An advocate for Vancouver’s historic Chinatown is speaking out after vandals targeted the guardian lions at the Millennium Gate once again.
Lorraine Lowe, executive director at the Dr. Sun Yat Sen Classical Chinese Gardens, said she arrived in the neighbourhood Saturday to see one of the lion’s eyes painted pink and the other lion’s eyes painted green.
She said she also discovered Saturday that someone had broken through a fence at the gardens themselves, did more graffiti on one of the facility’s walls and left feces on the ground.
“Unfortunately it is not new news. Chinatown has been targeted for quite some time, it’s especially gotten bad since the pandemic,” Lowe told Global News.
“It’s just our culture that we keep our head down, we don’t complain and don’t make a stink, and we’ve just been constantly kicked to the ground.”
The Millennium Gate’s guardian lions and the lion statues outside the nearby Vancouver Chinese Cultural Centre have been repeatedly targeted by vandals, sometimes with explicitly racist graffiti.
The neighbourhood at large has also seen a 300 per cent increase in graffiti, according to the Vancouver police.
Recently, vandals targeted a mural commissioned by the City of Vancouver aiming to celebrate Chinatown’s diversity — prompting one legacy shop owner to launch a petition calling for accountability.
On Friday, the province pledged to work with the city on solutions.
Lowe said she was pleased to hear support from senior levels of government, but that the problem would not be easy to solve.
“The graffiti and vandalism, that’s just a symptom of a bigger problem, there’s people suffering and dying on the street from the toxic drug supply, there’s people who are expressing their pain and suffering on the walls of our garden,” she said.
“We need to move forward as a society and we need to help each other out. With that being said, with Chinatown, there needs to be a balance. There needs to be foot patrol. The presence of the Vancouver police has been very helpful in terms of a presence.”
Vancouver police said they had been alerted to the damage to the lions and that officers were actively investigating.
Comments