Vancouver’s Chinatown Gets a Fresh Burst of Colour

Chinatown Vancouver: An Illustrated History
Donna Seto
House of Anansi Press (2025)

Donna Seto remembers a Chinatown bursting with life and a red balloon bursting with sadness one summer day when she was four.

The balloon was a gift. So was Chinatown, then. Seto recalls the historic Vancouver neighbourhood as a “social network and food paradise,” not to mention “a lifeline” for her immigrant parents, who made regular visits to the bakeries, grocers and barbeque meat shops, their daughters in tow. They were never more alive or more themselves than they were in the Chinatown of Seto’s childhood memories.

Chinatown is different now. The last 30 years have seen major changes in commercial activity, community and safety, not to mention the physical structures and spaces themselves. They could all use a fresh coat of paint.

That’s where Seto comes in. Her new book, Chinatown Vancouver: An Illustrated History, is precisely the colourful burst of life the place deserves. It’s an art book, with 70 colourful paintings of Chinatown’s iconic buildings and businesses; it’s a history book, full of archival photos and interviews with notable community members; but it’s also a vision of what the neighbourhood could become with some love and attention.

Recently, Seto spoke to The Tyee about what inspired her book: the need to create amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the Chinese community’s part in Canadian history and the fear that the Chinatown she and her family have cherished for decades could one day disappear, just like her red balloon.

This interview has been condensed for length and clarity.

The Tyee: As I understand it, Chinatown Vancouver is another great example of what happens when you trap an artist in their home for several years. Tell me about this new book.

Donna Seto: I started doing these paintings during the pandemic, and it was because I was bored. I had a bit of time and I started painting and picked up watercolour. Then I went down to Chinatown. I live pretty close. I live in Mount Pleasant and I spent a lot of time in Chinatown when I was growing up. It was sad to see during the pandemic when no one was there. But the good thing was that I got a chance to look at the buildings, because no one was on the street. And then just… why is the paint all chipped? Some of them are a little lopsided. But you see there's so much history and beauty in the buildings. Each and every single one of them is quite different. And then I started painting these paintings. I started posting on social media, because that’s what you [did] back in the pandemic.

Of course. It was the only way to stay connected.

Yeah. So people started sharing these stories, and I started learning all these things about how much people love Chinatown, love the buildings.

So I started putting this together. I never thought I would write a book like this so soon, but I think it was that time, where Chinatown needed some attention and some love. And then I just discovered so much about the history of Chinatown that I actually didn't know.

There’s a line in Chinatown Vancouver where you say: “my training taught me that the Chinese weren't a part of Canadian history.”

I think that applies to a lot of racialized people in Canada. Even in my Canadian history classes that I did at Simon Fraser University as an undergrad, we were just one line or, like, a paragraph in our history books. Like, we helped build part of the railway. That was it.

Looking into the history of Chinatown, you realize there’s so much in there that we haven’t covered. For the book, I wanted it to be kind of a living history, so I did a number of interviews with people, some who are still working in Chinatown. Some of their grandparents opened restaurants or lived in Chinatown. They had these deep connections. So it became this project where their children were remembering and reflecting on what their parents went through and how much it had an impact on them.

They remember Chinatown being very vibrant and very busy. Keeman Wang, who’s in the book — his parents owned the Way Inn restaurant and Ming’s restaurant, which used to be a nightclub. It was huge back in the day. He was telling me they used to play in the alleys.

That doesn't seem safe.

People used to play in the alleys. Kids did. They would chop vegetables during the day with their parents or grandparents and then they would send them down the street, down Pender, to go to the book shop, to buy a little stationery, just as a reward.

I don’t think I’ve ever been introduced to these buildings — not the way that you did here in this book. Suddenly, this or that building has a name to me. It has a story. It’s an incredible kind of revitalization you've done. It had me wishing we’d done the same thing with the real buildings.

It’s not too late, though. The great thing about these buildings: some of them have been there for over 100 years, and they’re still there. We can do something about it.

Tell me about the decision to make them so colourful in your paintings — to allow a bit of space for exaggeration and artistic license. I feel like when you are writing a history, even an illustrated history, there’s a pressure to just make it accurate. But this isn’t quite that.

