Once every four years, television news cameras are dispatched to Commercial Drive to catch sight of dear old Italian men wearing pants up to their nipples and very dear young Brazilian women wearing bikinis down around their hips, all in order to corroborate the widespread rumours of a thriving multiculturalism that breaks out in this beguiling corner of the city during the quadrennial World Cup soccer tournament.
Multiculturalism thus becomes yet another topic of derisive comments and acidic sneers up and down the very same fabled street, because anything that becomes safe enough for corporate media to celebrate for the docile masses out there in Flatland, all aglow in the cold blue light of their droning TVs, can no longer be anything for us sophisticates to celebrate here. Like so many other elements that make this street special to the point of being sacred, those living in it are driven to deride it the most harshly, if only because to celebrate it looks and sounds too much like the TV news that ironically is trying to imitate us.
Our multiculturalism, which took decades to naturally evolve by the wind, rain and tidal wash of countless people compelled to move up and through the neighbourhood, has been seized by the cold dead hand of corporatism and squeezed to feed the blind and starving Living Dead out there. But lets not allow the vultures to do the killing; there really is a beautiful, unique, and fascinating interbreeding of art and culture going on in apartments, back rooms, shops, industries and out on the sidewalks all around here resulting from rich streams of new cultures washing over and through these street the last couple of decades. One may count on less than two hands neighbourhoods in the world as rich with cross-pollination as this one has become.
Take, for example, the ethnic restaurants of Commercial Drive. In one single mile of this street between Grandview and Venables, there are 95 places to sit and eat and drink. Among them, there are 24 different nationalities announced on awnings above them, nationalities representing all six inhabited continents of the world with combined populations amounting to 60% of global humanity. That is to say, chances are three out of five that anyone from anywhere in the world can come to this one mile of Commercial Drive—the real Red Mile—and find a restaurant serving their home cuisine. Even every sub-region of the world is represented here: Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the Pacific are all present and accounted for.
The more amazing fact is economic: of the 95 places with seats and service, only three are corporate chains. The rest are independent small businesses, and judging by how long they’ve been here, most of them are more or less thriving.
Ranging in size from a low of two seats to as many as a hundred seats or more, the average size place has around 30 seats. With an average of seven restaurants or cafes per block along this stretch of Commercial Drive, that makes for over 200 seats per block, and about 3,000 seats in total, where anything from Greek to Jamaican to Moroccan to Turkish to Ethiopian to Brazilian, and just about everything in between, can be ordered, and is ordered, at the rate of perhaps 10,000 orders a day.
Given the generally adventurous and tolerant population surrounding Commercial Drive, it is hard to imagine anyone coming here to set up a restaurant serving quality food from their home cuisine from anywhere in the world, and not succeeding. By comparison, it is downright weird to find a Japanese restaurant anywhere in the famed culinary city of Bologna, and it is impossible to find a Lebanese restaurant anywhere in the biggest city in the world, Tokyo, with a population greater than all of Canada’s. Think there’s a Brazilian restaurant in all of Paris? Not according to any online dining guides there isn’t. Even all of New York, so-called City of the World, lacks for what can be found on Commercial Drive’s Red Mile: authentic French-Canadian poutine.
This is not just a promotional brochure for dining on Commercial Drive. The existence of such an extraordinary range of ethnic restaurants, the sheer number of them, and the general success they enjoy with customers, all packed into this one mile, tells us the arts, culture, and politics of this street is also drawing from 24 or more different national experiences spanning the six continents of the globe. Inside and at sidewalk tables outside the socially congenial meeting places of all these restaurants and cafes, ideas, conceptions, feelings and ambitions described in at least 16 languages and who knows how many dialects are being exchanged in hundreds of thousands of instances each month, all in this exquisitely alive mile. What paintings, novels, scripts, screenplays, histories, dances, costumes, photographs, and political notions have been germinated, fertilized, and hatched in the busy, buzzing milieu of Commercial Drive’s Red Mile?
