Chinatown Audio Tour
For the last several years, I have been leading semi-regular walking tours through the Montreal Chinatown. Depending on the group and my interests, it deals with themes of gentrification, immigration and labour discrimination, racism, and community-building.
The original tour was designed and researched by a group of Chinese Canadian youth around 2003. They called it The Chinatown Project. Their work included interviews with community members, as well as building contacts with many Chinese organisations.
I first ran the tour with my friend Zabrina Law, who is friends with one of the original members, James Yap. She has since left town, but I’ve continued adding new research to the tour document, and refining the presentation.
I was most fortunate to have Josie Caro of CKUT Radio record my latest outing with a group of McGill students. David Koch and I later edited the audio into an ‘Audio Tour’ which was posted to the McGill Daily’s media blog. You can download the podcast, load it onto your portable audio player, and go for a guided stroll through this historic Montreal neighbourhood.
Audio recorded by Josie Caro. Produced by David Koch and Trevor Chow Fraser.
Download (27 MB :: roughly half an hour).
Here’s a map to help guide your tour:
View The Chinatown Project in a larger map
Update: January 2013
To help mark the release of « Être chinois au Québec », the documentary film starring my friends Parker Mah and Bethany Or, I’m digging into my archives and finally putting my notes for the Chinatown Project online. I can’t believe I didn’t do this earlier, but I’m excited to see if the spotlight Bethany and Parker shine on Chinatown can help bring the tour back to life.
Hugh Grigg are discussing.
Hugh Grigg 11:26 on 23 December 2012 Permalink |
Thanks a lot for making this freely available online, really interesting stuff. I like these kinds of smaller-scale, local projects, and I think they’re perfectly suited to sharing on the Internet. I’m going to see if the Chinatowns near me have anything like this.
My life with radio « Trevor Chow-Fraser 20:39 on 4 January 2014 Permalink |
[…] kept finding a way into my life in other ways. My friend David Koch helped produce this audio tour of Montreal’s Chinatown. And after showing me how easy it is to work with the free, open source Audacity software, […]