Big changes in Little China
How a dramatic demographic shift is shaking things up in the Toronto neighbourhoods that have become the three most dominantly Chinese census areas in Canada
The country’s three most dominantly Chinese census areas are all located in Toronto, according to new data from Statistics Canada — a trio of neighbouring “tracts” in Scarborough where 87 per cent of residents circled “Chinese” on their long-form questionnaires.
But this statistic obscures a demographic shift that has been quietly unfolding since the last census, in 2006, when the area was already 80 per cent Chinese.
Despite the neighbourhood’s apparent homogeneity, its makeup has changed dramatically as newcomer groups have moved in and older ones have moved on — a phenomenon playing out in many communities across Canada, where the immigrant population has reached its highest level in nearly a century.
Only in this particular patch of Canada, the dominant group has remained the same if you’re judging by the census’ demographic categories: “Chinese.”
The difference is that many newcomers are now blue-collar immigrants from mainland China, whereas the area’s “old-timers” tend to be middleor upper-class families with roots in Hong Kong. This has introduced occasional culture clashes that could be exacerbated by language barriers: mainland Chinese immigrants tend to speak Mandarin, whereas the language of Hong Kong is Cantonese.
“They call this area ‘Little Fujian’. ” FANNY LAU REAL ESTATE AGENT WHO SPEAKS CANTONESE SAYS SHE’S BEEN ‘PHASED OUT’ OF THE AREA, WHERE MANY AGENTS NOW SPEAK MANDARIN
“I do hear some friction, but I try to mitigate the issues,” said Councillor Raymond Chin Lee, whose Ward 41 touches on the area. “In Canada, we all try to live together as Canadians.”
On Wednesday, Statistics Canada released its latest tranche of census data, revealing that Toronto has finally tipped over into “minority majority” status, with more than half of residents now identifying as a visible minority.
After South Asians, Chinese people make up Toronto’s largest non-white group, comprising 11.13 per cent of the city’s population. Many have concentrated in places like Agincourt, sometimes referred to by locals as “Asiancourt.”
But drilling down to the “tract” level, a small geographic area defined by Statistics Canada for census purposes, the three most dominantly Chinese pockets in Toronto — and indeed, all of Canada — are found around the corner from Pacific Mall, one of North America’s largest Asian shopping centres.
The three census tracts are located side by side. On a map they form a “T” shape that looks a bit like an oddly shaped shirt hanging off the laundry line that is Steeles Ave. E. The hem of the left cuff is Brimley Rd.; the right cuff’s hem is Birchmount Rd.
This chunk of land is home to10,855 residents, 9,445 of them Chinese. And the fact that it’s predominantly Chinese will not be surprising to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the area, where Chinese characters adorn the restaurant signs and the local Scotiabank branch is staffed by tellers who are fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese.
Councillor Lee, who lives south of this area, bought his first home here three decades ago, when it was still mostly farmland and emerging subdivisions. “It has changed dramatically since I first moved up here in 1985,” he said.
In the 1980s and ’90s, a tide of Chinese migrated into the suburbs, according to Arlene Chan, an author and historian of early Chinese Torontonians. Many were part of the exodus from Hong Kong after Britain announced it would be handing the former colony over to China.
Others were landed immigrants from the downtown Chinatowns who finally had enough money to buy into the Canadian dream.
“It was a dream of theirs to move into the suburbs, where they could have a bigger property and a better life,” Chan said. “If you came from Hong Kong or the southern part of China, you would never have had anything like that — a big house with a two-car garage.”
Back then, Park Royal Trail, a winding semicircle of a street off the west side of Brimley Rd., was a coveted address for middle- and upper-class Chinese families, said real estate agent Fanny Lau, who has worked in the vicinity for two decades.
“Thirty years ago, the Hong Kong economy was doing so well,” she said. “The people . . . were wealthy.”
Today, however, many of those families have moved on and the area’s cookie-cutter pink brick homes are starting to show their age. Wealthier Chinese immigrants now prefer to put down roots in Markham or Richmond Hill, according to Lau.
The northern portion of the Port Royal area has remained predominantly Chinese, who make up 90 per cent of the population. Only these days, residents hail mostly from mainland China, especially the southeastern province of Fujian.
“They call this area ‘Little Fujian,’ ” said Lau, who is a Cantonese speaker and who said she’s been “phased out” of this area, where Mandarin-speaking real estate agents have largely taken over.
One of Little Fujian’s newest residents is 29-year-old Sweetie Chen, who shares a corner house with eight relatives, including her siblings, mother and two young children, who go to school nearby.
Chen said she chose this area because a friend from home had already moved here. She likes the neighbourhood because she can easily find food that suits her tastes. Many of her neighbours also speak Mandarin, thus removing some of the pressures to quickly master English.
“It’s a lot like home here,” she said in Mandarin. “It’s more friendly, and here I don’t feel as homesick.”
Like many of the area’s newer immigrants, the men in her household work in the trades (they lay paving stones). Trucks and construction vans have become fixtures on the wide residential streets, though labourers can often be seen biking or walking to their work sites.
These newer families tend to live closer to the poverty line, said Anna Wong, executive director of the nearby Chinese Family Services of Ontario. Her non-profit provides counselling and settlement services and have seen a spike in their Mandarinspeaking clientele, which has grown to roughly 15,000 in 2011 from just over 2,000 in 2008.
This new community tends to have a high “isolation index,” she said, partly because of a lack of English skills, a barrier perpetuated by the high concentration of Mandarinspeaking residents and businesses that enable people to get by without learning English.
“For about 66 per cent of the population (in my riding), their mother tongue is other than English and French,” said MPP Soo Wong, whose Scarborough-Agincourt riding includes one of the three census tracts in this area.
“That’s very reflective of the firstgeneration Canadians.”
Lee said language and cultural barriers sometimes cause tensions between new neighbours — disputes he’s occasionally called in to mitigate. He said these two Chinese communities tend to have different habits and “philosophies towards life.” He said complaints often centre on neglected gardens or outdoor clutter.
“Maintaining a house is not the same way, because (many mainland Chinese) were used to living in condos,” he said. “The Hong Kong Chinese have been here a little longer, so they tend to learn a little bit more about how to look after their gardens.”
May Lee is among the area “oldtimers” — she and her civil engineer husband have lived here 31 years — and said she remembers reporting a neighbour whose overgrown lawn had become waist high. She is Canadian-born but her parents are from Guangzhou and speak Toishan, a language similar to Cantonese, which used to be the lingua franca on her street.
“They’re all Mandarin now,” she said.
Lee doesn’t like some of the changes she’s observed in recent years. There are often too many vehicles parked on the streets overnight. She doesn’t like seeing houses with “extra junk lying around.” Occasionally, her neighbours play noisy, late-night Mahjong games in their garages.
“They’re slapping down the tiles and yelling,” she said, then laughed. “I mean, they’re having fun, and my parents did that too. But some people just don’t like it; they think it’s gambling.”
But Lee acknowledged that this area has long been a place for new beginnings. Even the non-Chinese households are diverse. On her street, there is a Jamaican couple, a South Asian family, a Korean household and a Swedish-Chinese family.
Her next-door neighbour, a 30year-old cake artist named Natalie Stanchevski. Her parents also started over in Canada, after moving here from Macedonia.
“We’re all just immigrants,” Stanchevski said, “doing our own thing.”