Chinatown Gates: Monuments Towards Decolonial Relationalities

1. Chinatowns Gates as Portal

Standing in front of a fresh cold expanse on the edges of Edmonton’s Chinatown, I felt a heavy weight equal to the vast empty space I saw before me. It was November in 2017, a bright winter afternoon and the day after the city removed the Chinatown Gate. The freezing night before, the Chinatown community held a candlelight vigil as construction crews dismantled the Gate into pieces for its indefinite storage. 

The Gate was important to my mom, and it became our place to take family photos. After dim sum at my dad’s most frequented restaurant “Pearl City,” (the homonym “pig city” made us kids giggle) we would visit the Gate. Climbing the stone lions that flanked the structure, I would reach my hand into the lion’s mouth to rub its tongue, a ball, for good luck. The presence of the Gate acted as a portal, allowing my body to connect to these age-old symbols.

2. Chinatown Gates in Context of Hegemonic Systems

At a time when colonial monuments are falling around the world due to the ongoing provocation of police brutality against Black and Indigenous peoples, we are collectively scrutinizing what deserves to be honoured in public space. Many monuments clearly align with colonial relationalities while other monuments like Chinatown Gates contain qualities that both engage and resist settler colonialism.    

For the state, monuments explain a past, inculcate a sense of shared experience and destiny, and institutionalize narratives. Confederate monuments in the U.S. and imperialist monuments in Canada represent racist values, giving these dangerous ideologies space to persist today. For good reason, these statues are being toppled, doused, pelted, and pitched. People have been advocating for the removal of contested monuments tied to slavery, imperialism, and white settler colonialism for decades, and the recent unrest has brought these issues to the forefront. An active relationship to these public spaces suddenly seems new and possible, and with it the chance to re-envision and shape public spaces to be more representative of our collective values and not those of hegemonic power.

A part of my examination of Chinatown Gates includes considering which monuments to keep and revisiting the monuments that never came to be. Chinatown Gates are monuments, public art, and architecture that mark an “other” space.​​¹ Sister cities often contribute to Chinatown Gates. For example the city of Harbin, sister city of Edmonton, gifted the architectural design and craftsmanship for Edmonton’s Chinatown Gate, the Harbin Gate. Chinatown Gates are a diasporic tradition that began as tokens of economic goodwill between countries signifying a promise of a flow of capital​​² before becoming an aesthetic necessity for the survival of a Chinatown​​³ that then evolved into a symbol of belonging for the Chinese diaspora. But to understand the Gates, we also must recognize that Chinatown is not outside the empire.​​⁴ In “The Complications of Colonialism for Gentrification Theory and Marxist Geography,” artist, activist, and academic Liza Kim Jackson states “gentrification is one strategy in the continued historical colonization of Indigenous peoples.”​​⁵ Jackson explains, “Colonial relationalities (both symbolic and material) give rise to the settler city persisting through the capitalist mode of production, which is reproduced by bodies who share space across social differences through gentrification.”​​⁶ Geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore elaborates, “racism enshrines the inequalities that capitalism requires.”​​⁷ Our Chinatowns have participated variously in these dominant systems, benefiting from colonized land while also being marginalized, resulting in a complicated legacy. 

Chinatowns embody, as Zadie Smith eloquently describes in relation to her position on hegemonic systems, an “unholy mix”​​⁸ of oppression and community. They are spaces that have been targets for racism, violence, and gentrification but also offer sanctuary and cultural connection. It is human to be this unholy mix. Chinatown Gates are symbols of exotification and belonging, both limiting and protecting the Chinese-Canadian community. Invited to Canada by the federal government, immigrants are used as tools of state-initiated colonialism while simultaneously representing performative multiculturalism. Racialized settlers are, to a degree, both oppressed and oppressor. Chinatown Gates reflect this inheritance. They embody the unholy mix that intersectionality complicates, but this entanglement does not need to be paralyzing. Rather, it could generate new, more just forms of societal systems.

3. Thoughts to Understand Our Roles for Better Futures

As Chinatowns and their residents face displacement and cultural erasure, whether through disinvestment or gentrification, municipal leaders need to decide if diverse spaces, which are important to the experience of belonging, are city priorities. Often, cities talk about making space for everyone, naive that a neutral urban space exists, but city public spaces are designed with white and middle-class citizens at the fore. If city leaders are committed to making sustainable spaces of belonging, then signifiers of diverse identities are crucial for our cities’ public spaces. Chinatowns are historical and cultural spaces for the diaspora to be nourished by cultural foods, use familial languages, conduct spiritual practices, and source ways to form cultural identity. Culture is a connection to the past and ancestral knowledge; it keeps traditional practices alive and assists in envisioning better futures. Chinatowns are alive today. They serve as important community spaces for vulnerable residents, providing resources and social support for both elders and newcomers.

