Vancouver

The Canadian city has long been home to a thriving Chinese community, its presence most apparent in the food scene, where the traditional and modern come together with a dash of West Coast cool.

- By Connor McGovern. Photographs by Alamy, Rennie Brown, The Chinese Tea Shop, Miku restaurant and Rich Won

“Chinese culture is very subtle,” says Robert ‘Bob’ Sung. “It’s all about symbolism.” That may well be true, but little is subtle about the slices of char siu we’re devouring from a polystyrene tray on a Chinatown corner. The hot, sweet morsels of pork from Money BBQ & Produce are fatty and lurid red. “It all has a meaning,” adds Bob. Red, he says, is a symbol of joy and after today’s feast — my fingers sticky with scarlet sauce — I expect to be a very happy man indeed.

Bob is leading me on one of his A Wok Around Chinatown tours, exploring the cuisine of Vancouver’s Chinese community. A third-generation Chinese-Canadian, he comes from a family who’ve been living in Canada for more than a century, much of it working in British Columbia’s food industry. “I was always surrounded by the aromas of the kitchen growing up,” he says, as we pass shops strung with red-and-gold lanterns.

It’s fitting — symbolic, some might say — that gold still gleams amid the old neon of Chinatown today. In the mid-19th century, thousands of Cantonese-speaking migrants came to British Columbia from southern China for the Gold Rush, and many of them were employed to build the Canadian Pacific Railway in the decades that followed. Some stayed on afterward, working in sawmills and fish canneries, but found themselves marginalised by the rest of the population. Chinatowns began to develop across Canada, with tight-knit communities of bakeries, restaurants, and food stores soon opening their doors.