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When Sandy Yep saw an article in the Montreal Gazette that real estate developers were trying to acquire the iconic Wing Noodle factory building along with it the whole southwestern block in Montreal, he was struck with anxiety. 

The Wings building, as it’s known to locals, has a historical legacy in Quebec’s last standing Chinatown that goes back to 1897, and has been producing noodles since 1947. And for Yep, the news of its sale struck a more personal chord — the building right next to it was his grandfather’s house. 

Yep was born and raised in Montreal’s Chinatown, growing up in the 60’s, watching as the neighbourhood flourished with business, and then eventually started to decline. His great grandfather immigrated to Montreal in 1897, and created a home for generations to come. The stone house is at least 175 years old and was the place where Yep spent his childhood. 

“I witnessed the destruction, demolition, and dismantling of our Chinatown,” he says. “The fact [is] that we have been here since 1897, at least my grandfather, and that nobody understands this story is literally about our erasure.” 

The news of the building’s acquisition by developers moved Yep, an educator for the Ministry of Education of Ontario, to reach out to the Chinatown Working Group (CWG), a volunteer-run community organization that was advocating to protect Chinatown from the gentrification that continues to threaten it. 

“The physical dismantling of Chinatown, for me, is actually a direct form of systemic discrimination and racism. And not only is it about the attitudes that we’re confronting, we’re actually being systematically erased… and it’s happening all over North America,” says Yep.

Through petitions, consultations with the Montreal City Council and the provincial government, the Chinatown Working Group was successful in getting heritage designation for the block with the Wing Building and Yep’s ancestral home. 

“The folks at CWG literally saved my grandfather’s house,” says Yep. “We now have the opportunity with the momentum that’s been created to really try to make prominent policy, systemic support for Chinatown, actively enhance its economic development, and return Chinatown to its former glory.” 

What is threatening Montreal’s Chinatown? 

Yep says that COVID exacerbated a lot of the challenges that were already in the community. Business owners in the neighborhood struggled, the subtle racism that was already there became more overt, says Yep, adding that the attack on the community became more prominent. Also, according to the Montreal police, anti-asian hate crimes in the city increased by 500 percent in 2020 between March and December, compared to the previous year. 

Parker Mah was a former member of the CWG and is now a community organizer at the Jia Foundation. He explains that COVID made the situation worse, but Montreal’s Chinatown was already starting to become a shell of a community. 

Since the 80’s, the neighbourhood has been marketed by the City of Montreal as a tourist destination, says Mah, which essentially means it’s a spot people go to for food — this economic activity is important, but doesn’t make up for the services that are absent and vital to a community. 

There’s a dearth of services and amenities for the populations that actually live in Chinatown. For instance, many grocery stores selling culturally appropriate foods, according to Yep, have disappeared with the rise of gentrification.  

When non-Chinese people move into the neighbourhood, they may not be familiar with the products at the store, like Chinese vegetables. Slowly, getting less and less business, these grocery stores go out of business, explains Yep, who says this happened in Vancouver’s Chinatown and is already impacting Montreal too. 

In recent years, social institutions in Chinatown like the YMCA and the Chinese Community and Cultural Centre have also shut down, leaving the community without spaces to go for support. 

The Guy-Favreau YMCA shut down in 2019 after being an integral part of the community for 30 years, due to escalating rent. Then the community centre had closed the previous year. 

While some longstanding institutions and business have shut down, there are many spaces which never existed to begin with. Mah points out that the neighbourhood doesn’t even have a park, affordable housing development, or a seniors’ centre. 

Especially during the pandemic, when people everywhere face mental health struggles and social isolation, community support systems and communal spaces are irreplaceable. 

Earlier this month, after a public consultation, the Office de consultation publique de Montréal (OCPM) released a report that listed nine recommendations to protect and revitalize Montreal’s Chinatown. 

Among the recommendations is for the city to adopt regulations for new buildings and city planning in the area to protect the integrity of the neighbourhood. But on top of protecting the physical elements of the area, the report also recommends that the city put effort into promoting the culture and rich history of Montreal’s Chinatown and its population to the general public.

“I think there’s the opportunity now that we can actually turn [Chinatown] around to be livable in the way that people can actually thrive, and businesses can grow in a way that speaks to the heritage and the culture of the community that we’re wanting to preserve.” says Yep. 

Filling in the institutional voids in Montreal’s Chinatown 

The Chinatown Working Group has been advocating for the community’s needs since they formed in 2019.

However, Mah says that as a volunteer-run group, most members are burnt out. “We didn’t see a sustainable future for us to just keep putting out these fires and doing work that the city should be doing,” he says. 

Yep also says that their “voice at the [municipal] table was always either very ad hoc, or very piecemeal. There was never really a systemic kind of outreach.” (Future of Good reached out to the City of Montreal for comment, but did not hear back by publication time.) 

Imagining a more sustainable future for the community advocacy for Chinatown, the members of CWG decided that the neighbourhood needed two main operations: one group that could advocate for the Chinese community’s needs at the municipal level; and another organization that could preserve and promote the cultural heritage of Montreal’s Chinatown.  

And so, earlier this year, the Chinatown Working Group shut its door, and in its place came the Chinatown Roundtable and Jia Foundation. 

“One of the things we found when organizing on the ground through chatting and the working group was that there were a lot of institutional voids and weaknesses in terms of representation,” says Mah. While there was so much interest in Chinatown in terms of media coverage and organizations wanting to partner with Montreal’s Chinatown, there was no go-to organizational partner that represented the community, according to Mah. 

Jia Foundation aims to represent Montreal’s Chinatown and partner with other organizations supporting the neighbourhood, whether through murals or art exhibits. 

Yep and Mah hope that the work they are doing via the Jia Foundation will create more spaces for Montreal’s Chinatown, like community centres, so that, “the community is able to resist, be autonomous, and not be so dependent on tourists,” says Mah. 

Heritage is just the first step for all the work that needs to be done 

Mah explains that Jia Foundation is seeking to do “place-keeping,” which is “an evolution of place-making — this buzzword that has to do with taking up space and taking back space in collective consciousness from the dominant narrative in Quebec, which is very white dominated.” 

But Mah says, “we called it place-keeping because we’ve always been here; it’s not like we need to make a place, we should just keep the place that we should have already had.” 

Place-keeping also aims to protect intangible parts of Chinatown’s culture and history, through art-based projects, educational outreach, and activating public spaces. 

Jia Foundation plans to bring to life the vision of a vibrant and livable Chinatown with schools, daycares, libraries, and greenspaces — all things that most other neighbourhoods in Montreal already have. 

Yep echoes Jessica Chen, a city planner in Montreal and advocate for protecting Chinatown, in that “heritage is just the first step to the long work that has to be done at a community and at a political level to actually revitalize, reimagine, and recreate Chinatown,” says Yep.  

Otherwise, the face of a building can be preserved while the guts of it are gone, he says. 

“I think Montreal’s Chinatown can be a model of development and sustainable living. It’s a beautiful community that needs to be protected for what it was and is, and I think it’s worth saving,” says Yep. 

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