| Fall 2005 |
Editors: Saara Liinamaa, Janine Marchessault and Karyn Sandlos
An Te Liu, “Chinatown in the Ether”:
“There are over 30 Chinese malls and centres north of Toronto alone, all taking various forms and scales. There are now more Chinese people living outside of China than there are Canadians living in Canada. Fixed and bounded, the old Chinatowns may continue to survive, but they no longer represent the most complete story about Asian immigration, settlement, and commerce. What we witness is something that has a weaker sense of representation, that is harder to identify and locate. The malls represent a mutation, multiplication, and dispersal of Chinatown – they are mobile, adaptable, and sometimes invisible. They have no natural habitat, but they can land and begin to participate in forming meaningful locations and a contingent sense of place that is equally a result of an intrinsic foreign quality. Amidst ether, these places are simultaneously foreign and domestic, familiar and strange, non-urban and kind-of-urban, somewhere, nowhere, and anywhere.” (89)
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