"Chinese Signs In Richmond: Should There Be A Limit?"

Given that people of Chinese descent have lived in BC since settlers started stealing the land from the original owners I suggest it is time we teach Pinyin to all our students in grade school.

I tried learning it as an adult and my language skills are not very good. When I could not stop calling my mother a horse I knew I was in trouble. If I had learned it at a younger age I think it might have gone better.

I worked in Richmond for three years and anytime a bunch of us went to lunch there were always two or three people who could translate the menu and order in the restaurants that had Chinese menus.  Pretty much every office in the city would be the same.

If this woman has so much trouble with the signage maybe she should ask one of her Chinese friends. After all with half the population being of Chinese descent she must have some. right?    

So she won't drive up #3 Road because she can't stand to see all the signs?

I think I see a solution in there somewhere.....

This seems pretty straightforward, in that posting a sign in Chinese (or any other language) does not injure possible readers of the sign. (If they don't understand it, no harm, no foul, right)? The state therefore has no business dictating what languages may be used in signs. 

ygtbk wrote:

 The state therefore has no business dictating what languages may be used in signs. 

[url=http://www.canlii.org/en/ca/scc/doc/1988/1988canlii19/1988canlii19.html]...

Quote:

The material adduced in this Court did not justify the limit imposed on freedom of expression by ss. 58 and 69 of the Charter of the French Language. The material established the importance of the legislative purpose reflected in the Charter of the French Language ‑‑ the enhancement of the status of the French language in Quebec ‑‑ and that it was a response to a pressing and substantial concern ‑‑ the survival of the French language. The threat to the French language demonstrated to the government that it should, in particular, take steps to assure that the "visage linguistique" of Quebec would reflect the predominance of the French language. While the material indicated a rational connection between protecting the French language and assuring that the reality of Quebec society is communicated through the "visage linguistique", it did not demonstrate that the requirement of the use of French only in ss. 58 and 69 is either necessary for the achievement of the legislative purpose or proportionate to it. Whereas requiring the predominant display of the French language, even its marked predominance, would be proportional to the goal of promoting and maintaining a French "visage linguistique" in Quebec and therefore justified under s. 9.1 of the Quebec Charter and s. 1 of the Canadian Charter, requiring the exclusive use of French has not been so justified. French could be required in addition to any other language or it could be required to have greater visibility than that accorded to other languages. Accordingly, the limit imposed on freedom of expression by s. 58 of the Charter of the French Language is not justified under s. 9.1 of the Quebec Charter, and the limit imposed on freedom of expression by s. 69 of the Charter of the French Language is not justified under either s. 1 of the Canadian Charter or s. 9.1 of the Quebec Charter. Section 9.1 is a justificatory provision corresponding to s. 1 of the Canadian Charter subject, in its application, to a similar test of rational connection and proportionality.

[emphasis added]

The Bourassa government amended the law (Bill 101) in 1988 to conform with the Supreme Court decision by deleting French exclusivity and instead requiring French predominance on all commercial signs - and that's the way it remains to date.

Of course, the foundation of the Supreme Court's decision was the persuasive evidence of a legitimate legislative purpose, namely the need to protect the French language. It might be difficult to demonstrate that English is similarly threatened in North America because of some Chinese signs in Richmond.

 

 

ygtbk wrote:

@ Unionist: I am in favour of people being allowed to speak the language that they choose.

Sure you are. But you're not in favour of anyone having to understand or communicate with them. A resident of Lethbridge who walks into a convenience store has a right to ask for Oreo cookies in Tibetan - but he has no right to expect anyone will pay attention. Same if s/he shows up in the emergency room. Or are you??

Quote:

I'm pretty sure that we're not going to have a meeting of the minds on this one.

Well actually, all I did was quote a passage from a Supreme Court of Canada decision. You may have to take up your disagreement with the Supreme Court. I'm just the messenger. Hold your fire.

Quote:

However, do you agree that, regardless of possible defects in my reasoning, I'm reaching the correct conclusion for Richmond?

Yes. And I agree with Catchfire. Those who have trouble with all those Chinese signs should fuck off. In English, of course.

Quote:

And how do you demonstrate that a language is threatened, anyway?

Search me. I guess you'd have to read the full decision of the Court (did you?) and possibly even locate some of the evidence upon which it relied to reach its conclusion.

Actually, I don't care much for individual rights. I think that people, first and foremost, have responsibilities to their fellow human beings and to the environment. Any rights they have flow from that. Otherwise, you could grant them rights on paper, but they wouldn't be worth the... you know.

 

Unionist wrote:

Quote:

However, do you agree that, regardless of possible defects in my reasoning, I'm reaching the correct conclusion for Richmond?

Yes. And I agree with Catchfire. Those who have trouble with all those Chinese signs should fuck off. In English, of course.

Quote:

And how do you demonstrate that a language is threatened, anyway?

Search me. I guess you'd have to read the full decision of the Court (did you?) and possibly even locate some of the evidence upon which it relied to reach its conclusion.

Actually, I don't care much for individual rights.

