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Bing Thom: He lives on for many people in this city every day

October 25th, 2016 · 3 Comments

I was in a classroom yesterday morning where yet another person, one of a series I’ve heard in the last week, talked about how important architect Bing Thom was to Vancouver.

Alden Habacon, UBC’s senior advisor on intercultural understanding, told the roomful of young people that Bing was the first person to say that Vancouver was essentially an Asian city, something that earned him a lot of negative backlash.

Others I’ve talked to in the past two weeks since the shocking news of Bing’s death came out have mentioned their own last encounters with him: a meeting where he was working with others to preserve and revitalize Chinatown or the lunch at his invitation because he wanted to talk about how academics could get involved in leading difficult conversations about Vancouver’s future.

All of that drove home what I noticed in the first few days, which was the way that Bing was loved by so many different people in Vancouver, people who sometimes aren’t even on speaking terms with each other in this fractious city, people who are bitterly divided on this issue or that issue. But Bing was somehow above that.

My colleagues Adele Weder and John Mackie did lovely tributes to Bing, detailing his graceful buildings (some built, others not) and his strong sense of social responsibility.

But, for many people, Bing’s impact was through his quiet conversations.

That was the case for me. Although I wrote stories about his graceful Sunset community centre, his innovative Surrey public library, his ideas about how to create community in a condo tower on Nelson, his campaign to keep the Vancouver Art Gallery in its present location, it was the non-news talks we had that stick with me.

The last one was in April. Bing called me — somewhat unusual — saying he had something he wanted to talk about.

It took a while to arrange an afternoon coffee because he was always busy, as usual. (Like many, I was surprised to hear he was 75 when he died of the brain aneurysm in Hong Kong because he seemed so youthful and active. He was well-known among Kits residents for his frequent swims at Kits Pool, which he walked to in his brown bathrobe from his house nearby.) When I went down to his office to meet him, he was just coming out of a meeting with a group of Asian investors.

We walked down to a cafe close to his office next to the Burrard Bridge, a place on the seawall.

There was a parade of people walking past. Bing, ever observant, looked at them going by and commented, “Look here, those are all young people. They are service workers who have the middle of the day to walk around. We may have to face the fact that we are a resort city. There is this generation that exists in this resort word. It’s amazing how many young people have no permanent jobs here, the game workers and film workers.”

That was so Bing, extrapolating a big observation about Vancouver by watching people strolling along in the middle of the day.

But that wasn’t why he had called.

He was worried about the anti-Chinese feelings that he saw coming to a boil in Vancouver.

He told me an anecdote that I later used in a story I was already working on, about mainland Chinese immigrants. He was in his car near his house on Point Grey Road when he got to a stop sign and there was some confusion between him and another driver about who should go first. The other man got upset and yelled at Bing, “You should go back to where you came from.”

“It’s the first time in 40 or 50 years where I’ve had this kind of encounter,” Bing said in his usual quiet, what-does-this-mean way. Bing had other friends, long-time Canadians like him, who’d experienced similar incidents.

It was worrying him. And this from a man who has not shied away from raising the alarm about the impact of investor money and global capital on Vancouver. It was Bing who first talked, in the early 2000s, about the danger of Vancouver turning into a resort city.

But, he said, things had gone too far. People were focusing on race now, or whether someone was from mainland China, not the real issue, which is global capital.

He was dismayed at some of the reporting he was seeing. One was a New York Times story that focused on the Lamborghini-driving fuerdai kids of Vancouver. “It’s so myopic, so transparently sensational.”

He didn’t deny that Vancouver is being shaped by global capital. But, he emphasized, it’s one that every major city has.

We talked a lot more, sitting in the afternoon sunshine. He told the story, again, of how his grandfather was the first in the family to come here, but his father, who got a pharmacy degree at a California university, went back to Hong Kong in disgust when he discovered that he couldn’t get a job anywhere in Vancouver because he was Chinese. Bing’s mother eventually moved back to Vancouver with the children, but his father refused to join them. “I think my family was the original astronaut family,” he joked.

I had already started talking to mainland Chinese families for a big feature I was working on (published later that year, in August) and he was curious about that. He had his own stories about some of the changes happening because of the mainland Chinese wave of immigration.

He talked about a terrific new restaurant in the city run by a woman from northern China. But only people from northern China were going to it at that point.

He told a story about how new immigrants do things that Canadians see as unacceptable, but those immigrants don’t even know it’s unacceptable.

He knew of a local family that had sold a house to a new immigrant family from China.

Then the new family couldn’t close right away, so they asked if they could rent. Then the new family started ripping out the kitchen in the house and moving it to the garage. Then they sublet the house to someone else. When the seller family found out about all this, they were horrified. Bing pondered that, musing aloud about how the family from China saw what they were doing as completely reasonable.

“Under the Chinese system, everything was state-controlled. And then there was private life. They were very separate. But here there’s mutual supervision. Everybody is in the middle ground between state and private.” This is a society that operates on a system of informal civil control, which people from Communist China aren’t used to.

It was so like him to take one story he heard from a friend and then start thinking aloud about how Canadian society operates compared to Chinese society. And then to share that on a sunny afternoon with a reporter, as part of his mission to be a bridge and translator for Vancouver’s many different groups.

I’ll miss all the buildings that he’ll never build now. But I’ll miss those conversations, where he would look at young workers strolling by in the sunshine or tell a story about a new immigrant family and then think aloud about what that all meant, even more.

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