Vancouver is a famously multicultural city. Or should I say that Vancouver is a multicultural city that wishes it was famous? At least Mayor Moonbeam no longer uses, in public anyway, that useless moniker "World Class" in order to describe our lovely dumb blonde of a city. Everyone wants to live here, it seems, and we have an incredible diversity of languages spoken in Vancouver to prove it. These are the languages that I have so far identified in my sixty years of residence:
English, French, Cantonese, Mandarin, Punjabi, Tagalog, Hindi, Guajarati, Urdu, Farsi, Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Italian, Greek, Turkish, Tamil, Russian, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, Serbo-Croat, Albanian, Macedonian, Swahili, Romanian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Thai, Burmese, Kurdish, Mongolian, Uyghur, Nepalese, Catalan, Welsh Gaelic, Danish, Bengali, Hebrew, Basque, Klingon, and Tolkien Elvish...
To name but a few, along with any of the surviving aboriginal languages...
It is also extraordinarily easy to learn a foreign language in this city, given the many rich resources that our ethnically diverse immigrants bring with them. I have become fluent in Spanish without having to take any university courses or having to live in a Hispanic country. One can take the Skytrain from Surrey to downtown Vancouver and hear any number or combination of the aforementioned or other languages. It would be like living in the United Nations, only more nations than united, I would say.
One Colombian student mentioned to me that he finds the people in Vancouver to be rather cold, standoffish, and preoccupied, especially given how many distinct languages are spoken in this city. I replied that this could be because there is still nothing really cohesive that binds people together here, since Vancouver is a city that is both multicultural and immigrant.
I have previously mentioned that culture is often differentiated by substantially more than ethnicity. For example, we have here what could be called hipster culture, or self-consciously hip people younger than forty who like to wear ugly beards and funny glasses and poorly fitted toques in hot weather and tend to congregate in the same coffee shops and bars. There are a number of them taking over and gentrifying the Downtown Eastside where they are opening their own hipster hangouts that none of the local poor can afford to patronize, They have also spilled over into Chinatown where they are doing the same thing, the only Chinese people who would be caught dead or alive in these establishments were born in Canada themselves, otherwise, the hipster clientel, as well as the hipster entrepreneurs are almost all disturbingly Caucasian.
I think that what really divides people in this city has very little to do with ethnic differences and a lot to do with monetary social class. Throughout the streets and on transit it is very rare for strangers to interact, especially with the plethora of high tech toys and listening devices that keep everyone distracted and isolated. Everyone seems in an awful hurry these days to work and qualify their little hienies off as they march to the music of hell, also known as the drumbeat of global capitalism. No one has time for anyone else these days apart from their own little tribe and professional network. This seems to be making a terrifying prophesy out of Margaret Thatcher`s saying that there is no such thing as society, just individuals and their families.
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