The last point is obvious. I do care about individual rights. And I do not think that the Supreme Court of Canada gets it right every time. I will read the decision, but if it concludes that without legislative support, the French language would die out in Quebec, I will be extremely surprised.

Catchfire wrote:

As for the two intrepid anglophones asking this concern-petition: fuck. off.

Having lived in Richmond for almost 20 years I have seen this play out time and time again.  The city is little like it was a generation ago.  People talk about a day when everything south of Blundell was farmland except for Steveston which was a thriving fishing community.  Complaining about the signage on 3 road (north of Alderbridge) is just part of this.  Hectoring people is fun but that does nothing to bring groups together.  I know many people that complain about the lack of English in these malls.  The solution is to find ways to bring people together so that understanding can grow.

@ Pogo #17

I guess my question (and to you too, k) is if you think these people have any chance of going anywhere with this, because frankly they sound like cranks to me. The only understanding that needs to happen as far as I can see is for them to get over it. I have never lived n Richmond, but I remember when I lived in Vancouver at least one mall where there was hardly a word of english. Big deal.

I remember the "ethnic malls" issue in Calgary, but that was one bureaucrat's report,  as far as I know nothing came of it after people rightly called it for what it was.

http://www.canada.com/Call+limit+ethnic+malls+Calgary+angers+Chinese+res...

 

NorthReport wrote:

Maybe I'm wrong but I have not heard of this being an issue in Chinatown and why not? Are we dealing with less tolerant folks in the suburbs perhaps?

I guess that you haven't been to Richmond much.  There is a big difference from a Vancouver's Chinatown and the north end of #3 Road (fun fact the # roads are 1 mile apart back when Richmond was divided into sections and quarter sections).  There was a contest to name this area but for the life of me I can't remember what the winner was.  The Richmond malls have little of the tourist flair that dominates Chinatown.  They are all business.

This issue comes up every couple of years and is difused each time.  A big part is having key community leaders on side.  A dozen years ago Richmond created an intercultural advisory committee.  In addition to providing advise on intercultural matters it has brought community leaders together.  Yes people will stand and complain about change, but when no one in leadership positions supports them the issue falls away.  In the end time will be the biggest healer. 

allergies maybe for food products

although that can have separate, non-prominent signage to accomodate that need

 

Catchfire wrote:

Obviously the answer is to open more Cactus Clubs.

Um, Cactus Club is under boycott because they serve Israeli wines. Until such time as they agree not to I'd b prefer for Cactus Club to go out of business.

kropotkin1951 wrote:

If we really wanted to undo the century old anti-Chinese racism we would be teaching our children in this province to speak both languages. Somehow the fact that people who grow up in the Netherlanders all learn multiple languages hasn't stopped them from speaking Dutch.

We either embrace the fact that BC settler history is a history of Chinese immigrants not just white Europeans or we will remain a society with its racism merely thinly veiled. I know first generation immigrants from China and I know Canadian citizens whose ancestors moved here from China over a hundred years ago.  That is the BC I live in and want to celebrate.

+1

kropotking1951 wrote:

I am not in the majority on this issue but I really think that apologizing for the head tax is a tiny insignificant symbolic gesture.

Obviously much more than head tax redress is needed to address the racism against Chinese immigrants in Canada, but I still think head tax redress is important. Certainly those Chinese people who took up the fight for head tax redress thought it was important, and I'm not going to tell them otherwise.

As for the main issue in this thread, I think it's great that the Chinese immigrants who come here and don't speak English actually have places where they can read the signage. If it helps to make their experience of coming here a little less stressful and alienating, I'm all for it. As others have already said upthread, those who think the way the two women who created this petition do can fuck off.

Yes, the food thing is basically about allergies. Otherwise, all of this strikes me as a non-issue. The kids will all speak English, such is the power of the imperial language (though actually, Turkish, Moroccan, Chinese etc kids in the Netherlands all learn Dutch). There have always been ethnic clusters when there are significant numbers of migrants from a given region, language, cultural or religious group who have limited skills in the culture and language of the target country. These create not only "cultural comfort" but are an important network for jobs, housing and other necessities of life. Obviously the older ones are more "charming", the effect of time passed and them becoming touristy to some extent, but also the toxic shittiness of car-dependent postwar development, whether of ethnic clusters, the majority group or a mix.

For example, the Montréal district with the highest concentration of people of Italian descent is neither old Petite-Italie (where I live) or its spin-off in the former city of Saint-Léonard (which is a short drive or bus ride eastwards) but in the utterly drab and boring Rivière-des-prairies district, which is nothing but shitty car-dependent sprawl, some of it opulent, some of it much more modest.

Our oldest Chinatown is tiny; it was never as large as Toronto's (obviously to say nothing of Vancouver's original one or later ones!) and a good part of it as destroyed in a shameful expropriation for the Guy-Favreau Federal building and the Complexe-Desjardins, which is a shopping mall but also houses Québec government services including Revenu-Québec (the older Hydro-Québec building and Revenue-Canada are very close by). Elderly Chinese people still gather in the concourse under Guy-Favreau, bringing some salutary life and laughter to that dismal place.

kropotkin, which Chinese language would you have pupils learn?