A lot of these photographs are black and white, so I had to do a bit of guesswork. But another part is how I see it. A lot of [the images] are more vibrant. There was a time in Chinatown where there were all these neon signs. I’m too young to have actually seen them. I wish I did see them. I’ve seen some photos and they're awesome. So it’s almost kind of blending in what they might have looked like at night, with the neon signs glowing and the rain that is reflected on East Pender Street, and another part is what I remember of that vibrant Chinatown when I was four or five years old, in the early ’80s, seeing it for the first time. I remember Chinatown being super loud, super smelly, super tasty, all these things — super everything. So I'm pulling that into the paintings a little bit too.

Those choices did a lot for me as a reader, just in terms of bringing these buildings to life. But I have to imagine that this project did a lot for you as well. Often as the audience, we think about what the artist intends for us. But this project feels so personal, at times.

It became personal. I didn’t intend it to be personal initially. As I was rewriting the book, I put a lot more of my personal history in there. My grandmother used to live just outside of Chinatown in Oppenheimer Park, and she’s still around. She's 105. She’s in a home, but we used to go down there and visit her all the time.

My mom and dad still do all their shopping at the few grocery stores there. They still do all their banking in Chinatown. The other day, my dad was like, “I’m gonna go buy light bulbs.” I'm like, “Are you going to Home Depot?” He says, “No, I’m going to Chinatown.” I'm like, “Why are you going to Chinatown to buy light bulbs?” “There's a place on Georgia I know.”

So it is personal. Growing up in Canada and being of Chinese background, I never really felt proud of my heritage. I think it’s different now. I look at the kids now, and I think there’s a lot more diversity, there’s lots to be proud of. But I never felt like I had a part in Canadian history. It was always about these people who didn’t look like me.

History teaches us who has value. When the stories are never about us, the assumption is that our stories don't matter. Then at some point, you become the storyteller, and you suddenly have this drive, or maybe a sense of responsibility or need, to tell stories that enshrine your history and recover this sense of self-love that you missed growing up. Like I said, it’s revitalization, not only downtown but within. Self-revitalization, maybe?

Some of my friends became very connected to Hong Kong in the ‘90s, whereas I didn’t. I went the other way. I refused to speak my language. Now that I’m doing this project, it has made me think that there was a lot of internalized racism there that I’ve had to unpack over the last few years. But I’ve also become proud that there are people like me out there, because I didn't see that before. These are people who were never in those history books, never studied in politics, weren’t on TV, weren’t in the stories that I read. So I think it’s important for these stories to come out.

I suppose you can’t do a history of Chinatown without thinking a lot about racism. Whenever I read local history, it just makes me so mad. Doing your research, did you find yourself just getting mad? Or was it mostly just joy at recovering all this lost knowledge?

It’s probably a combination of both. Part of that madness came during the pandemic, when there was this spike of anti-Asian racism, and we all felt it, just walking around. So some of the stories did make me mad. Even the white waitress scandal. People couldn’t work. Why wouldn’t you let white women work there? And these were working-class women. They couldn’t find jobs elsewhere.

It’s such a great example too of how racism hurts everyone. We hear these stories and assume it only affects racialized people. It doesn’t.

Chinatown is important, and the history of the Chinese is super important. There’s so much that we haven’t included in education and discussions of our politics. What happens is we have this incomplete history of what Canada is and I think that’s at the centre of it. This is a living history. It’s not over. These are living memories. Memories are important. Feelings are important.

If Chinatown wasn’t a racialized community, I think we’d have worked harder to preserve it, both then and now.

I think so. Like, these are the politics of 2025. When I read about the history in 1905, the creepy thing is, it’s the same thing. Nothing has changed. We talk about how much progress we’ve made, and have we? Have we really?

Sure, you see people like me and you in jobs that we [couldn’t] get before, but still, we had to experience so much discrimination. I had to forget my language in order to get here, in order for me to write in a certain way, in order for me not to sound like I’m Chinese. That took effort.

You forget parts of yourself. I hope the next generation won’t have to choose that.

Donna Seto will be in conversation about ‘Chinatown Vancouver’ with SFU City Program director and urban studies professor Andy Yan at the Vancouver Public Library’s Central Branch on May 24. The event is free, and guests can register online.