on shopping and signage

Conversation between two of my students:

UBC Student: Hey, there's a banana on the ground!

UCLA Student: Yeah, that happens a lot.


A summation of my past two and a half days in LA:

Stores visited so far: Target (West Hollywood and Culver City), Albertsons (Palms and Marina Del Rey), Trader Joes (Palms), Ralphs (Westwood) and Costco (Marina Del Rey).

Number of Donut-Croissant shops seen so far: Too many to count. We even saw one that claimed to offer "Donuts-Croissants-Bagel" - and yes, that's Bagel in the singular. Henry says they're mostly run by Chinese-Cambodians. Reminds me of the Chinese Food-Hamburgers-Pizza-Fried Chicken-Subs spots we'd see in DC that were also mostly run by Chinese from some indiscriminate location in the diaspora.

Number of times my ethnicity has come into question: 2.

Highlight of the trip so far: telling a recently paroled inmate that I was just a tanned Swede rather than the Asian he'd assumed me to be.

Also, within walking/bussing distance of my apartment (in Mar Vista, about a mile from my friend Jill's house and just down Venice Boulevard from Venice Beach) are the following culinary establishments:

1) Tito's Tacos (at Washington / Sepulveda): tasty tacos, with a ridiculously long line-up even at 8:30pm on a Sunday evening
2) Mitsuwa (at Centinela / Venice): the former Yaohan supermarket
3) Zankou's Chicken (Sepulveda / Santa Monica) : rotisserie chicken, accompanied by what my prof's partner Brandy calls "garlic lard"
4) Versailles (Venice / Motor): best Cuban restaurant in town. Named as such because the space formerly housed a French restaurant, and the Cuban owner-operators never bothered to change the signage.
5) Cafe Brasil (somewhere along Venice, just west of Versailles):
6) Howard's Famous Avocado and Bacon Burgers (also along Venice)
7) Empanada's Place (Venice / Sawtelle): empanadas filled with every imaginable filling, only 2 blocks from my apartment
7) Guelaguetza (Sepulveda / Palms): a Oaxacan Mexican restaurant, serving incredible mole (according to my prof, Henry) and also acting as a remittance service and community centre for the Oaxacan community in LA.

luggage has arrived!

21 hours after my flight lands in LA, my luggage decides to show up.

Jenn is going to go shower now.

arriving in LA

A quick and dirty post, because I'm too tired to pontificate:

1) I managed to make my 11am flight with 2 minutes to spare, due to my leaving my passport at home and a horrendously long line-up through Customs. My bags, however, decided that they weren't quite ready to leave Vancouver until the 5pm flight. It is 11:57pm and I am still waiting for them to arrive at my apartment.

2) There are very few trees in LA.

3) There is a Fatburger 2 blocks away from my apartment

4) Upon arrival at LAX, I was asked by a Filipino baggage handler if I was Japanese.

5) There is always traffic on the 405, even (especially?) at 8:30pm on a Friday night.

6) The Peking Duck Pizza at California Pizza Kitchen is not quite as tasty as the ones I remember ingesting in my youth.

Will post more tomorrow, after I drive Jessica to her film shoot at USC and I get a decent amount of sleep.

off to the market!

From these two photos, you never would've guessed that the Richmond Night Market started out as a predominantly Chinese-oriented commercial endeavour.


Forget self-tanner, or exotic culinary experiences! Now you can buy your "ethnicity" at the Richmond Night Market!

Ahhhh....gotta love consumer capitalism.




And one day, we'll photoshop Rosalyn into this group. :-)

Holy gentrification!

strathconahouse-2
Originally uploaded by UCLA UBC Summer Course 2005.

This is a 4-plex on Union St in Strathcona. One of the units - 511 Union St - is selling for $489,900. Unreal - for a historically low-income immigrant neighbourhood, I find it hard to believe that one renovated heritage house could go for $2 million total.

At this rate, even yuppie scum like myself aren't going to be able to afford Strathcona.

off-topic: photography

I love taking photos of kids.

wiki me this, wiki me that

While driving my partner to the airport at the godforsaken hour of 6am (he works for the UBC Registrar's Office, and goes up to UBC Okanagan every now and then for meetings), we came across the prettiest view of Mount Baker.

Didn't have my camera with me, but here's the closest approximation I could find on Google.


In other news:

Came across the Wikipedia entry for "Chinese Canadian" last night. Even more fascinating was the discussion. If you've never encountered Wikipedia, "it's a free-content encyclopedia, written collaboratively by people from around the world". Plain English: it's an online encyclopedia that everyone with an internet connection can edit, discuss and participate in. The Chinese Canadian entry has only been around since July 2003 (check out the history) and over 500 people have contributed to the page so far.