As I said up thread Pinyin or Simplified Chinese would be the language to teach our students to read Chinese.  Mandarin is the dominant Chinese language now although it used to be Cantonese in earlier generations.

I agree that all the second generation children I know use English as a first language. There is no concern that Chinese will become the dominant language in my lifetime but if it did so what. 

In 1874 as soon as the province joined Confederation they stripped the Chinese and FN's men of their right to vote in elections. Before joining with the two dominant settler groups in the Canadian federation BC followed British laws and all men had the vote. The Japaneses were excluded in 1885 but in the hierarchy of racism the Japanese were always treated better than the Chinese.  I am sure it was comforting for the Chinese that their right to speak both English and French was guaranteed when they lost the right to vote. I wonder what my province would be like if we had not excluded Asians from our society but instead had embraced them as equals.

http://www.elections.bc.ca/index.php/resource-centre/electoral-history-o...

For the food it is more than just allergies.  My daughter is diabetic and needs to know information about carbs etc which is required by law.  If she had an interest in the goods sold at these malls she would have to research the product information before she could buy.

That still has nothing to do with the signage that seems to be repelling these poor sensitive people and preventing them from driving down public streets.

I think if you go into these markets you will find that pretty much everything from a bag of black beans to a clay jar of fermented tofu will have a paper Nutrition Facts label stuck onto it, in french and english, because that's the law. I have seen a few exceptions in the spice aisle and in the medicines, and of course, gluten in a pail is gluten in a pail.

I can't say the same for some of the bulk bins or health food stores. But that's "normal" food.

 

 

People with diabetes should read labels. If there are no labels then they should leave it on the shelves and report the store whether it be a health food store or an Italian or Greek importer.  I go to enough restaurants to know that very few of them list the ingredients in their dishes so again I don't understand what this has to do with racist women complaining about too many Chinese signs.

 

Quite right, J22! Problem solved!

(Oh, and Left Turn, I was being sarcastic. I would like to see Cactus Club go out of business even if they started serving Palestinian wine and localvore meat and produce)

Their Vancouver restaurant is a few blocks away from my apartment. I've been once and it was excellent! Thanks for reminding me it's time for a return visit...

And to go down the food labelling tangent a bit more, for anyone really interested in another culture's cuisine, your native language is only going to get you so far anyway. Lots fo things don't have english names, and knowing that something is called ajowan isn't going to tell you anything more about it. Considering that there are some things that have two and three names you'd be better off learning Latin.

Course that's not just in other cultures. Who would know that if you're buying bay leaves you're probably not getting bay, but some other kind of laurel. Or that if you order a raspberry soda you're actually drinking something that came out of the back end of a beaver?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castoreum

 

 

Oh, I'm sure they are that kind of people. Another person along those lines is Howard Galganov, who was an "English-language rights activist" here, got fed up (nobody was paying much attention to him any more) and moved to Eastern Ontario. Now he is actually spending his time complaining about Franco-Ontarians and bilingual signs!

Stop making me hungry, Unionist! I love dim sum and Kam Fung is very good. Though our Chinatowns must seem pathetic to BCers in comparison to Vancouver and its suburbs. Brossard, by the way, is a south shore suburb with a considerable Chinese and Southeast Asian population.

Yeah the sign situation isn't nearly as inaccessible as proclaimed.

I will say, though, regardless of how you feel about English's dominance, about settler languages and so forth, it's ultimately the closest thing Metro Vancouver has to an interlanguage. If your first language is Punjabi, Farsi, Spanish or Polish and you visit a neighbourhood of Chinese stores, it's most probable that the language in which you will communicate is English (regardless of your proficiency level or the proprietors'). And businesses which recognize the advantages of welcoming a broader clientele will put some effort into outreach and reap the rewards.

Anyway, Google Translate's smartphone app is getting better and better. Nowadays you can even recognize (poorly) several Asian scripts by camera and machine translate it (mediocrely) to your language of choice. Maybe one day the differences between written languages will be irrelevant to anyone with access to cheap technology.

radiorahim wrote:

Not having been in the Vancouver area for decades, I took a virtual tour of the street in question via that internet spying service otherwise known as Google street view.

I saw such strange and exotic signage from places like McDonald's, Scotiabank, Tim Horton's, Burger King, Future Shop etc.

I saw a fair bit of bilingual Chinese/English signage and yes occasionally the Chinese writing was bigger than the English lettering.   I really had to strain to find any unilingual Chinese signage and at most found maybe one or two instances of this.

The only conclusion that I can come to is that the petitioners come from the "I don't like the French on my Cornflakes box" school of thought.

Perhaps they should do their shopping on "Get a Fucking Life Boulevard".

 

I don't see why people are so occupied with denying it exists.  I live here I have been many times to Yaohan Mall and Parker Place Mall and can vouch that English signs are very rare.  Given that just over 40% of Richmond list themselves as Chinese one would hope that there would be a large retail sector devoted to them.

dble pst