Detail from Chinatown Vancouver: An Illustrated History by Donna Seto. Clockwise from top left: Wing Sang Building, Mah Society Building/Jade Dynasty Restaurant, Marco Polo Supper Club, Chinese Freemasons and Dart Coon Club, and Wing Sang Building. (House of Anansi Press)

When she headed onto the streets of Vancouver’s Chinatown in June 2021 with her camera, Donna Seto was taking a moment during the pandemic to look at an often-visited neighbourhood of her childhood from a different perspective. 

With the streets emptier than she remembered them being in the 90s – both because of COVID-related slowdowns in foot traffic and a longer-term decline spurred by gentrification and changing demographics – she found herself looking more closely at the buildings, noticing for the first time their architectural details and realizing their unique nature. 

Seto, an academic researcher and political scientist who had always loved art but didn’t pursue it beyond high school, began working on watercolour paintings of the buildings she’d photographed and posting them to her social media feeds and website.

“I had all this free time, and it was a way for me to kind of ignore the world but also look at the world in a different way,” Seto says of her decision to start painting Chinatown’s buildings. 

She certainly didn’t have an extensively researched, handpainted, book-length history of the neighbourhood in mind. 

But her brightly hued work, presenting the buildings not necessarily as they appear now but as they once were and could be again, resonated with many. People commented on her images, sending her messages about their own memories of the buildings and the businesses that populated them over the years. 

“All these stories were really inspiring. I didn’t realize how much people love Chinatown, and how much they also loved what it was,” Seto says, speaking by phone from her home in Vancouver the week before Chinatown Vancouver: An Illustrated History was released. 

Vancouver-based House of Anansi Press editor Shirarose Wilensky spotted the images online and got in touch with their creator, curious to see whether this series of paintings could be turned into a book. 

This is where Seto’s professional background came into play. The self-taught artist is a researcher by training, and she and Wilensky developed the idea to build the paintings into an illustrated book, with text also by Seto, that would tell the history of the neighbourhood. 

The result is a 260-page book with illustrations by Seto of 64 buildings – and additional spot illustrations of common Asian groceries, dim sum dishes, and pastries. (The cover illustration, including the title font, is also Seto’s work, as is her own artist illustration.) In addition, Seto sourced archival photographs of the buildings to help illustrate their stories over time. 

The buildings are grouped thematically in five chapters that examine different aspects of the neighbourhood’s story, from its earliest days in the late 19th century to its cultural societies, restaurants, food ecosystem, and more. 

Seto read extensively to research the book, from news articles about Chinatown businesses over the decades to historical records of particular buildings, and books by writers such as Paul Yee and Wayson Choy. She also interviewed members of the community, including descendants of some of its earliest entrepreneurs, such as Yip Sang, who established the Wing Sang Company, an import-export business that operated out of the Wing Sang Building, built in 1889, which now houses the Chinese Canadian Museum. 

“People in Chinatown have so many stories to tell, but they’ve never been given the ability to actually tell the story,” Seto says. “They are mostly shopkeepers and entrepreneurs, so they’re not used to thinking that their story is valid for history. It was a matter of convincing them that their stories are valuable. This is a story of everyday people.”

By telling the story of the neighbourhood, Seto also tells the story of Chinese immigrants to Canada. The book includes a timeline of historical events in both China and Canada that begins in 1757, when Guangzhou became a major trading port, “fostering the growth of trade-savvy migrants,” as Seto writes, to 2006, when the Canadian government formally apologized for the Chinese head tax and the 1923 Chinese Immigration Act known as the Chinese Exclusion Act. The neighbourhood’s history is an important part of the larger history of Vancouver and Canada, even if that has not always been apparent.

Seto, who holds a PhD in politics and international relations, remembers reading about the Chinese-Canadian experience in university history textbooks – in the odd paragraph about building the railway.

“I didn’t see myself in history; I didn’t see that people like me contributed to anything, but when you look at these individual histories, you realize that people did so much,” Seto says. “Even though they’re everyday things, they had ripple effects in the community and in Vancouver.”