So if one of us wanted to edit the Chinese Canadian entry, you could go right ahead (heck, you're probably better informed than most of the people currently editing...). Or perhaps you'd like to edit the Richmond entry. Or the UCLA entry. Or the bubble tea entry.

Speaking of which, here's my favourite piece of trivia from the bubble tea entry:

"In September 2004, defending a US$18 billion weapon purchase plan, the ROC Ministry of National Defense used bubble tea as an example of the overall cost of the proposed purchase. The Ministry stated that the total cost of the weapons systems would be equivalent to the money saved if all Taiwanese drank one less pearl milk tea per week for a period of twenty years."

food and foodies

In her blog, Joyce mentioned the review that the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority does each year of restaurants in the area. Here is the list in all its rat-infested glory. Don't say we didn't warn you!

A friend recommended LA.foodblogging: a collective blog about Los Angeles food, by Los Angeles eaters. Some well-written blogs, and interesting reviews of Chinese restaurants in LA. I laughed when I read about the Empress Pavillion running out of dim sum - who knew such a thing could occur???

Here's the Vancouver equivalent at egullet, with a corresponding link to their Chinese restaurants in Vancouver discussion.

And to finish off, a food-related article from the Atlantic Monthly on the impact of Chinese migration on San Gabriel Valley and Monterey Park.

Jenn likes her food! :-)

returning to richmond

I suppose it's only "returning to Richmond" if you've been there before - or if like me, you grew up there.

Like Rosalyn, I can remember the rolling farmlands of Richmond (i.e. the ALR, or Agricultural Land Reserve). There was a great farmers' market on Steveston Highway, across the street from my piano teacher's neighbourhood. Many a piano lesson ended with my mom and I buying bok choy from the proprietors...

I also remember arriving in Richmond at Diefenbaker Elementary for grade 1 to find that I was one of 3 non-white kids. This, after my first 5 years of life in Coquitlam, where I was one of 5 non-white kids in my kindergarten class. I believe I was unimpressed when my 1st grade teacher tried to have me placed in the ESL stream upon her first sighting - this after being told that I was reading (English, that is) far above my grade level in kindergarten!

How things have changed.

So we wandered around this "new Chinatown" for a few hours today. Joyce has quite the detailed account of our day.

(I've started to post my photos at Henry's group Flickr page, since I've reached my upload limit for the month).

Learned all about negligence and tort law from Leon Lam at Pacific Plaza. Here's a taste of his legal difficulties.

In other legal news, the bootleg guy at Admiralty Centre was arrested last night.

Rosalyn theorizes about the significance of Richmond.

Yesterday's Vancouver Vocabulary: Counterflow

stuck in the elevator!

stuck in the elevator!
Originally uploaded by Jennlau.

Of all the places to end up today - who would've thought we'd end up stuck in the elevator at the Asian Library with the Head Librarian?!?

Suzanne, Raymond, Vicki and I were having a rather lovely tour of the Asian Library with Eleanor Yuen, the head librarian, when she decided to take us from 2nd floor to the basement via the elevator.

Maybe it was a bad sign that we were only going 2 floors via elevator. In any event, we descended - and waited for the doors to open

and waited

and waited...

By this point, I was seriously wondering whether Eleanor was just punishing us for not reading Chinese.

In any event, here's the view from the elevator after Plant Ops finally pried the door open. Eleanor is the stylish woman standing slightly to the left, having been the first one to escape.

Best of all was the disdain the campus cowboy expressed when I took too long to capture the moment...

off-topic: free culture, free history

This has nothing to do with Chinese migration, but where would historians be without open access to archives and documents? So let me introduce you to the Free Culture Movement (that's "free" as in free speech, and not free bzzr).

Let's start off with Lawrence Lessig. Professor Lessig is my idol. His baby, Creative Commons, is a super-nifty organization that offers creators a "some rights reserved" model - thus letting other creative types continue to "rip, mix & burn" their way to a world filled with culture.

(Sidenote: Lessig isn't just an IP law geek. He also takes the time to stand up for the other causes he believes in.)

Also, maybe we should take advantage of the free storage/sharing at OurMedia for this program's projects.

city of glass

Kits Beach
Originally uploaded by Jennlau.

Where, oh, where has the summer sunshine gone?!?

Highlights so far:

1. Kicked off the Chinese Migration summer course last night with a rousing meal at Hon's Wun Tun House. I must say, Hon's makes some damn tasty potstickers.
2. Drove recklessly through Kits, trying to avoid the Tall Ships crowds
   
3. Discovered a whole new set of Vancouver vocabulary upon conversing with the 3 American students:

• Grow-op
• Vancouver Special
• Smarties
• Toque/Tuque (damn that French-Canadian spelling!)