The Hongcouver | Why ‘non-Anglicised Chinese names’ matter in Vancouver’s housing market: No, it’s not about race

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A Vancouver home for sale, in an exclusive neighbourhood where detached houses fetch C$3 million or more. Photo: Reuters

Published: 6:26am, 6 Nov 2015Updated: 11:49am, 23 Feb 2016

Q: What’s in a name? Specifically, a non-Anglicised Chinese name?

A: Quite a bit more than some in Vancouver might suspect.

The question stems from a high-profile study released this week by Vancouver housing researcher Andy Yan, acting director of Simon Fraser University’s City Program and a longtime advocate for more data on the city’s housing unaffordability problem.

Yan looked at all MLS sales of detached houses in three of the city’s expensive Westside neighbourhoods in a six-month period and found 66 per cent of buyers had non-Anglicised Chinese names. Among sales worth C$3 million or more, the proportion of buyers with such names rose to a whopping 85 per cent.

Yan says his findings point to an influx of foreign capital to Vancouver, and that a non-Anglicised Chinese name “may be an indication that an owner may be a recent immigrant to Canada”. For his troubles, Yan has been caught in a storm this week over whether or not his use of such a proxy was racist, and he rejects his critics with some heat.

“My great-granddad paid the head tax,” he told me on Tuesday. “So to somehow use [concerns about] ‘racism’ to protect your privilege? That’s just absurd. This is an almost-uniquely Vancouver reaction.”

Among his critics was Jimmy Yan, a legal commentator on Chinese-language Fairchild Radio, who took objection to the use of non-Anglicised Chinese names as a proxy for being a recent immigrant. He posted an online poll (since removed) on WeChat and Weibo which invited naturalised Canadians to say whether they used Anglicised or non-Anglicised legal names. He said that of 58 respondents, 81 per cent used non-Anglicised names, which he believed undermined Andy Yan’s proxy method.