Capturing history before it disappears: Vancouver author and illustrator celebrates the Chinatown of her childhood in a new book
Posted May 25, 2025 12:44 pm.
Last Updated May 25, 2025 12:48 pm.
Once a bustling commercial hub in the 1960s and 70s, the gradual decline of Vancouver’s Chinatown neighbourhood started in the 1980s and 90s. In recent years, that decline has been compounded by concerns about public safety and gentrification. Reports of violence because of Chinatown’s proximity to the Downtown Eastside have also discouraged visits to the area. This all came to a head during the COVID-19 pandemic, when anti-Asian racism increased by 717 per cent.
What also happened during the pandemic was the start of a personal art and research project that evolved into Chinatown Vancouver: An Illustrated History. It’s a remarkable new book that is both a remembrance of Chinatown’s past and a symbol of hope for its future.
“It’s a place worth going to, it’s a place worth honouring, but also it’s a place worth saving,” said author Donna Seto.
Born to working-class Chinese immigrants in the early 1980s, Seto’s first memories of Chinatown were accompanying her parents as they bought groceries, ate dim sum, purchased newspapers, and visited her grandma.
The self-described “writer, self-taught artist, and occasional academic” says the pandemic allowed her to revisit a long-dormant passion for her art. The book started with her picking up an old sketchbook and drawing a building.
“I never thought it would become a book. It was just a hobby,” she said.
Seto started photographing buildings in the neighbourhood in 2021. That led to a painting, and then another, and another. Then she started sharing the images on social media.
“People started to send me these little snippets about their experiences, about Chinatown and these buildings and these businesses, and what they remember.”
“And you realize they’re more than just buildings, and they’re more than just businesses. There is a lot of life there too,” she said.
“Place is more than just a physical dot on a map or a collection of buildings,” Seto writes. “It provides us with an emotional link to our identities while also connecting us with culture.”
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It wasn’t long before a publisher came calling.
“So, in mid-2022, the House of Anansi reached out to me and said, ‘Hey, we love your paintings.’ So, they really sparked this idea and pushed this project forward,” she said.
“Eventually it evolved into quite a long book; it’s almost 300 pages, and it goes into quite an in-depth history about not just Chinatown Vancouver, but the Chinese in Canada.”
Seto shows that Vancouver’s Chinatown is the story of the Chinese in Canada in microcosm. Early on, Chinese people weren’t allowed to work in many professions, so they had to be entrepreneurs to survive. Many started businesses, like restaurants, to make money. Chinatown had become a self-sufficient community for early Chinese settlers, many of them bachelors who worked to send money back home. Once the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act was lifted in 1947, many families were reunited, and the mix of businesses in the neighbourhood became more food and entertainment focused.
By the 1960s and 70s, Chinatown was a bustling commercial hub. A group of Chinatown residents had successfully fought against efforts for a highway to be built through the neighbourhood, and by 1971, Chinatown was designated a national historic site. But by the 1980s and 90s, shifting priorities among the Chinese community and evolving migration patterns introduced a new group of middle-class and business immigrants who didn’t necessarily identify with the old Chinatown. Instead, they flocked to Richmond and other suburbs.
One of the first buildings Seto painted was 23 East Pender, the former flagship location of Ming Wo Cookware. An early casualty of the pandemic, Ming Wo had been the oldest retail store in Chinatown and one of the oldest businesses in Vancouver.
“The fact that they chose to close that store and not the other stores in Vancouver, it really signified changes in Chinatown and the needs of Chinatown. Also, that sparked this idea that a book is necessary, in that sense, to kind of capture this history before it disappears,” she said.
It’s that sense of capturing history before it disappears that informs the entire book. Seto combines around 70 illustrations with elements of personal memoir, local history, as well as an A-to-Z narrative of the Chinese Canadian experience in a slim, easy-to-read volume.
The result is an eye-opening experience for both the reader and the author.
“Until recently, the history of the Chinese in Canada has existed [only] in the margins,” she writes.
“It’s been an interesting process, because growing up, I never saw myself in mainstream media, and when I was studying history and politics at university, I never saw people like me in the books I read. I never read about people like me. So, through this project, I learned a lot about my heritage,” she said.
In one essay, Seto explains how today’s Chinatown is like a red balloon she had as a child: temporary and fragile. While the fate of the neighbourhood remains to be seen, this book makes the case that Chinatown is indeed a place worth saving — and celebrating.
She sees the book as the start of a broader conversation.
“We also need to see and welcome more voices and hear more stories. And so, this book is just a beginning, and it’s there for people to start having these conversations and for other people to build on them,” she said.
Chinatown Vancouver: An Illustrated History is published by House of Anansi Press.
