Old John Has Cone
The Chinatown That Was
By JACK STEPLEB
AS SMALL BOYS, we used to chant rude verses at the Chinese vegetable hawkers whose horse-drawn wagons perambulated Vancouver's residential streets during the First World War―and then flee in terror, fearing but half hoping that the butt of our insult would chase us.
But old John―all Chinese vegetable men were called John―was always too good-natured to take offence from small fry. He would load his reed baskets and canvass the back doors of the neighborhood ， while we would slink back through the bushes to filch a carrot or a couple of radishes from his untended truck.
All Johns were characters to us, and as familiar as members of our own families. We imitated their pidgin English, and parodied the shuffling gait of those who could not afford trucks, but who carried their produce in big baskets slung over their shoulders on bamboo poles.
Many still wore queues―or， as we called them, pig-tails. And to young minds, East Pender Street was a fascinating  and  colorful  foreign land
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steeped in mystery and imagined perils, peopled by countless Dr. Fu Manchus in black, pyjama-like garments, skull caps, white socks and black slippers. And we all knew that the long thick queues were used to strangle people.
We believed that between Chinatown and the waterfront were scores of underground passages that led to the docks, through which flowed an evil trade of smuggled Chinese, silks, opium and white slaves.
Chinese women were few in number, and for the most part still clung to their trousered native costumes and hobbled about on their bound feet.
To our impressionable minds, oldsters smoking their pipes outside a laundry were invariably lookouts protecting an opium parlor or a gambling "den." Come to think of it, what has happened to the reliable old Chinese laundryman who dampened clothes by spewing water through his teeth?
Those were the days when Chinatown was a real Chinatown, where

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CHINATOWN NEWS, OCTOBER 3, 1960