While it’s important to advocate for multicultural spaces of belonging in our cities, it’s also critical to untangle the histories, ideologies, and strategies surrounding Chinatowns that further settler colonialism. Our cities and Chinatown leaders must find tools for Chinatowns to thrive without having to pander to city neo-imperialist global economy strivings that perpetuate colonialism. As Jackson says, “gentrification is involved with a bourgeois production of space that reiterates colonial and capitalist ideologies and relationalities of dispossession, displacement, exploitation, and marginalization.​​⁹ While Chinatowns have struggled within white supremacist systems, Chinatowns have also benefited from colonized land and have perpetuated colonial attitudes towards the urban poor, those who are viewed as not labouring appropriately and lowering property values. In order to decolonize Chinatowns, community members must acknowledge their own settler histories and the power they do possess to resist ongoing colonialism that is manifested in today’s Chinatowns. Active solidarity with Indigenous theoretical, philosophical and historical knowledge and relationalities is the only ethical approach to building better futures.

While we rethink Chinatowns and their collective social value, we have the opportunity to reconceptualize Chinatown Gates. This is particularly true in Edmonton, the city I reside in, which has the rare circumstance of building a new Chinatown Gate to replace Harbin Gate, which was removed in 2017 for light rail transit development.​​¹⁰ If we want to free the Gates from pandering to empire and propagating a false nostalgic past, if we want them to reflect today’s diaspora and point to our desired futures, what should they look like? Today’s artists in the diaspora can play an important role in bringing new life to this traditional symbol. Importantly, to take responsibility for our relationship to treaty lands as racialized settlers, we can recontextualize the Gates as a gesture of decolonial relationality.

4. Why Diasporic Chinatown Gates Need to be Reconceptualized

My research on the reconceptualization of Chinatown Gates began with a generative conversation with Karen Tam, a Tiohtià:ke/Montréal-based artist and curator whose practice focuses on the constructions and imaginations of cultures and communities through installations of the recreations of Chinese restaurants, karaoke lounges, opium dens, curio shops, and other sites of cultural encounters that often exist in Chinatowns. Reflecting an impulse—common to the diaspora—to fabricate what has been erased in order to give voice to our place in dominant historical narratives, Tam’s work embraces disregarded Chinese-Canadian artists into art history and imagines what art history would look like if they were included. 

Chinatown Gates are often made by Chinese craftspeople, and the design is drawn directly from Imperial China. For example, Edmonton’s Harbin Gate is modeled after the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing. Although, the architectural and design details bring authenticity to Chinatown Gates, in the current social context of the diaspora, Chinatown aesthetics are a self-orientalizing​​¹¹ survival tool to be perceived as more acceptable and useful. In the way Tam visualizes Chinese-ness in the diaspora, I aim to explore ways that reconceptualize Chinatown aesthetics, from a position of empowerment that reflects and responds to current social contexts. Chinatown Gates have been a successful strategy to protect Chinatown, but is a Westernized and commodified reflection of Imperial China an aesthetic worth perpetuating?

To clarify the need to transform the Chinatown Gate, I looked to Ryan Lee Wong, who outlines: “before Asian American was used on census forms and in newspapers, it was a radical, intentional identity. In 1968, students in the Third World strikes at San Francisco State University and UC Berkeley dropped the problematic Oriental for the new term Asian American.”​​¹² If the Chinatown Gates are a word, they are more likely “Oriental” than “Asian American,” let alone “Chinese diaspora.” If history tells us that “Oriental” is problematic, then reconceptualizing Orientalizing aesthetics in Chinatown is part of the shifting dialogue of our identity. Wong further explains, “culture is often the most enduring primary document [of political movements]. Whether intentional artworks or ephemera produced to circulate a message, cultural objects allow us a window into the world [of other futures] that are in turn fertile generators of new cultural forms and paradigms.”​​¹³ If our Oriental Chinatown Gates became diasporic Chinatown Gates, how would they change?

5. Artists Responding to the Chinatown Gates in the Archives

After my conversation with Tam, I connected with two artists whose practices involve the evolving histories of Chinatowns and uncovering stories from overlooked histories. In this interview, which took place online, with Saskatoon-based interdisciplinary artist respectfulchild and Tkaronto/Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist Shellie Zhang, we discussed their individual practices in the context of current social need while unpacking the purgatory states of Chinatown Gates in two Prairie cities on Treaty 6 territory: Saskatoon and amiskwaciwâskahikan/Edmonton.

