I have reached the end of the placement, and I'm heading back to the UK later today. I did my final presentation on Thursday, and it went really well! Many people were rather surprised that I got all of that done, contrasting my own memories of procrastination and midday naps, but I realise that that ignores the late nights and the fact that I literally constantly lived and breathed Chinatown. 

I think it's been particularly interesting to walk around the neighbourhood remembering titbits about it from the property ownership database. This property was bought in 2022 for x dollars, this property is a suspected rooming house, this property is owned by the same group that owns this property... I have gotten to know Chinatown as a spreadsheet and a very long list of addresses.

Yet I have also gotten to know Chinatown as a place to live, work and play. This property has been in business for almost a century, this property is where people practice lion dancing, this property is where I had really good banh mi that I later realised was not vegan. Interwoven into this space are the stories that the community holds, their first dates, their homes, their favourite restaurants. After six weeks, I feel privileged to say that I can now recount stories of my own on these streets, that I have made my mark on this community and that this community has made its mark on me.

A street is never just a street, a property is never just a property. Real estate moguls and city governments often forget this. They use databases like my own and paint with broad brushstrokes over entire neighbourhoods. The people in Chinatown do not oppose change, but they do oppose change that is totally made outside of their control, without their consent. What I have developed is a master's tool and what it cannot do is dismantle the master's house. 

I nevertheless trust that neither myself nor any of the people I have been working with will end up using this data inappropriately: we have the values and the institutions within the land trust to ensure that our data practices are ethical and transparent. The stats that I found were genuinely illuminating, and after also having written some guides for future use I hope that that it can continue to be updated in the future.

I'm missing Nuit Blanche tonight, a giant community arts festival across Toronto. Many of the people who I have gotten to know are performing in a giant parade across Chinatown. I nevertheless got to see them assemble one of the archways late last night. Walking out of a restaurant near midnight, I smelled warm humid air with a dash of someone's incredible cooking and another dash of construction dust. I smelled China. Ignoring how the smell that I had previously nostalgically identified as being China is really just humidity and air pollution, I like to think how, for centuries, the Chinese diaspora have fled poverty and persecution to come to entirely different places and build new lives from nothing, and building something greater than themselves, than everyone. This is what Chinatown is really about.