And we haven’t even begun to consider what additional hybrids of thought occur when Rolls Royces are parked where toothless men scan for discarded cigarette butts, while a middle class, taking in the afternoon sun at the café tables, pauses in conversation to absorb the visual discord. The range of economic classes in this mile matches the range of ethnic representations like probably no other street in this country.
Then there’s the type of work we do here. At the café where I drink most often, in any single hour, it would not be untypical to see a pair of police officers, a teacher, a house painter, a documentary filmmaker, a construction labourer, a car mechanic, a group of fire fighters, a homeless and unemployed man, a college instructor, a corporate CEO, a real estate baron, a hooker, a finish carpenter, a famous painter, and a novelist order up coffees one after the other.
Without batting an eye, all these people can be sitting in or outside the window onto Commercial Drive and watch pass by, in that same hour, a man wearing a fishing net for a suit, another wearing (honest to God) a colander on his head, another who walks back and forth all day minus one more article of clothing till he’s down to his underpants and socks, another with white patent leather shoes and the widest-breasted brown suit and orange tie you ever saw, another in the most expensive Armani suit worn in Vancouver, another dressed totally in black and throwing up a cloud of dust around him just like Pig Pen did, and yet another, an aging strong-man straight out of the circus, who wears no shirt at all and has not been known to say a word to anyone.
There are no doubt more babies in strollers going by than on any other street around, plus there are pretty gaggles of high school girls, gangs of menacing high school boys, heaps of 20-somethings from all over the country, too many in their 30s and 40s with mortgages and cars on their minds, a surprising number of people in their 50s and 60s more outgoing than the 20 year olds in any other place, and an endless stream of seniors, retirees and elders, some with oxygen tubes up their noses, others in battery-powered wheelchairs or pushing walkers slowly up the sidewalk.
And yet, amidst all this wild chaos of cultures, languages, economic stations, occupations, sartorial statements and all those ages, it is so rare for any conflict to erupt that when someone does raise their voice, everyone stops and turns to see the drama. There is plenty of crime here, lots of shoplifting, fencing, drug dealing, loan sharking, beatings, swarmings and robberies. I was stunned only a few months ago to see an elderly friend being dragged up the street at high speed as he hung, with a terrorized expression on his face, to the open door of his car that had just been carjacked by a manically grinning man; the grocer across the street came tumbling out his door in a massive punch up with some repeat thief just last week; the café across the way was closed for three months for fencing just too many stolen articles; the bank at the corner seems closed weekly for police investigations following yet another armed robbery; and the crack sellers who come out at night scare away the usual pot dealers. This is no Disney-planned Celebration City, Florida. The poverty, desperation, drug addiction, alienation, violence, pain, and sorrow is all real and out front here, too, trudging up the street cheek-by-jowl with all the wealth, happiness, fulfillment and joy that is in equal abundance.
What it is that both scares and fascinates the television news cameras, the people at home watching on TV, and the adventuresome types who come out to visit Commercial Drive, is not any one of these elements, or the mixing up of the cultures and languages, economic classes, occupations and political outlooks, for it is really in essence no different from anywhere else in the country in all that. Rather it’s the volume to which all these things are turned up. It’s as though someone has walked into a room playing Muzak quietly and twisted every knob in sight as far clockwise as it will go. Everything you can slightly glimpse and quietly sense elsewhere in this city and country is, along this magic Red Mile of Commercial Drive, blindingly bright and blaringly loud. It’s the difference between the kiddie swing ride and the massive wooden roller coaster at the PNE; it’s the difference between Anne Murray singing Snowbird and Alanis Morissette singing You Oughta Know: they’re both catchy tunes about love and betrayal, but one sets the spine ashudder and the other does not.
That’s how I feel sometimes when I look up from my newspaper sitting at my café: I look up and down this beguiling street and I get that feeling I’d get if I’d had You Oughta Know up loud on my iPod just when I’m cresting the precipice of the huge wooden roller coaster. That’s the kind of street this is all the time between World Cups, and that’s what the television news cameras can never, and will never, show.
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