The two artists became friends when Zhang was invited by AKA artist-run centre in 2019 for a research residency, which resulted in a solo exhibition titled “Believe It Or Not 信不信.” In the exhibition, Zhang’s photographs—based on research in the City of Saskatoon Archives—revisit redacted Chinese-Canadian narratives. One of the artworks includes Saskatoon’s never-realized Chinatown Gate which is partially concealed by a red silk handkerchief. The photograph is boldly colourful and visually arresting, humbly unveiling a monument that embraces the dreams of many Chinese diasporic community members. 

During her research, Zhang found a generally unknown piece of history: Saskatoon’s Chinatown, in the early 20^th century, was located where the Remai Modern sits today. This revelation compelled respectfulchild to do further research, whereby they found city council minutes documenting the decision to move Chinatown in the 1930s. These relocations are a common occurrence around the world and are a sign of the city’s settler role in maintaining the hegemony of colonial relationalities. Acts of displacement, gentrification, and colonialism all come from the root philosophy of terra nullius, which allows those with more power to conceive land as unoccupied or uninhabited and, therefore, theirs to take.

Stories of early Chinese settlers—their everyday life, resilience, and celebration—are rare in historical documents. In the archives, Zhang and respectfulchild found that records of Chinese presence primarily exist as misdemeanor reports and racist policies. Our diasporic Chinese history is reduced because of our foreignness, so it’s easy to see how Chinatown Gates became a global diasporic tradition. The monument signals belonging to us, a welcome contrast to the historical experience of prejudice and harsh discrimination that persists today.

To remember Saskatoon’s almost-forgotten Chinatown, respectfulchild’s project titled 落叶归根 :: falling leaves return to their roots is a sculpture of a Chinatown Gate presented at the Remai Modern. Installed in a space with windows that overlook the South Saskatchewan River, the Gate is made of a wood frame overlaid with a paper skin containing notes to the ancestors written by the public throughout the exhibition. Levitating and ghost-like, the Gate has its feet in spaces physical and metaphysical, times past and present, and the multigenerational aspirations that join and transcend them.  

The Chinese idiom, 落叶归根 falling leaves return to their roots, means everything returns to its original source. The phrase is commonly used to express the journey of returning to the homeland or hometown. Drawing from the cultural practice of burning joss paper or “spirit money” and other crafted paper resembling material goods, respectfulchild included a burning ceremony as part of the project. A ritual to remember, burnt paper offerings offer nourishment to the ancestors during Qing Ming and Hungry Ghost festivals. For many Chinese settler ancestors, the Gates are a fragment to signify home in the diaspora. Burning the paper Chinatown Gate transforms it into the ancestral realm. It’s a collective offering that remembers the unrealized dream the Chinese ancestors held and brings one signifier of home to the ancestors. 

Children of immigrants may not have set foot on their ancestral land, and yet we are more familiar with the land here, as uninvited guests on Indigenous land. In-between homes and not knowing where home is, there can be a diasporic yearning to feel a resonance between our bodies and the earth from where our ancestors came. Our unknown history both frees and entraps us. Research is one way to understand our ancestors. Ritual space is another, making possible direct contact with our ancestors, which is not traced in the archive. We want to know our ancestors and their practices, to enter into dialogue with them and find groundedness in the past so that we can move forward with more certainty. respectfulchild’s ceremonial burning of the paper Gate returns the Gate, the offerings, and the idea to the earth. No matter what movements brought us here, at least we might understand the wisdom that everything returns eventually.

落叶归根 :: falling leaves return to their roots is a gesture towards acknowledging history. Art institutions must grapple with their participation in the gentrification of racialized and low-income communities like Chinatown. The 2014 exhibition M’GOI/ DO JEH: SITES, RITES AND GRATITUDE 唔該/多謝: 常用感情景口語, presented by Centre A Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, asked:

In a capitalist society where the right to enter one space or another is dependent on little more than one’s ability to pay rent, are there rites of passage/entry, gestures and postures that should be adopted to pay respect? How can we, on both institutional and personal levels, take a posture of gratitude and respect especially in instances where the act of being given to isn’t so direct and the right to receive isn’t necessarily one’s own?​​¹⁴

These are questions to be answered personally, by families and communities, by organizations and workplaces, by institutions and by cities. 落叶归根 :: falling leaves return to their roots explores this complexity not only in the context of Chinatown’s displacement and cultural erasure, but also in the context of our position as settlers.

