Beyond the Rhetoric

For most intents and purposes, you could say that Vancouver has an embarrassment of riches when it comes to restaurants. As such, we simply cannot and will not tolerate sub-par food, nor will we put up with sub-par service. But that is exactly what I experienced over the weekend at a relatively new Chinese restaurant [...]

Many of us are inclined to call it Chinese New Year, but it’s really more appropriate to call it Lunar New Year. After all, several other cultures aside from Chinese celebrate it. I’ve always grown up romanizing the phrase as Gung Hay Fat Choy, but you might see it elsewhere written as Kung Hei Fat [...]

There’s a lot of food in Richmond, mostly of the Asian variety. Over the weekend, I made my way over to Aberdeen Centre to give Aoyama Cafe a try. It’s clearly Chinese, but they’re going for a Japanese-inspired menu that combines with a coffee house-like environment. In fact, you’ll see UCC Coffee featured prominently. Located [...]

The loving father often told his daughter: “The first generation plants the tree; the next generation enjoys the shade.” A couple of months back, you might remember me mentioning The Year of Finding Memory by Judy Fong Bates. The memoir recounts her journey back to her ancestral village in China, some fifty years since she [...]

The Chinese culture and population in Vancouver wasn’t always the way it is today. When most people think of Chinatown, they see the iconic arch-shaped gate that is located in the western part of the area, but that’s not the Chinatown that I remember from my childhood. For me, the picture above more closely resembles [...]