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2. THE NEW YELLOW PERIL: The rhetorical construction of Asian Canadian identity and cultural anxiety in Richmond
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
- Chapter
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Introduction O n October 21, 1995, the following advertisement for the cbc Evening News appeared in the Richmond Review (p. 5), a community newspaper that serves a suburban readership situated south of the city of Vancouver , British Columbia: let’s talk. In the last year, the Chinese Canadian population grew by 26 percent. It’s the biggest social transformation Greater Vancouver has ever experienced. As the pace of change increases, so do racial tensions. We need to talk. Monday at 6:30, Kevin Evans moderates a discussion on race relations in a special cbc Evening News Forum. Watch facing forward: race relations in vancouver The race relations “News Forum” (subtitled “Neighbours: Beyond Political Correctness” when it was broadcast on the evening of October 23,1995), and the events that precipitated it, provide an exemplary starting point for the analysis of discursive struggles over community identities, urban environments , and race in British Columbia. Televisual discourse, with its invitation to“talk” and its deployment of the promise of “moderation,” sought to intervene in a series of race relations crises. These crises, as I will demonstrate, were forms of “moral panic” (Hier & Greenberg, 2002) that were both conspicuously constructed by the news media themselves and linked to a locally established discourse of Anglo-European Canadian entitlement to space. These discourses were not only present in the local news but were long preceded by the locally published “official” history of Richmond, written by 19 THE NEW YELLOW PERIL The rhetorical construction of Asian Canadian identity and cultural anxiety in Richmond Glenn Deer 2 Leslie Ross and entitled Richmond: Child of the Fraser (1979), a historical text that not only reinforces the character of Anglo-European spatial entitlement in Richmond but simultaneously places Asian Canadians in an abject, outsider space. This historical text provides evidence of how Richmond officially regarded itself in the 1970s, not as the multicultural and dynamic zone of development that it would become thirty years later, but as a semi-rural, Euro-Canadian community on the road to steady urban transformation. The cultural homogeneity and assumptions of Euro-Canadian spatial priority found in this history provide an important context for understanding the tensions between long-time residents and immigrant newcomers in the mid1990s , and these tensions would erupt as a series of significant media events. Such cultural contexts paved the way, in 1995, for local newspapers to provide an increasingly dramatic narrative of racialized conflicts over immigrantdriven increases in urban change, and the participation of prominent print journalists and citizen correspondents became an integral part of the cbc forum held on October 23 of that year. This study will consider these cultural contexts, local histories from the 1970s like Richmond: Child of the Fraser, and the media discourses of 1995 that culminated in the October cbc forum entitled “Neighbours: Beyond Political Correctness.” Race and historical contexts Vancouver and Richmond have shared a long, but often overlooked, history of significant conflicts between dominant white communities and minority communities of colour, mainly of Asian background, over the ownership and use of space in British Columbia’s lower mainland. From the earliest race riots of 1887 and 1907 by anti-oriental leagues that destroyed Chinese and Japanese homes and businesses on Vancouver’s Hastings and Powell streets (Adachi, 1976; Ward, 1978; Anderson, 1991), to the appropriation of JapaneseCanadian properties and boats in Richmond’s fishing village, Steveston, and the forced internment of 22,000 Canadians of Japanese ancestry in 1942 (Adachi, 1976; Miki & Kobayashi, 1991), to the more recent publicity in 2004 over the strategic positioning of Indo-Canadian and Chinese-Canadian political candidates in particular Vancouver and Richmond constituencies, these intertwinings of group allegiances, competition, and racialized spaces are central in understanding the past and present cultural dynamics of the Greater Vancouver region. The ethnic-social character of the city of Richmond, surrounded by the arms of the Fraser river and located south of Vancouver, has been described by Ray, Halseth, and Johnson (1997) as being historically a “steadfastly European space within Greater Vancouver”(p. 88), although the fishing village of 20 The new yellow peril [3.238.57.9] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 13:39 GMT) Steveston, with its long association with Japanese fishermen and some Chinese cannery workers in the early 1900s, is the “exception.” Ray, Halseth, and Johnson also note that as of 1971, Richmond had a “homogenous British/ European identity,” and that Asians were a small portion of the population: they comprised only...