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In April, 1941, Loy Key, the proprietor of a laundry in on East Georgia Street in Vancouver’s Chinatown, mailed a letter to Barker's Café in Silver City, New Mexico. I had not even been born then, so he could not have known that he was creating a piece of postal history that would fit so well into my own history. Nor could he have known that before the decade was out, a Chinese man working at his job at Barker’s Café would fall victim of extreme violence.

The cover to Silver City was mailed April 16, 1941. Although it’s an airmail cover, it would most likely have completed its journey by train: Silver City did not have airmail service until 1951. The airmail stamp that franks it, issued June 15, 1938, shows a Fairchild Sekani flying over the riverboat S.S. Distributor on British Columbia’s Skeena River.

It is small wonder that I am drawn to this cover: several years ago I adopted Vancouver as my home. It’s a city with a fascinating multicultural history, and an especially large Chinese-Canadian population. The cover’s destination, Silver City, New Mexico, is especially significant to me: I grew up in Silver City, a small mining and ranching community in southwestern New Mexico, with a cultural history no less fascinating than Vancouver’s. Moreover, I remember Barker's Café: it was located just a block north of the office of the Silver City Enterprise newspaper. I was more than just familiar with the Enterprise; after my family moved to New Mexico from New York State in 1949, my father became its editor.

The Chinese characters on the cover (see detail image at the left) are not a Chinese version of the address — few if any post office employees in Canada or the United States were Chinese in the 1940s, and it’s doubtful if any of them could read Chinese.

From top to bottom and right to left, the Chinese translates as an instruction to the recipient at Barker's Café: “Please send [to] / Mr. Pan, Jing Zun,” or, in Western parlance, “Mr. Jing-Zun Pan.”

Paul Yeung, Cultural Program Director at the Chinese Cultural Centre of Greater Vancouver, notes that “Pan” is a rare Chinese surname, possibly representative of a minority ethnic group from northern China.

This cover opens a small window on the Chinese diaspora of the 19th and 20th centuries, when Chinese in their millions crossed the world's oceans to escape the endless cycles of poverty in their own country.

"Gold Mountain" Dreams

The first Chinese arrived in Vancouver in 1858. They called Canada “Gold Mountain” and dreamed of striking it rich in the Fraser Gold Rush. Their dreams, however, turned into real-life nightmares of indentured servitude and crushing racism. Vancouver-born author Wayson Choy writes movingly of Chinatown’s early days in his historical novel, The Jade Peony:

Most Chinatown people were from the dense villages of southern Kwangtun province, a territory wracked by cycles of famine and drought. When the call for railroad workers came from labour contract brokers in Canada in the 1880s [to build the Candian Pacific Railway], every man who was able and capable left his farm and village to be indentured for dangerous work in the mountain ranges of the Rockies. There had also been rumours of gold in the rivers that poured down those mountain cliffs, gold that could make a man and his family wealthy overnight.


“Go to Gold Mountain,” they told one another, promising to send wages home, to return rich or die. Thousands immigrated in the decades before 1923, when on July 1st the Dominion of Canada passed the Chinese Exclusion Act and shut down all ordinary bachelor-man traffic between Canada and China, shut off any women from arriving, and divided families. Poverty-stricken bachelor-men were left alone in Gold Mountain, with only a few dollars left to send back to China every month, and never enough dollars to buy passage home. Dozens went mad; many killed themselves. The Chinatown Chinese call July 1st, the day celebrating the birth of Canada, the Day of Shame….

In the city dump on False Creek Flats, living in makeshift huts, thirty-two Old China bachelor-men tried to shelter themselves; dozens more were dying of neglect in the overcrowded rooms of Pender Street. There were no Depression jobs for such men. They had been deserted by the railroad companies and betrayed by the many labour contractors who had gone back to China, wealthy and forgetful. There was a local Vancouver by-law against begging for food, a federal law against stealing food, but no law in any court against starving to death for lack of food. The few churches that served the Chinatown area were running out of funds. Soup kitchens could no longer safely manage the numbers lining up for nourishment, fighting each other. China men were shoved aside, threatened, forgotten.

During the early mornings, in the 1920s and ’30s, nuns came out regularly from St. Paul’s Mission to help clean and take the bodies away. In the crowded rooming houses of Chinatown, until morning came, living men slept in cots and on floors beside dead men.

It’s just over a kilometre (six-tenths of a mile) from the intersection of Granville and Georgia streets in downtown Vancouver to Chinatown’s Millennium Gate entrance on Pender Street, a short walk or drive from one culture into another. Chinatown survives today as the second-largest Chinese enclave in North America (San Francisco’s is the largest), but nevertheless it’s a small area covering only a dozen or so city blocks.

Like stepping into China

To walk Chinatown’s colorful streets today is like stepping briefly into China itself, although it is probably more like the China of a few decades ago rather than today’s China. Its streets are crowded with shoppers and filled with sights, sounds, and aromas that to unaccustomed Western senses are exotic. Vancouver, despite growing gang- and drug-related crime, is a statistically safe city, and Chinatown is safer still — only rarely does Chinatown figure in reports of crime.

There are relatively few Caucasians to be seen in Chinatown (more in tourist season), and few signs in English (although local business interests are pushing for more). It's hard to imagine that only a few blocks away is “English” Vancouver, where tourists in their thousands spill into the city from cruise ships to shop on trendy Robson Street.

Closer still, on Chinatown’s western boundary, is East Hastings Street and its embarrassing, sad ebb and flow of hookers, pimps, drug dealers, and homeless people, who consist largely of Caucasions and First Nations people. (Chinese-Canadians themselves are today for the most part prosperous and no longer suffer the same degree of prejudice of previous decades, and Metro Vancouver’s Chinese-Canadians — a third of the population — no longer live exclusively in Chinatown and are integral to Vancouver’s culture, commerce, and politics.)

Photos by Bob Ingraham

Vancouver nearly lost Chinatown in the 1950s, to “development”: A clique of politicians and developers proposed an eight-lane freeway, an extension of the Trans-Canada Highway to downtown Vancouver. In improving traffic flow into downtown Vancouver, it would have wiped out Chinatown.

A storm of protest erupted. Vancouver's Chinese and liberal Caucasian communities (with help from African-Canadians from Halifax, who had headed off similar threats against their community) thwarted the plan.

Today, because of that protest, the Trans-Canada Highway bypasses most of Vancouver, with the happy result that the city is not overly plagued with suburban sprawl and inner-city decay (with the exception of that sad stretch of East Hastings Street) and is composed largely of diversified, viable communities. It may also be one of the reasons that downtown Vancouverites can boast of one of the the few inner-city areas on the planet that is rapidly growing in population, in part because suburbanites are moving to downtown Vancouver to avoid commuting, which ranges from irritating to nearly impossible.

And what of Loy Kee?

And what of Loy Kee? He exists as a listing in Vancouver’s 1941 business directory as the proprietor of the Diamond Laundry at #217 Georgia Street East, but his laundry is long gone, replaced by a parking lot (image at right). Numerous enquiries in the area produced only puzzled looks and head shakes. An archival record held in Victoria notes the death of a “Kee Loy” at age 74 on September 28, 1949.