Impressions of Victoria, 2021

July 11, 2021. Sunny. Today I took a whirlwind day tour of Victoria. The city’s Chinatown is well worth visiting. One look at the design of this parking meter, and I knew I was in Chinatown—I hadn’t taken a wrong turn.

There are plenty of Chinese touches here: red lanterns, red-brick walls…

Chinese red…

The red-brick walls make a fine backdrop for photos… This guy was certainly going all out to get his shot of the narrow, red-walled alley.

Victoria’s Chinatown is the cleanest and best planned I have ever seen—and also the most commercialized.

Plenty of Chinese-style merchandise… As for the quality, you could probably scoop up armfuls of the same stuff at the Yiwu wholesale market…

I suspect foreign visitors are more taken with it… (Or, to put it another way, more easily taken in…)

Chinese tourists, meanwhile, would rather retreat to the shade, sip coffee, and scroll through WeChat…

The pandemic has forced quite a few businesses to close as well…

A new world?

A few minutes’ walk from Chinatown is Market Square. Built in 1975, it is an elegant setting filled with restaurants, local boutiques, antique shops, and creative workshops where visitors can learn to make handicrafts.

This appears to be a student exercise on display. Look closely, and you will see that the work takes gender confusion as its subject.

There are all sorts of locally designed gifts here. What are the themes, I wonder? Beautiful women and old men? Things that make you happy every day?

Gender has become one of the major issues of our time. This artist must be a feminist: male cartoon characters have all been reimagined as women—Superwoman, for instance—as a challenge to male dominance in public discourse… What would a future society of blurred gender distinctions look like?

…one big tangle…

WoW……

After leaving Market Square, we took a stroll through downtown.

Then we headed to our next stop: Victoria’s Fisherman’s Wharf.

Compared with other fisherman’s wharves, Victoria’s is fairly small. But it is bright and colorful, and not a bad place for a few photos.

One feature of the wharf—or perhaps one drawback—is that there is not much shade. The sun is fierce.

For the final stop of the day, we came to the British Columbia Parliament Buildings. Nearby are popular photo spots such as the hotel where the Queen once stayed, but what caught my eye was the installation art on the steps of the legislature.

The steps were covered with stuffed animals, children’s shoes, socks and clothing, and crosses, commemorating the remains of more than a thousand unidentified children found this year near the sites of several former Indigenous residential schools across Canada. These schools were established by the Catholic Church on behalf of an earlier Canadian government, ostensibly to improve the education of Indigenous children. They went on to become a dark chapter in history and a nightmare for the children sent there. Stories of abuse were rife. The unidentified remains discovered at several former school sites this year offered further confirmation of that shameful history.

The number 215 on the shirt presumably refers to the remains found in the most recent discovery, while the orange, perhaps evoking the color of prison uniforms, serves as a symbol. These discoveries have prompted an enormous public response in recent weeks and many commemorative events. They have also escalated into unrest, including damage to public property. It remains to be seen how events will unfold.

Just as Chinatown can become overly commercialized, gender issues and the residential-school revelations can become overly politicized.

Take anything too far, and its character begins to change…

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