November 25, 1997

Vancouver Dances To A Hong Kong Beat

Eric Ellis Vancouver

Any China trader who's spent more than a few days confined to a bad hotel doing business in a scruffy provincial Chinese city has probably already experienced Vancouver's great contribution to Asia-Pacific economic co-operation.

Bored after the room service "hamburger", they flicked through the dubious fare on hotel TV, invariably settling on anything familiar that might pop up on Rupert Murdoch's much-neutered Star TV.

And several times a week, they will alight on Baywatch's Pamela Lee Anderson, the Dolly Parton of the '90s, a Vancouver girl and pretty much the only reason the show is sold and watched across Asia, its biggest market. The organisers of the APEC summit describe "Pammie" as "British Columbia's best known export". 

Vancouver tilts to Asia in myriad other ways, finally proving the truth of the national motto "From Sea Even Unto Sea", a nobility betrayed by mostly white Canada's traditional tendency to pull politically, economically and culturally to the Atlantic and beyond.

Since 1987, almost 200,000 immigrants of Chinese descent have arrived in the city - 60 per cent being the so-called "yacht people" from wealthy Hong Kong -fundamentally changing the fabric of the city and turning it into an overseas Chinese city just as culturally credible as Penang, KL or Jakarta.

Meandering property owners were suddenly shunted aside by thrusting Hong Kongers who bought and sold several times over from the plan while parliamentarians started giving speeches in Cantonese in thechamber.

Prime Minister Jean Chretien appointed a Hong Kong-born restaurateur, Raymond Chan, as his Secretary of State, his constituency being Richmond, once swampy farmland but now bearing a remarkable resemblance to one of the "new towns" of Hong Kong's New Territories. Its names translate auspiciously into Cantonese as "wealthy gate".

A recent study of local schools found English spoken at 44 per cent of homes and a Chinese dialect in 31 per cent and rising, explaining why when Rupert Murdoch's popular TV series, The X-Files, which is filmed in Vancouver, needs Asian scenes they simply head to Richmond or Vancouver's booming Chinatown.

The transition has also had its problems. Though a Pauline Hanson has yet to emerge and probably won't, Canadians have begun complaining they are strangers in their own land and worse, are being priced out of it by brassy Hong Kong parvenu who until this year, could buy Vancouver office buildings with the yield from Hong Kong apartments.

Canadians raised, like Australians, in an immigrant culture where you landed low and worked into prosperity, were appalled by the surfeit of pink Chanel suits, mobile phones, red Mercedes' sports cars. And they have not warmed to complaining "astronauts", the bored HK middle-classer living out a two-year "prison sentence" so the whole family can be Canadians - just in case.

And it's largely because of them that Vancouver celebrates its arrival as "The Newest Asian Capital on the Pacific Rim".