英文摘要 |
Located in the City of Victoria, Canada, Victoria’s Chinatown is one of the oldest Chinatowns in North America. Its history is as old as the colonial history of the Canadian West. It was also the one of the most important immigrant gateways in Canada. It is worth paying special attention to how this Chinatown erected several arches for different purposes for five times over the past 150 years since the Chinatown has been established. The Gate of Harmonious Interest, erected in 1981, is the first permanent Chinatown arch in Canada. Therefore, this paper aims to examine the architecture, the landscape, and the erection of the arches in Victoria’s Chinatown. Based on primary and literature research, especially the works of Professor David Chuenyan Lai, this study discusses the dynamic relationships between the arches, the type of buildings and the area of the immigrant community, and it addresses the concept of production of space in order to illustrate how the Chinatown arches, one of the most significant figures in Chinatowns, shape the community landscape and the sense of place in North America. This article proposes that along with the Chinese arches being erected within their community over and over again, transnational politics and contested identity competition have been fading out. Instead, the Chinese immigrants chose the authenticity of the diaspora to serve the needs and cultural identity of the local community. The spatial practice and the process of representation of an ethnic enclave, the sociocultural adaptation, and the change of its area can also be clearly observed. |