A rather Vancouver moment.
Today we took one of my Chinese students, a teenager from Beijing, to the Crystal Mall in Vancouver, B.C. for lunch and shopping. On the way home we were listening to Vancouver’s mostly-Chinese radio station, 96.1 FM, when a little English lesson segment came on introducing “The jig is up!” to the Chinese population of Vancouver. We listened to see how they’d translate it (完蛋了！), but I couldn’t help laughing and shaking my head when they gave the unfortunately appropriate example sentence: “The police found marijuana in his car. The jig is up!” At least Vancouver’s Chinese immigrant population is learning locally relevant English…
My Chinese students say the Crystal Mall is the current big Chinese hang-out (Chinatown is apparently for the older generation of Hong Kongers). If you combined a Tianjin supermarket with a Tianjin vegetable market, cleaned it up, made it a little less crowded, mixed in some 繁体字, and improved everyone’s English, you’d have the Crystal Mall. You can use Chinese in all the stores and they’ll hardly bat an eye.
We all had fun (Sara’s first time on the Skytrain), and it was good Chinese speaking time for us. I think we’ll do this again.
Richmond’s definitely the Chinatown — the entire city’s Chinese! I was driving there the other day and noticed that all of the drivers were, too, Chinese. Ah.. the times :)
That’s what my students tell me: Richmond is the real Chinese central; Chinatown is for the old folks. They also say there is, or at least was, a great Chinese night market in the summer. You know anything about that? We haven’t been to a good night market since we left Taibei.
I’ve actually never been to a night-market. There’s one in the Chinatown areas, one in Richmond — in summertime, that is.
[...] Vancouverite born and raised), Mandarin radio English-teaching spots that use the example of a marijuana bust to illustrate “the jig is up,” or really random stuff like what we overheard this [...]
never go there ,hope site seeing soon.
[...] Aiya, Wen-ge-hua… 哎呀，温哥华…… [...]
[...] from Beijing was using wàiguórén (外国人; foreigner) to refer to the white people in a Vancouver shopping mall this weekend. Then while we were shopping for Chinese DVDs a group of college-age Chinese girls passed us. One [...]
I love Crystal Mall, and I eat there almost every week. There’s an excellent Taiwanese place called Ali Shan that is cheap and good, as well as the South West Pepperhouse that has the best 失传菜 I’ve ever had outside of the mainland. Oh my god, 水煑魚 is so delicious!