Christopher Cheung

Christopher Cheung is a staff reporter at The Tyee.

He is interested in the power and politics behind urban change, and how Vancouver’s many diasporas strive to make a home in a city with colonial legacies.

Cheung has reported on the mystery of the street vendor "baklava man," the social life of local Chinese malls, the right to public washrooms, food security in the Downtown Eastside, the “translator kids” of migrant families and the invasion of the colonial Himalayan blackberry.

In 2021, he won the Jack Webster Award — B.C.’s top achievement in journalism — for his reporting on how COVID-19 has disproportionately affected working-class immigrant neighbourhoods.

Cheung also occasionally writes personal essays. He’s documented his time living in Vancouver’s most-diverse neighbourhood, his family’s annual "grave sweeping" and a year-long investigation on the Instagrammers who came to take profile pictures on the rooftop outside his downtown window. His essay "Blind Spots,” on the lack of true ethnic and cultural representation in Canada media, won the 2021 Dalton Camp Award for best essay.

Cheung has written for a number of newspapers and magazines, with columns in the Vancouver Courier and Metro, where readers will remember his community stories on Duffin’s Donuts, Kingsgate Mall and Asian immigrant seniors with backyard farms. He was born and raised in Vancouver and still lives there.

He graduated with a master’s in journalism from the University of British Columbia in 2016. Find him on Twitter and Instagram, or visit his website.