3 Chinatown events you don't want to miss + Share your opinion on Gain Wah re-opening
Events to re-envisioning Chinatown as a place for community
After the fun-filled interactive Chinese School: Anti-Gentrification Edition, we’re excited to share with you more upcoming events to keep protesting 105 Keefer with our voices and culture.
To help us cover expenses for events and to make them more accessible for the community (cue stools, tents, and language translation!), please consider donating to the community event fund. So far your donations have helped us acquire one tent for shade and cover the expenses for Chinese School (thank you!), but we’re currently running a negative budget for upcoming events, so your help would be greatly welcomed:
Here are three upcoming events where you can help reimagine Chinatown that puts community-first:
1. 105 Keefer Design “Walkout”: A Guided Tour with the Chinatown Memorial Plaza Designer (Sat, July 22, 1-3pm)
Join us on Saturday, July 22, 2023 at 1:00 PM for a free guided in-person design tour at the Chinatown Memorial Plaza. This unique event offers an opportunity to explore the plaza alongside one of its original co-designer, Lewis N Villegas.
Located next to 105 Keefer site where a billionaire real estate developer, Beedie, plans to build gentrifier condos, the Chinatown Memorial Plaza is a significant cultural landmark in the heart of Chinatown that honours the sacrifices of Chinese Canadian railway workers and veterans. During the tour, you'll gain insights into the plaza's original design concept, context, and significance, and why Beedie's 105 Keefer condo project will negatively impact the plaza.
Whether you're passionate about heritage and urban design or simply curious about Chinatown, this guided tour promises that you'll learn something new. We'll end with a light snack and social with live music at the Memorial Plaza to chat about what this space can become.
This tour will be conducted in English with paper print-outs. There may be future tours conducted in Cantonese and Mandarin.
2. PLACE: Participatory Panel featuring Chinatown Today, T’uy’t’tanat Cease Wyss, Maya Preshyon (Sat, July, 22 3-5pm)
Hosted by the CURRENT Symposium and taking place at 254 East Georgia St. – Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh land, in Chinatown, neighboring Hogan’s Alley – “PLACE”, a participatory panel, invites the community to engage through conversation and knowledge sharing in the neighborhood’s many layers of intersecting histories. The streets we inhabit hold on to traces of memory of those who live there; from the plants growing through the sidewalks, to its architecture and the forced absence of it. The city makes evident the social dynamics that continue displacing entire communities.
Led by T’uy’t’tanat Cease Wyss, Maya Preshyon (Vancouver Black Library) and Russell Choing & Pearl Wong (Chinatown Today), we hope to inspire fruitful ways to nurture intercultural, intergenerational solidarity and resistance through tangible and intangible place-making.
Pssst…a sneak peek from Chinatown Today below…
3. Collage & Karaoke: Re-envisioning 105 Keefer with Yarrow and SaveChinatownYVR (Fri, July 28, 6-8pm)
Occupy space, make art, and sing your favourite Chinese tunes with us at 105 Keefer on Friday, July 28th 6-8pm! Despite Beedie receiving approval for their condo development plans at 105 Keefer, we will continue to push back harder. We invite you to join us in occupying the space at Chinatown Memorial Plaza with our culture, voices, and creative energy.
Get ready for a night of collage and karaoke, where we will collectively reimagine 105 Keefer. Bring your favourite collage supplies, photographs, and magazines to create collages that reflect your visions of 105 Keefer, which go beyond Beedie's gentrifying condos. The goal of this event is to demonstrate to various levels of government that 105 Keefer has the potential to become so much more for the community than just luxury condos, and that they should obtain the land for community use instead. We will remind the government of the shadow that Beedie’s condo would cast not only on the Chinese Memorial Plaza, but also the Chinatown community.
Re-envisioning 105 Keefer is an event done in collaboration between SaveChinatownYVR x Yarrow Society.
We also need volunteers to help out!
Share your opinion on the re-opening Gain Wah Restaurant
On September 9, 2022, a fire in the Gain Wah restaurant at 218 Keefer Street forced its closure as well as displacement of 45 residents living in the Keefer Rooms SRO above it (222 Keefer Street).
The Downtown Eastside SRO-Collaborative (SRO-C) is working to facilitate a collaborative process to restore the building so that 1) Keefer Room residents can return to their homes, and 2) the Gain Wah can be revitalized as legacy Chinatown business and affordable cultural food asset in the neighbourhood.
The SRO-C is seeking community input to better understand loss caused by the fire, and to imagine possibilities for Gain Wah and Keefer Rooms' restoration. This survey is a first step and all questions are optional. Whether you can spare 5 minutes or 15, please share as much or little information as you’re able and comfortable with.