Chung

Vancouver’s Chinatown is full of beautiful and interesting photo opportunities. For the next month you can have your Chinatown photo on display at Kee’s Laundry Gallery on 228 East Georgia, and also online through their gallery site (be patient and give it a few minutes to load- it’s worth it!). Using the popular photo sharing application Instagram, you can take a photo and give it the hashtag #chinatownyvr to have it included in the gallery and online.

The exhibition is curated/sponsored by the advertising agency St. Bernadine Mission Communications. According to the Kee’s Laundry site, the agency moved to Chinatown in 2011 and wanted to do something to celebrate their new neighbourhood. What a great idea! Because Kee’s Laundry is a window gallery, you can go and view the exhibition from the street anytime of day or night.

If you’re curious about how Kee’s Laundry got it’s name, they have a little bit of history here – looks like they did a little archival research!

Friday March 23 and Saturday March 24 at 7 pm you are invited to a free staged reading of Larry Wong’s new play, Empress of Asia, based on his original one act play: Siu Yeh – A Midnight Snack. The readings will take place at the Firehall Arts Centre at 280 East Cordova Street. From the Firehall Arts Centre:

“Can a young woman, born at the dawn of the 20th Century, find happiness with a husband true to the ways of the Qing Dynasty and 20 years her senior? Only after she endures two weeks in the Pig Pen, pays her $500 Head Tax on her arrival in Canada and satisfies his foot fetish.

The development of Empress of Asia has been supported through the Community Historical Recognition Program, Department of Citizenship and Immigration.

For more information, visit firehallartscentre.ca or call 604.689.0926

Read by: BC Lee, Minh Ly, Lissa Neptuno, Nelson Wong, Andrea Yu

Written by Larry Wong
Director & Dramaturg: Donna Spencer
Set and Video Consultant: Craig Alfredson
Lighting Consultant: Jamie Burns
Costume Consultant: Sabrina Evertt”

Larry is well-known in the Vancouver community for his involvement with the Chinese Canadian Military Museum, the Vancouver Historical Society and the Chinese Canadian Historical Society of B.C., for which he writes the informative column “Ask Larry” on their website. It’s very exciting to have a local expert write a play with Empress of Asia as the title, since it is such an important ship to the Chung Collection!

As mentioned above, the reading is free and open to the public- no advance tickets required. Definitely a great outing for Friday or Saturday night!

If you meant to register for the WCILCOS (World Confederation of Institutes and Libraries in Chinese Overseas Studies) conference here at UBC in May of this year but missed the deadline, there is good news: the deadline is extended until March 15. Past WCILCOS conferences “have been very successful in bringing librarians, institutes, and scholars in Chinese Overseas Studies together, not only in providing a platform for librarians to interact and exchange ideas with scholars and collectors, but also a platform for tackling issues in collection development, access, preservation, and information-sharing in the field of Chinese Overseas.”

You can check out the program here and registration information here.

Jeremy Lin is creating serious buzz in the sports world not only for being the first American of Chinese descent to play in the N.B.A., but for the inspiring Cinderella-esque story that has seen him go from sleeping on his brother’s couch to leading the New York Knicks to 7 straight victories.

While Chinese-Canadian athletic history is better known for soccer than basketball (read a description of Vancouver’s Chinese-Canadian soccer team on the Chinese Canadian Stories website) the Chung Collection does have one photograph of a Chinese-Canadian basketball team which won a championship in 1946:

We would love to learn more about this team, such as what league they played in, and whether this was their only victory! If you know something about this history and would like to share your knowledge with other Chung Collection researchers, please email us at chung.collection@ubc.ca, or leave a comment in the digital image.

To search for items in the Chung Collection related to Chinese-Canadian athletics, try searching for the subject heading “Athletes” with the keyword “Chinese.”

Modernize Tailors is a Vancouver institution, having been operating in Chinatown since 1913. The business and the two brothers who run it, Bill and Jack Wong, was recently featured on Global News:

Bill and Jack’s brother was the well-known Vancouver businessman and philanthropist Milton Wong, who passed away recently. Watch the Global News clip for the interesting story of their business, the building it is in, and why their brother Milton entered the professional world why they (both graduates of Engineering from UBC) kept up the family business.

The video above is embedded from the Global News website; the Modernize Tailors feature will play after a short advertisement.