Many years ago when I was living in Vancouver, I worked at a thrift store on East Hastings Street. The place was one of the largest shops of its kind in Canada and attracted people from all walks of life: teens from North Vancouver looking for trendy clothes, homeless people in search of basic necessities, and hustling ‘resellers’ searching for their next big find.
In the mornings at about 9:45, just before the opening hour, a queue of people would form outside the storefront. When it was time, I would go over and open the doors. All at once the resellers would rush into the store taking care not to fall over each other. In teams of two or three, they went to the various departments, and by a quarter past the hour everything of value was gone. I would spend the first hour of my shift ringing up hundreds of dollars in goods that would never again be sold at a fair price.
Twice daily I would commute to and from Dunbar, the bus ride taking me on a grand tour of Vancouver. I cherished that bus ride. First I would gaze out at the multimillion dollar homes of Dunbar and Kitsilano, some filled with heaps of university students like me, and others with wealthy bankers and prep school kids. We would drive the length of Broadway, a busy retail area, before turning left onto the Granville bridge. Here I would take a look over at the mountains, down at the water, and then at the downtown approaching. This is where things would take a turn for the worse. Once you had made your way through Granville street and turned on to Hastings, a scene of pure suffering would come into view.
One evening after a shift, I sat down at the back of the bus, prepared for the hour-long journey home, and through the music in my headphones, overheard a scuffle breaking out towards the front. I looked up to see a large man yelling obscenities and clawing at another person sitting across from him in the aisle. This person, an Asian woman somewhere in her fifties, was trying to prevent the man from snatching her phone.
Suddenly another person joined in. Now there were two of them intimidating her. What had triggered this I couldn’t even begin to know, but what I did sense was that it was about to turn ugly. The pair of them, both about six foot three and two hundred pounds, were out of control.
I looked around to see if anyone else onboard was preparing to intervene. Nope. Not a stir. A moment of action was about to be required, and everyone had their faces glued to their screens. Suddenly, violence erupted, and I saw one strike the poor woman in the shoulder. In an instant I was on my feet, halfway down the aisle, and wedged in between the chaos.
There I was, my skinny five foot nine self come face to face with a man and woman who were perfectly capable of turning me into pudding. Staring at them now, I could tell they were both drunk. Once they realized that I was impeding their assault on the smartphone lady, the rage was redirected towards me. Adopting my best strong man impression, I stood tall and took a couple of blows. First to the neck. Then to the chest.
I yelled something like “back off!” in an embarrassingly high-pitched tone and they moved away towards the exit. The driver had stopped the bus at this point and was in the midst of calling the cops when, just like that, they sprang off into the night. I turned to face the lady I’d been shielding with my body and found her shaking in fear.
“Thank you”, she said, “thank you so much.” Over and over again. She told me her name was Flora.
I looked around at the rest of the bus. Hardly a soul had moved. A woman got up and said, “fucking natives man”, as if that was some kind of consolation. Staring at her blankly, I turned back to Flora and asked what had happened. Apparently, she started filming the couple because they were being racist and she felt unsafe. They didn’t like that she was filming and lashed out.
Racism against Asian people in Vancouver was common during the pandemic. Fuelling it were conspiracy theories about lab leaks and the Chinese government’s intentional weaponization of Covid-19. This is exactly the nonsense that Flora’s attackers had been spewing at her.
Long after they had fled the scene, transit security and the Vancouver police department showed up. I accompanied Flora while she delivered her witness statement and watched unimpressed as the cops failed to cope with her distress. Flora’s English was marginal and the young police officer seemed to be having difficulty empathizing with her. “As a word of caution, next time don’t film people on the bus, it only aggravates them more.”
Thank you jack*ss, very helpful.
When it seemed like a detailed account of the crime had been collected, we all went our separate ways. Flora left me with her phone number and asked if I would help with any of the follow-ups, like providing a formal witness statement. Of course, I agreed.
It would be several weeks before I heard from her again. I was at home cleaning my room one afternoon when I got a call. She was at a mobile phone shop upgrading her phone. “Liam!”, she said. “I can get an iPhone Pro for free, would you like to have it?”
Looking at my cheap half-broken smartphone, I said, “Absolutely!”
The next day I went to Kitsilano to meet her for lunch. When I showed up to the restaurant, she was there waiting for me with a number of people standing beside her. As I approached, they reached out their hands and congratulated me for how I had stood up for their friend (I later learned that Flora had only just met them, and had somehow found the only other Chinese people in the restaurant to tell the whole story to).
She handed me a gift-wrapped iPhone and proceeded to quiz me on a wide range of topics over lunch. The uselessness of the Vancouver Police Department (VPD), the global pandemic, racism, where I was from, what school I was going to, and more. Above all, she wanted to know if I was going to press charges against our attackers. Her strong feeling was that me joining the fray would put enough pressure on the VPD to find the culprits and serve justice.
I didn’t give her an answer then and there, but I had my reservations. What good was filing charges going to do? Frankly, I felt a little embarrassed by the situation. Flora was worried sick that I had been hurt or traumatized by the event, and at this point was projecting her own fears on to me. I guess I felt that my good deed had already been done, and I wasn’t particularly keen on getting involved in a legal dispute, especially when the perpetrators weren’t likely to be found.
Throughout the course of our conversation, I learned that she had been living for a long time in Toronto as a real estate agent. She told me that Chinese buyers were her main clientele, and that regretfully her English had never really improved because it simply didn’t need to. When the pandemic hit, she had been on the way back from a family visit to China, passing through Vancouver at just the wrong moment.
A case of Covid-19 required her to quarantine, so instead of going back to Toronto, she decided to stay on and explore a new city. For a couple of months, she had been working on applying for a real estate license in British Columbia and building a clientele. On the day of the bus incident she had been out for a picnic in the park soaking in the best of the Vancouver sun. She hadn’t an idea what would be waiting for her on the way home.
Weeks later I was sitting in a police cruiser with a detective from the VPD recording my witness statement. At the end, he asked me if I was intending to press charges. I said no. Flora’s attackers still hadn’t been caught. I couldn’t help but think that they never would be, and wondered what good it would do if they were. Those two had likely been in/out of jail and on/off of drugs for their entire lives. They, like so many First Nations people in Vancouver, are caught in a perpetual cycle of abuse and disempowerment. On top of that, they have to sit and watch while the descendants of people who had no right to occupy their land decide its future course. The actions of the two on the bus are inexcusable, but I understand on some level where it comes from. Flora is not responsible for their despair, we all are. With that, I got out of the car, closed the door, and went off to live out the rest of my university days.