shunde, a county-level city until 2002, and now a “district” of Foshan.

Thanks to Google Maps, I may now show the rest of (English-speaking) world where I come from and perhaps go back to with my own means.

View Larger Map

Specifically, Ge’an is a small village, in the district/city of Shunde, which is part of the prefecture-level city of Foshan.

From what I gathered in 2005, as my father’s cousin chattered with the relative leaving nearby, the idea of building a nice big house in the village is nothing new, as other “villagers” now actually live in villas that they built within the village.

Except the 2005 photo of myself, the photos on this post were taken by my father.

On Monday and Tuesday morning, we visited Kaiping, a town about 150km west of Hong Kong, famed for its diaolou. We visited only one cluster of diaolou, Zili Village, a 30-minute ride by taxi (around 60RMB).

Diaolou are the heritage of returning Overseas Chinese. They are fortified towers, dwellings, constructed to sustain attacks from invaders, thieves. Their architectural influences are unique, in that they incorporate elements from outside of China, such as flamboyant balconies.

Un livre fantastique, qui donne une perspective franche sur la Chine sur un ton souvent anodin. On y raconte les exagérations du progrès chinois des années de Mao, vu par des Québécois vivant à l’aube de la Révolution tranquille. Et ces Québécois ne sont pas les moindre, le journaliste et éditeur Jacques Hébert, et le jeune Pierre Elliott Trudeau, futur Premier Ministre du Canada. Trudeau ose nous raconter ses péripéties hors normes en Chine, une nuit évadant la surveillance plus que bienveillante de leurs hôtes pour faire multiples rencontres dans Beijing de 1960 (dans un pays au sortir du Grand Bond en avant), ou encore cette fois où son charme légendaire sur de jeunes interprètes frisa l’incident diplomatique. Mais surtout, nos deux innocents nous ont donné une perspective d’innocent d’un pays avec lequel ils (et peu de gens de leur temps) étaient peu ou pas familier. Comme le disait Alexandre Trudeau dans la préface, c’était surtout, et avant tout, un livre de voyage.

Archives de Radio-Canada :
http://archives.radio-canada.ca/politique/premiers_ministres_canadiens/clips/2076-12889/

CBC Archives:
http://archives.cbc.ca/politics/international_politics/clips/2049-12815/

(Il y avait aussi une apparition d’Alexandre Trudeau au Téléjournal quelque part au printemps ou été 2007, mais c’est introuvable…)

It is mostly old contents, but on a newly redesigned/rethought CBC Digital Archives website, launched today with its sister project, the Archives de Radio-Canada. There is among other things a very interesting topic on Chinese immigration to Canada with 20-something clips from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s television and radio archives.

C’est en grande majorité du vieux contenu, mais sur un tout nouveau site reconceptualisé/repensé des Archives de Radio-Canada lancé aujourd’hui en compagnie de son jumeau, le CBC Digital Archives. Il existe entre autres un intéressant dossier sur l’immigration chinoise au Canada, avec une vingtaine de clips provenant des archives audio et vidéo de la Société Radio-Canada (incluant un reportage entier sur Honkouver (sic)).