Chinatown Working Group’s Written Submission Template For The OCPM Consultation On Montreal’s Chinatown
To EVERYONE in-or-out-of Montreal who wants to directly help preserve the city’s Chinatown—the last in the province—and contribute to the neighborhood’s future, Now Is Your Chance.
The city is has finally taken steps to consult the citizens—residents, local businesses, patrons—what they want for the district, starting with expanded heritage protection and a height/density limit to new structures so that buttdirt money-snorting low-lives/developers can’t sink it all in gentrification. I spent maybe 20 minutes on PG-ing the latter diss which is more time than it’d take for you to make your submission.
The city WILL actually listen and act, but it needs your say. There are things changing for the better, so now’s your chance to contribute to the course of multicultural prosperity. Also fudge bill 96 though that’s another thing.
Extra Existential Blog! portion:
I’ve been a volunteer of Chinatown Working Group since last autumn’s municipal elections. Montreal’s Chinatown is a neighborhood I’ve had an understandable attachment to my whole life, despite my feelings of displacement as someone who didn’t truly fit either as a Chinese or a Westerner. But as I grew up to understand that there is a unique perspective in my diaspora dual-culture experience, I also understood that my Chinese-and-by-extension-Asian identity isn’t defined by looking back on how much I failed to preserve my linguistic and cultural roots, but by how I ultimately choose to live out and cultivate what I do know and wish to know going forward.
“JIA 家: family / home”, as Jessica Chen deeply movingly put.
MTL Chinatown has been the only place that’s felt like existential haven for the parts of my identity I wish to cherish the most—the place where my Asian identity and values can feel most celebrated and at harmony with the otherwise Western world I navigate
But as Chen put so on point—it won’t make a difference if one small building is given protection if another high-rise will just be built next to it. Chinatown’s heritage protection needs to further cultivate a future that aesthetically, culturally, and soulfully reflects Chinatown’s historic legacy and what makes it unique.
Aight how about this, if 26 people directly/residually tell me they sent in their submission, I’ll force myself to publish an ODC trailer by next month. Any free time lately went to Tigerbelly and the Johnny Depp v Amber Heard trial. Very compelling.
OPEN DOOM CRESCENDO 