Inviting the public to write notes to all those who have contributed to the way we live, respectfulchild makes space for a wide range of responses. There are notes of gratitude, grief, regret, apologies of many kinds, apologies to the Indigenous ancestors for the violence of colonization, questions, revelations of identity, doubts of ancestral acceptance, and everyday best wishes.

As a country, we are grappling with what truth and reconciliation means. On every level, we are being called upon to form frameworks that answer how best to support and build strong relationships with Indigenous peoples. Chinatown must work to understand the responsibilities of a settler positionality. Artists, too, must ask these questions. As we become increasingly aware of the necessity for decolonization, we discover the inadequacy of the visual culture around us. What does a monument on Indigenous land mean? What should one look like? If monuments presently fortify the state’s narrative, then the contemporary making of monuments must change; Chinatown Gates must transform.  In “Activating the Archive” Ryan Lee Wong writes: 

Archives are living bodies that grow and contract in response to the times, and the archives of social movements offer proof of histories that have been erased or silenced through political shifts and narrowed historical writing. Each of us, whether or not we identify as artists or activists, has some connection to the hopes driving social movement culture that can remake our identities and societies by coming together with intention.​​¹⁵

In the following 2022 interview, respectfulchild, Shellie Zhang, and I explore this subject further.

6. Chinatown Gates: A Conversation with Artists respectfulchild and Shellie Zhang

Lee Rayne Lucke (LRL): What is your relationship to Chinatown Gates?

respectfulchild (r): Saskatoon never had a Gate. I remember it being a thing that was going to potentially happen. When Shellie came to Saskatchewan to conduct research for the “Believe it or Not” exhibition at AKA artist run centre, she gave an outsider’s perspective and saw things that I normally take for granted. Shellie saw the image of the Gate on an electrical box and asked what it was. My family said, “Oh, it’s just the Gate that never happened.” It was barely documented in the archives. It was something we knew about, and at the same time it wasn’t something we were holding on to. Instead, Saskatoon has a community ting/pagoda in the park.

It’s always exciting to see other cities’ Chinatowns and the Gate as a marker to a special space. Although, as I was working on the project, 落叶归根::falling leaves return to their roots at the Remai, I got concerned that people would think that the Gate needs to be revived. I don’t think Saskatoon needs a Gate; rather, it’s more symbolic about how the Gate was never realized due to societal shifts.

The Gate is really interesting to me because the history of Chinatown’s architecture is complicated. We did it less for us, but more to win outside approval. Lots of complicated feelings around Gates.

Shellie Zhang (SZ): There is a curiosity about the Gates. We were driving past an intersection and stopped at a red light. I looked to my left and saw a painted small mural on an electrical box of what looked like the Gate and remembered asking, “What is that?” and that’s how the conversation began.

There is a quote by Toni Morrison, “The very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do.” That is what this project in Saskatchewan felt like to me, because respectfulchild and I kept going into spaces for research and we kept getting misinformation, really offensive portrayals, and things that are uncontextualized. As a result, we both craved a more accurate understanding of what the Chinese community in the past was like and began to look for it.

Like what respectfulchild said, it’s not about “we need a Gate” for representation, because that is a one-dimensional approach. What’s more interesting about the Gate is the symbolism of what it portrays in a moment in time. There is a conversation circulating these past years about what monuments we should put up and what we should tear down, spearheaded by the Indigenous and Black movements (e.g., public statues memorializing John A. Macdonald, Egerton Ryerson, Queen Victoria). The Gate in Saskatoon is really interesting because it’s a monument that never happened, so there are questions. Why didn’t it happen? 

We learned from some of respectfulchild’s contacts that fundraising was a barrier. The Gates had to come from some private capital. Here, capital is the thing that determines who gets recognition. Tourism also is part of the conversation for a reason to have a Gate, which is again the conversation about capital.

LRL: Along with capital, are there any other functions of Chinatown Gates?

