(Photos: David Choi)

THIS is what I wrote last week: “NIMBY – or ‘not in my backyard’ – has cropped up again – this time it involves a hospice. Plans for a hospice on the University of British Columbia campus have been put on hold because some East Asian neighbourhood residents say it offends their cultural sensitivities. Really? Death is unpleasant for all of us, BUT we all have to die. So get used to it, my friends! Such nonsense only sparks more racism.”
So I was really happy this week to see some responsible Chinese-Canadian community leaders condemn that nonsense and point out that there was NO cultural sensitivity involved here. David Choi, national chairman of the National Congress of Chinese Canadians, pointed out that he lived in a heavily populated neighbourhood in Hong Kong that had a cemetery and people there prospered.
He slammed those in the community who were using “the false claim of conflict with Chinese culture,” noting that they had resorted to three Ms – “misunderstanding, misconception and misrepresentation.”
Well put, indeed!

(Photo: Gabriel Yiu)

And well-known journalist Gabriel Yiu ridiculed comments made by some Chinese-Canadian residents who are opposed to the hospice’s construction that that would bring them bad luck and attacks by ghosts as the “most bizarre comments’ he had heard in recent times.
So I suggest that the UBC should go right ahead with the construction of the hospice – and if these residents, Chinese-Canadians or others, do not like that, they can get their sorry butts out of that neighbourhood. They are a DISGRACE to their own communities – and to Canada!

 

-RATTAN MALL
EditorAsianJournal@gmail.com
The BEST READ South Asian column in North America at www.AsianJournal.ca