Miss Chinatown’s charming history
When the annual Lunar New Year parade in Vancouver’s Chinatown heads east on Pender Street, south on Gore and then west on Keefer next Sunday , it’ll skirt restaurants, bars and galleries like Bao Bei, The Keefer and Bob Rennie’s Wing Sang that were the first in recent years to revitalize the historic, but rundown neighbourhood.
Now, Spencer Interiors, a 3,700- square- foot store that sells expensive Italian furniture, has opened on Main Street near East Georgia. Also on that corner is the London Pub, and funky artist workspaces have been popping up alongside oldtime storefronts: the pharmacies, grocers, wholesale egg and poultry vendors.
They’re just a few among the surge of new businesses moving into Chinatown.
But as Donna Chan, a 72- year old West Vancouver resident, spreads out a thick red velvet floor- length cape, edged in bright blue hand- beaded silk, she is asked to remember a night just over 50 years ago when it was Chinatown that was pushing out into the mainstream.
It was near the end of January 1960 and she had just been named the first official Miss Vancouver Chinatown.
To celebrate, Chan presided over a festive banquet at W. K. Gardens, a restaurant and cabaret on Pender Street.
The Chinatown- based businesses that sponsored the pageant, including names like H. Y. Louie, Ming’s and Modernize Tailors, billed it as a Lunar New Year party to celebrate the new Miss Vancouver Chinatown.
“Chinatown was confined in a way, in those days,” Chan said. “Mainstream Vancouver people were a little afraid to go to Chinatown … It was quite segregated from the rest of the community.”
Barriers were starting to fall, however, and these businesses and their founding families ( whose members would go on to establish some of B. C.’ s largest companies and steer its top academic institutions) were entering their heyday. They were growing in size and confidence and eager for Vancouver society to notice them.
Velvet cape opens doors
Chan poured tea and brought good wishes to VIP guests, including then- Vancouver mayor Tom Alsbury, several city aldermen and some corporate execs. She wore the velvet cape and “went around with my court [ including the pageant’s two runners- up] to add a bit of glamour to the occasion.”
“I think definitely they were reaching out,” said Rosanne Sia, a researcher with Chinese Canadian Stories: Uncommon Histories from a Common Past, a project backed by the libraries of the University of B. C. and Simon Fraser University that this week unveils an online look at the history of the pageant at chinese canadian. ubc. ca. “What better way than having three beautiful women there representing your community?”
At the banquet at W. K. Gardens,“they had a great, big roast pig,” remembered Chan who, back then, was a 20- year- old teacher by the name of Donna Yee. “They were the leading business people of several [ Chinatownbased] companies and they wanted to promote Chinatown … and say, ‘ Look here, it’s safe. We have wonderful food and times have changed’.”
Even though there had been informal pageants in Vancouver’s Chinese community going back to the 1950s, Chan is known as the first “real” Miss Vancouver Chinatown because the competition, for the first time, included formal guidelines, judges from outside the Chinatown community, a talent component and prizes instead of just cash.
Normie Kwong, the Canadian Football League star who went on to become lieutenantgovernor of Alberta, and Winnifred Mather, who was the Province newspaper’s fashion editor, were among the judges asked to pick a winner, based on giving 50 per cent of points for beauty, 25 per cent for personality and 25 per cent for talent.
Chan said she entered because she, her sister and her cousin wanted to go Hawaii that summer and she dreamed of winning the first prize of an all- expenses paid trip.
For her, it was very much a chance to make her family proud and to represent her community, said Sia.
Pageant revived
The pageant stopped after that first year and didn’t pick up again until 1977 when Andrea Eng was crowned.
This revival was backed by the Vancouver Chinatown Lions Club and organizer Paul Wong made sure Eng had a profile in Hong Kong just as more newcomers were moving from there to Vancouver. At the same time, he also pushed for her to go on to the Miss Vancouver and Miss Canada pageants.
Eng took both titles and represented Canada at the Miss Universe pageant before becoming a high- profile real estate broker in the years of mass emigration from Hong Kong to Vancouver. Notably, she helped the sons of Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka- shing navigate their property and other investments after he bought and redeveloped the former Expo 86 lands.
“The major change was that the winners [ now] had a great opportunity to create a professional network not only in Vancouver but one that eventually became international,” said Dircea Arroyo, another researcher. “So winning represented the chance of a lifetime and helped them in meeting the right people for a successful career.”
In 1995, Fairchild TV, the Vancouver- based operator of Chinese- language television and radio stations, took over as the main sponsor and the pageant was renamed Miss Chinese Vancouver. Importantly, Fairchild TV is 20 per cent owned by Television Broadcast Ltd. ( TVB), a major commercial television station in Hong Kong. This changed the path of winners yet again.
Broadening appeal
These days, the competition, now held in December, attracts many more candidates in Vancouver who — unlike in Chan’s day when all 13 contestants already knew or were connected to each other within the cosy, Chinatown community — were born overseas and speak Cantonese and Mandarin as their mother tongue.
Winners go on to compete in Miss Chinese International pageants with peers from across Asia, Europe and North America. Fairchild TV broadcasts the pageant in several Chinese- language markets and the link to TVB gives winners a natural way into overseas acting and singing opportunities.
By the time Bernice Liu, who was born and grew up in Prince Rupert, entered the competition in 2000 — hoping to quickly master enough Cantonese to fulfil a language requirement for her undergraduate international business degree at UBC — she was a unique candidate of sorts.
All the same, her victory sparked a Hong Kong- based career entertaining and marketing herself to Chineselanguage audiences. For several years after, Liu was TVB’S highest grossing actress and her face was used to endorse everything from Nike to Neutrogena across Asia. Her love life, meanwhile, filled Hong Kong’s insatiable, celebrity gossip pages.
She said “it was huge” that UBC gave her a decade- long leave of absence in which to come back and finish her commerce degree. If it wasn’t for a professor who encouraged her to put her marketing and finance studies on hold and go for a career in entertainment, she might not have taken the chance, said Liu. Recently, UBC gave her another six years in which to start and finish her degree.
Liu, who is no longer with TVB, is currently tackling the Mandarin- language market by taking on projects in China. Last fall, she finished filming a Qing dynasty drama in Hengdian and she is currently shooting a modern one in Beijing.
Eng lives in Vancouver, but still does business in Asia and keeps up with her contacts there.
Chan is a doting grandmother who likes to golf and travel. She has little use for that velvet cape now and would love to see it moved from her storage trunk into a spot, perhaps a museum, where it can be publicly appreciated for its small, but charming role in local history.