SZ: I go back and forth because I’m emotionally drawn to these Gates, even though it’s not something I would propel forward when looking at the broad context of community needs. Housing and basic income feels more urgent in a lot of Chinatowns, not necessarily a Gate. Although, when I see those Gates in a new city, it draws me into the neighbourhood. It’s incredibly grounding to see them. It’s quite complicated, realizing and feeling the sentiment and thankfulness that the Gates are there and at the same time realizing we need to revisit what is urgent.

r: I agree. It feels like it’s not the priority that I want because everything is so dependent on money. The Gate can feel territorial, and it doesn’t make sense in the context of Riversdale in Saskatoon, which is a gentrifying neighbourhood. Even though there is a history of Chinese businesses in Riversdale, it would feel like the wrong priority to mark the space with a Gate when there are so many other socioeconomic priorities to be addressed. Back when I was a kid, we used to have a much more visual presence in Riversdale: there were businesses, the Chinese New Year parade, and the big celebration at the Ukrainian church, so it used to be very tangible and we don’t have that anymore. Instead, it’s become more spread out around the city, and I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing. I would feel very uncomfortable pushing to raise money for a Gate rather than for community needs.

SZ:  The question is, like respectfulchild said, who is looking for a particular kind of recognition from the Chinatown Gate, and also what does that recognition mean when speaking to the community where the Gate is sited?

It’s also worth noting, in the BIA’s document, the proposal included an Ukrainian Gate as well as an Indigenous Gate, to recognize the history of who has been on the land, the portals in the past, the waves of settlement—I thought that was more interesting than just the Chinatown Gate.

LRL: The conversation about budgets, and whether public art should be prioritized, is a conversation that many cities grapple with. As artists who value equity and belonging for everyone, how do you come alongside prioritizing to meet basic needs while being makers of culture? Can culture be part of community care?

SZ: It depends on the circumstance. We need ways to keep talking about these things, to keep these conversations alive. It’s a privilege for me to say “maybe we don’t need Gates” and “this is my preferred way to allocate funding” as an English-fluent Han Chinese person who is an immigrant and whose family was not directly impacted by the legacy of Chinese-Canadian racism before we came here. It’s different for someone who is in their 90s, who has lived in Canada, experienced racism such as the Head Tax or Exclusion Act, and perhaps has not been given the privilege of conceptualizing a future with permanence. Our Chinatowns have been pushed aside, they’ve been moved, people haven’t been able to stay somewhere to call home. The Gate and that permanence can mean something very different to them.

I once heard educator and activist designer Sheila Sampath say that art in a community could be considered as a gift to the neighborhood. This really stuck with me because you have to think a bit about what kind of gift your receiver would enjoy or need. Art has a key place in movements, but it’s not the only way. On the same side, art has the ability to move and inspire, and movements would be nothing without inspiration and passion. There are, unfortunately, systemic ways in which things like culture and infrastructure are presented as competing options. In Toronto, a developer can make community concessions to a ward in exchange for building density or height above zoning guidelines. Community concessions could be green space, affordable housing, public art. A healthy city, a just society, prioritizes all the basic needs of its residents and has a vibrant culture. But if you were to ask me if our Chinatown needs a gate or social infrastructure, I would say the latter.

r: In Riversdale, Saskatoon, there is already so much public art, and there are quite a few community youth arts organizations and collectives in that community, including Chokecherry Studios, Future Artistic Minds, and Core Neighbourhood Youth Co-op. I don’t think these values have to compete, because art can happen on many different scales. Because of the way these Gates are made, they have a grandeur and complexity to them. If you don’t do it to that scale, it feels almost disrespectful. You got to go all the way or not at all. 

SZ: There must be other ways because we need both. I was filling out a survey from the federal government about its budget, and it asked people to pick their top two choices to the question: “Which should we tackle more urgently? Option 1: Supporting decolonization and supporting Indigenous communities, Option 2: Tackling anti-Black racism, or Option 3: Pandemic recovery, etc.” The options we are given to pick from are rigged against one another.

LRL: Thriving communities are an ecosystem, and art is part of the ecology of community care. Art also creates spaces for dialogue and encourages people to come together despite differences, which can be generative. 

In Edmonton, the Chinatown Gate conversation is politically relevant because it’s important to the community to replace what was removed. Here, artists are offered a glimpse of an opportunity to reimagine and reconceptualize what these Gates mean and look like. I want my elders to know: It’s not a rebellious act; it’s an authentic search to find contemporary diasporic expressions of our inherited identity.

The community has been advocating a replacement of our original Gate. Due to the conditions of the social fabric, there isn’t the space to allow the artist to be immersed into the design process of a new Gate. It’s understandable, and it’s also a lost opportunity.

Even outside the context of Edmonton’s current situation, existing Gates might need to be rethought because Chinatowns are changing. With the intent of practicing and preparing for better futures, there might come a time when there is another opportunity for a Gate, or, as we see in Saskatoon, it can be another form, like a ting.

