Gung Haggis Fat Choy!

Todd Wong combines Chinese New Year with Robbie Burns Day: poetry slam with Kung Fu, highland dancers with sheng players, erhu and bagpipes, dragon boat racing, and a banquet with deep-fried haggis wonton. Seattle and other cities are copying.

"Toddish McWong" in the Sun Yat-Sen garden, Vancouver, with accordion and MacLeod tartan -- Deb Martin photo, courtesy of Globe and Mail 17 Jan 2011.

Gung Haggis Fat Choy! started in 1993 at Simon Fraser University when Todd Wong, a student and 5th generation Fascinated by the similarities of martial arts, ancient music and ancient foods, "Toddish McWong" created a Vancouver BC tradition. In 2007 he fund-raised to save Japanese-Canadian author Joy Kogawa's childhood home from demolition. Eighteen years later, he serves dinner for a thousand  and races with the GHFC dragon boat team, whose uniform is a Fraser Hunting kilt and a red shirt decorated with Chinese style "lucky" gold coins.
 
This Is Who We Are: Scots in Canada exhibition toured Canada and Scotland in 2009, featuring among other photos, Wong in a lion mask (right, a different pic from the one in the exhibition, tartan unidentified).








Left, Robin Hood tax mask from Adbusters mag.

For more cultural hybrids, see Todd Wong's GHFC webpage, a 2004 CBC-TV video clip, Brave Waves fusion music, Ricepaper (especially its green issue) and Adbusters magazines.

Underwater video of False Creek, Vancouver -- 'Surface' by Fiona Bowie

False Creek in Vancouver, once teeming with aquatic life, was heavily industrialized after 1880 and for more than a century was an underwater desert. All sorts of effluent was dumped from metal industries, fish canning, distilling and manufacturing until the south shore (Granville Island) was redeveloped as a tourist area in the 1970s. Birds and fish are starting to make a slow comeback.

RCAF photo of industrial False Creek in 1946: BC Archives B-07512

Fiona Bowie specializes in public art. Her current work, Surface, is a video stream from an underwater camera mounted on the hull of an Aquabus water taxi. The video stream often shows only vague colours, until crustaceans or fish swim by. It is a live uncensored documentary of the underwater life of one of the most taken-for-granted waterways in British Columbia.

See also False Creek history by the Challenge Series, and False Creek Watershed Society.