The Making of The Pacific Mall: Chinese Identity and Architecture in Toronto

Authors: Ho Hon Leung and Raymond Lau

Type: Book Chapter
Book Title: Imagining Globalization: Language, Identities, and Boundaries
Editors: Ho Hon Leung et al.
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, (November 2009).

Introduction:
An ethnic icon in the Toronto Chinese communities, the Pacific Mall is a shopping mall, and probably the most well-known ‘Chinese shopping mall’ in Canada, possibly in North America.  When the Chinese in Toronto say “Go to ‘Tong Yin’ mall [referring to Chinese shopping mall in Cantonese], very likely they have the Pacific Mall in mind.  When the Chinese-American tourists visit Toronto, they demand to visit two places: the Niagara Falls, and the Pacific Mall.  We can see tourist buses loaded with visitors.  They are busy with dropping and picking up their clients.  The popularity of the mall has been expanded beyond the Chinese communities.  Non-Chinese visitors can be seen anywhere and at anytime in the mall.  The mall has also attracted attention from different media.  The Pacific Mall was introduced in a short film format by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in 2002.  It also appeared in several mainstream magazines in Toronto.  It earned its appearance in The New York Times in March, 2002.  The intriguing question is that under what circumstances, the mall has become an ethnic icon that signifies the ‘Chinese’ mall.  Why the mall is important to the Chinese community?  The purpose of this paper is to use the Pacific Mall to illustrate a theoretical framework that conceptualizes a convoluting relationship between ethnic identity and architecture.