In honour of the connection of friendships I am seeing among the diaspora, like between you two; in honour of these connections that extend into the future; in honour of our ancestors who gave their very best, what words would you offer to the future artist? What kind of advice or important perspectives? What are some things you would like the artist to consider?

SZ: From a formalist perspective, I would be very curious what a Gate created nowadays could look like. Like respectfulchild said, the first priority: can it even be achieved with these questions? Secondly, a lot of those Gates look to Imperial China. They were part of the exotification that our communities used as a tool to exist. There was a necessity to boost tourism, so businesses can sustain, so families and people can sustain. Does that function still happen now? Is that the aesthetic we still want for a contemporary diasporic Chinatown community? Do we want to reference Imperial China so directly? The Gates that diasporic artists have to deal with now and in the future require redefining what it means to have another realm of existence that is uniquely born under different conditions. I think it’s so interesting to take reference from the past, but still be able to make a new visual language. It’s uncharted territory!

I’m also a fan of temporary public art that’s become more common recently. Art that is up for a while and contributes to the dialogue, but is not up forever. It is a big burden to fulfill all these values in a permanent monument. I’ve never created a permanent work but I don’t know what people in 100 years are thinking! I like work that’s given the ability to change, learn, and be added to over time. Like respectfulchild’s project, it was a temporary Gate that brought up questions and continues in a different vein.

r: In the context of Saskatoon and smaller centres in general, we don’t have a critical mass, such as Toronto, to have so many diasporic areas like K-town and Little Jamaica. If we build a Gate in Saskatoon, it will be very inaccurate for it to be Chinese because there are so many more cultures that have contributed to the neighbourhood, like Fillipino grocery stores,  Korean restaurants, and Middle Eastern shops. What form makes sense to represent all of this? Definitely not Imperial China anymore. Who are we all trying to signify and mark a place for? Who is included and how far does it extend? It becomes the ethnic aisle at the grocery store.

Chinatown has never been just Chinese restaurants and businesses. The ting is located in the park, and there is a stone that says, “this is here to recognize the Chinese contribution to the community,” but it’s not saying “this is a Chinese space,” because the Gate symbolizes an entry into another space, whereas a ting is a gathering space. So, maybe it worked out.

LRL: As artists, how do you approach your practice and ground yourself when working on the land you’re hosted on? 

r: The Gate project at the Remai was where I explicitly grappled with my identity and cultural position on the Prairies, being a settler. I did that on purpose, because in a gallery I would be engaging with people who are outside my music community. I wanted to be intentional, and I didn’t want to work with my usual medium of sound and music because that can be so ambiguous. The things that Shellie brought up from the visit to the archives inspired me. Shellie is very intentional about learning and building from the context and history of the places she visits. Life of a Craphead’s work at AKA also inspired me because of how site-specific and relational it was, them working with Jin Jin. It made me want to do the same. It was a way for me to understand the history of the land where the gallery is situated now and it being the previous Chinatown.

SZ: A lot of conversations for diasporic artists begin with settlement, where are you from, how did you get here. We’re very siloed, and sometimes the platforms we’re given, or the history we’re taught, are siloed too. Often our immigration process begins with us landing on the soil, but we don’t talk about what was on the land before us, not as much. I’m far from being an expert, but I find it very grounding to learn parallels between communities. For example, I’m very humbled by the stories of Chinese and Indigenous communities living together in B.C. 

There are a lot of things that unite us through our mutual responsibility and goals, too. For instance we talk about Chinatown as a community that was pushed out, but there was a community pushed out long before Chinatown. Instead of the noun of Chinatown, what are the verbs of Chinatown? What are the feelings or actions that describe Chinatown? If one of them is this shared history of displacement, then we have to acknowledge the history of settlement that we have. We have to look further back.

7. Chinatown Gates as Portals to Signify Better Futures

During Canada’s second annual Truth and Reconciliation Day, I participated in a group walk in amiskwacîwâskahikan/Edmonton co-led by Carla Badger, Emily Riddle, Jessica Johns, Christina Hardie, and Kathryn Ivany. They guided us to gather around public art as they told stories of the land, disenfranchisement, and dispossession. One of the sites we visited was the public artworks at ᐄᓃᐤ (ÎNÎW) River Lot 11∞ Edmonton’s Indigenous Art Park, an example of re-Indigenization of urban space in the settler city. The artworks in the park are sites of collective remembering. 

When we gather around public art in Chinatown, what are the stories we want to tell? How can Chinatown Gates honour the complexity of our stories and create legitimate space on stolen land? Can Chinatown Gates adequately represent us today and our desired futures?

