Sometimes I feel like I do not need to live in Vancouver to “keep in touch with my culture”; except for the personal touch of being in a city that is about 15% Chinese, a lot of my daily fix comes through the Internet and other widely available resources.

With the magic of RSS feeds piped through Google Reader, I get sufficiently bombarded with Asian information from the few feeds I subscribe to.

It seems the longest-standing pillar of blog-style Asian-American information is Angry Asian Man and NPY has noticed how much stuff I’ve seen fit to forward to him since I have become a subscriber — AAM is concise in each post and churns out a lot of posts covering diverse interests. I would not be as informed about the detention of Laura Ling and Euna Lee if it were not for his up-to-date coverage and links.

Disgrasian is run by two women who are sassy and their “news” is slanted towards entertainment updates. Since it is run by women, they have a better eye for spotting the hot up-and-coming Asian entertainers. :D

Visualizasian, a name at which I shudder, streams in-depth interviews with Asian-American community leaders. Of the three or four since I’ve started subscribing, I have only been interested in the one with Yul Kwon, famous for winning Survivor several years ago but he’s gone on to do a lot with his fame and wealth.

Finally, the only Canadian one I subscribed to is one associated with a magazine I have not had the occasion to read, Schema. Instead of reading about fun events tantalizingly held in California, I can read about events in Toronto and, less often, Vancouver. Yay. However, that is how I get my Asian-Canadian events alerts even though the site can be a little slow to the game – several times, I’ve learned of an event the day of or after it has occurrred.

The three information websites have been quite timely and echoing each other on one thing recently: the upcoming publication of Bonnie Tsui’s American Chinatown [AAM, SCH]. (Oops, it seems Disagrasian did not write about it but it just seemed like everyone was!)

Do I care about Chinatowns in the United States when I am Canadian? Why should I? However, when I travel to new cities, I will often seek out Chinatown and take pictures of somewhat identical looking gates and then file them away in my Flickr under my Chinatown tag. So, I do care.

Writing about five Chinatowns in the United States — New York (largest), San Francisco (oldest), L.A., Las Vegas (newest), and Honolulu (seems to have played a large role in China’s history) — gives Bonnie Tsui the opportunity to write about her own experiences growing up in the United States. In addition to the research she has done and exposition of the various biggest Chinatowns in America, I do want to read more about her Asian identiy journey. From her bio, I can tell that we are of similar age and like countless second-generation Chinese-North Americans with parents emigrating mid-century to 1970s, we can proudly trace our roots back to a Toisan (Taishan) village.

I can claim to have visited the following Chinatowns: United States (New York, L.A., Portland), Canada (Vancouver, Victoria, Calgary, Toronto), Europe (London). The ones I’ve been to in the States are remarkably old and large and I could never get straight their claim to fame so I have compiled the following mini guide.

Oldest Chinatown in North America — San Francisco
Oldest Chinatown in Canada — Victoria

Most populous Chinatowns in North America
1. San Francisco (largest Chinese community outside of Asia)
2. Manhattan, New York

Largest Chinatowns in North America
1. Manhattan, New York
2. Flushing, Queens
3. San Francisco
4. Vancouver

Largest Chinatowns in Canada
1. Vancouver
2. Toronto
3. Calgary

Some other random tidbits and notes that came up which I was doing this haphazard “research”:
* Things change. At one point in the 1800s, Cumberland on Vancouver Island had North America’s second largest Chinatown.
* My Chinatown memories are not kitshy and of running around Toronto’s downtown Chinatown in the summers and March Breaks I spent there. Rather, in university, we would dine then karaoke in the chic suburbia Hong Kong-Chinese area in Markham and Richmond Hill. Calling it “Chinatown” would hearken distasteful connotations of the one downtown.
* I need to visit this newer East Chinatown in Toronto in the Broadview/Gerrard area.
* Halifax has no Chinatown — no surprise. Our lame joke is that there is a restaurant in town named Chinatown that is appropriately large in size.
* The age of a Chinatown is difficult to pin down and not so relevant. That being said, Vancouver has one of the oldest surviving Chinatowns in North America, however I don’t think it really shows.
* I love how the cultural center in Calgary was inspired by the Temple of Heaven in Beijing. When will I get to go to the real temple?