An example of a Chinatown Gate that offers a glimpse of ethical possibilities is artist Louise Zhang’s 2023 work “Hidden Realms.”​​¹⁶ The public artwork is a gateway installed in a thoroughfare under Salesforce Tower at Sydney Place, a development in Australia. During construction of the tower, archaeologists found artifacts of Chinese settlement. Zhang incorporated imagery of these artifacts into the gateway’s design. Recognizing the importance of consulting with First Nations peoples, Louise Zhang worked with Kamilaroi/Gamilaraay artist Dennis Golding. Golding’s design of a lily and shield represents the land and community of Sydney. The design is placed at the highest point of the Gate, flanked by willows. In Chinese culture, the willow branch symbolizes friendship and is a gesture to stay and not to leave: a sentiment that resists displacement and colonialism.

“Hidden Realms” is a Chinatown Gate that acknowledges the Indigenous land we are hosted on through consultation and collaboration. The artwork is site-specific, recognizing First Nations land and the historical site of Chinese settlement without nostalgia or self-Orientalizing. This Gate honours traditional Chinese symbols without propagating copies of Imperial China. The symbols of our ancestors incorporate an awareness of today’s social context. This is a Gate that gestures to the relational futures we want to see today, while still existing in the systems of a settler city.  In Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), there are portals as part of the pathways of the meridian system that connect us to our life energy (qi), for our health and greater consciousness. In “We, the Inevitably Interconnected: Meridians as Anti-Colonial Modality” Céline Chuang writes that meridians map us through movement. Chuang continues, “If we are made of and through movement, orienting through meridians is ancestral reclamation, decolonial anti-cartography: like the plants and the Elders teach, honouring life (qi) as inherently interconnected.”​​¹⁷ Using meridians as a metaphor, the Gates can be imagined as portals in our Chinatowns for better futures. 

8. Relational Renewal to Make New Portals and Systems

The monument can be an expression to signify better futures, but as artist Ehren Tool says, “Peace is the only adequate war memorial.”​​¹⁸ Expanding Tool’s sentiment, Liza Kim Jackson explains:

In the face of hegemonic attitudes that naturalize property ownership and laud neighbourhood upward mobility, only a decolonized approach can provide both an adequate understanding of the profound violence against community that is gentrification, and the everyday reproduction of the colonization of Indigenous peoples at the neighbourhood scale.​​¹⁹

Are we collectively willing to do the challenging work to transform our hegemonic systems into better ways of living, governing, and collaborating, creating pathways to make it easier to treat each other well? Dr. Dwayne Donald, a descendent of the amiskwaciwiyiniwak (Beaver Hills people) and the Papaschase Cree and a professor at the University of Alberta, guides walks in amiskwacîwâskahikan/Edmonton’s river valley sharing the nêhiyaw (Cree) wisdom concept of wâhkôhtowin, which means the responsibilities we have to each other because we are all connected. We are all connected to the land, the sky, the ancestors, and to each other. In the paper “We Need a New Story: Walking and the wâhkôhtowin Imagination,” Dr. Donald writes, “the stories we tell each other is a foundational way of how humans express our understanding of the world and our place in it. The stories typically told continue to perpetuate the damaging and divisive colonial legacies that result from relationship denial. Walking as a life practice has the potential to enable relational renewal.”​​²⁰

If walking is a way of being with each other and the land—finding renewing narratives and relations— what new stories might emerge from it? If our relationship to the land and with each other changes, how will art, the monument, our cities, and systems change?

9. Planting Seeds for New Portals for Better Futures

At the site of Edmonton’s original Chinatown Gate, which locals refer to as the Harbin Gate, the ground has been augmented with new tracks for Light Rail Transit. It is January 2023, five years since the Gate’s removal, and the Chinatown community has held onto the promise of its replacement. Recent events have motivated the city to prioritize the funding of a new Gate, to be installed one block south and rotated 90 degrees from its original location. The new Gate will not function as a gateway into Chinatown but rather as a memorial to Edmonton’s first Chinatown, which was displaced by the Canada Place federal building in the 1980s.

As Chinatown celebrates the new Gate, I should be overjoyed. Although I’m thankful, I also feel dissatisfied. After so many conversations with artists about the positioning of Chinatown on Indigenous land, I’m further convinced that the iconic monument of Chinatown needs to be reconceptualized. Simply repeating traditions is insufficient and doesn’t reflect the realities of today. Yet, I’m still hopeful. I continue to contribute to the building of a social fabric that uplifts artists and supports actions that reconceptualize Chinatown Gates—calling our desire for better futures. 

Lee Rayne Lucke is an artist, community organizer, and cultural worker. Their work addresses issues of spatial justice in order to call attention, mobilize, or divert structures of power with collective artistic gestures and participatory processes. Together with an artist and Chinatown community group called aiya哎呀, they offer spaces to remember the emotional and geographic loss of amiskwacîwâskahikan’s Chinatown at its intersections. Through the lens of Chinatown, the work is postured to envision and practice decolonial and better ways of being in the city. The work spans public interventions, satirical performance, capacity building with anti-oppression workshops such as “still in chinatown on Indigenous land working space for artists and cultural workers,” organizing to form openings for better futures, and making social spaces of cultural care.

1. Chinatowns are heterotopic spaces as defined by Foucault, an “other” space that is disturbing, intense, incompatible. Florence Yee, “At the limits of Self-Orientalism,” A Haphazard Handbook of Artists & Organizers across Chinatowns (2017, 2018, 2021): 4-24.
2. “These ornamental gates are representative of a unit of exchange in the political economy of Chinese, trans-Pacific nationalism. Serving as tokens of goodwill between governments and cultural communities, they promise advantageous trade agreements and the expedited flow of capital, technology and bodies across continents.” Erica Allen-Kim, “The Political Economy of Chinatown Gates,” Pidgin Magazine (2013).
3. Prior to the 1900s, Chinatown architecture was the same as the rest of the city. After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the threat of departure by Chinese business leaders, the city created plans to develop the look of a new Chinatown. Designed by architects and urban designers who have never been to China, the Chinatown aesthetic we know today is influenced by Western ideas of what China should look like, a chinoiserie of urban planning and architecture. Many cities have followed San Francisco’s Chinatown’s aesthetic strategy, which is now a standard for Chinatowns. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/pagodas-dragon-gates/.
4. I will be using the word “empire” for hegemonic systems and power.
5. Liza Kim Jackson, “The Complications of Colonialism for Gentrification Theory and Marxist Geography,” Journal of Law and Social Policy, No. 27 (2017).
6. Jackson, “The Complications of Colonialism for Gentrification Theory and Marxist Geography,” Journal of Law and Social Policy.
7. Antipode Online, “Geographies of Racial Capitalism with Ruth Wilson Gilmore – An Antipode Foundation film,”June 1, 2020, video, https://youtu.be/2CS627aKrJI.
8. Zadie Smith, “What Do We Want History to Do to Us?” The New York Review of Books (February 27, 2020).
9. Jackson, “The Complications of Colonialism for Gentrification Theory and Marxist Geography.”
10. E.C. Delmelle, Transit-Induced Gentrification and Displacement: The State of the Debate,  eds. R.H.M. Pereira & G. Boisjoly, Social Issues in Transport Planning (Advances in Transport Policy and Planning), No. 8 (Elsevier, 2021): 173-190 https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.atpp.2021.06.005.
11. Florence Yee, “At the limits of Self-Orientalism,” A Haphazard Handbook of Artists & Organizers across Chinatowns (2017, 2018, 2021): 4-24.
12. Ryan Lee Wong, “Activating the Archive,” Art as Social Action (2018): 23.
13. Wong, “Activating the Archive,” 26.
14. Tyler Russell, “M’GOI/ DO JEH: SITES, RITES AND GRATITUDE 唔該/多謝: 常用感情景口語,” An Art & Community Initiative, Centre A Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (2014), https://centrea.org/2014/04/mgoi-dojeh/
15. Wong, “Activating the Archive,” 26.
16. A video of Louise Zhang’s public artwork gateway titled “Hidden Realms” can be viewed at this link: https://lnkd.in/g4dHjZqB
17. Céline Chuang, “We, the Inevitably Interconnected: Meridians as Anti-Colonial Modality,” The Funambulist (May 1, 2021), Issue 35: Decolonial Ecologies.
18. Ehren Tool, “Finding the Authentic Self,” Curated Ceramics, February 8, 2023, https://curatedceramics.com/media_files/Curated.Profiles.Tool.pdf
19. Jackson, “The Complications of Colonialism for Gentrification Theory and Marxist Geography.”
20. Dwayne Donald, D, “We Need a New Story: Walking and the wâhkôhtowin Imagination,” Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 18 No.2, (2021), 53–63, https://doi.org/10.25071/1916-4467.40492.

This article is published in issue 39.3 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue