From October 16 to 20, 2006, the Georgia Straight, along with CBC Television, CBC Radio, and CBC.ca, will be exploring, investigating and celebrating what Living Together means to all of us in Greater Vancouver.

This is an annual multi-media project with our partner CBC, covering a wide range of topics, issues and events.

NEWS

Viewing workplace divercity
Shawn Atleo appreciates the leg up he received through the federal Employment Equity Act. In the late 1980s, as a young father, he obtained a job with the federal government as an employment counsellor's assistant. [Read More]

Some boat people still searching for a future
In a world heaving with more than 20 million refugees, asylum seekers, internally displaced persons, and stateless individuals uprooted by raging conflicts (based on a count by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) by the end of last year, it is easy to forget people like Hung Dung Pham. [Read More]

Real estate and diversity
Vancouver real-estate agent Elvis Ng has seen more than his share of ups and downs in the Vancouver housing market. Ng, a founding director of the Chinese Realtors Benevolent Association of B.C., had good reason to feel cheerful during a recent visit to the Georgia Straight's office on West Broadway. [Read More]

Head-tax redress fails to account for total toll
A Vancouver man has attributed the death of his mother to the Chinese head tax. But he won't be among those receiving federal compensation because his parents died before Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced that $20,000 payments will go to surviving head-tax payers and their spouses. [Read More]

Military goes multicultural
Strapping on combat boots was the last thing in the mind of Luis Miguel Portillo Illescas when he moved to Vancouver as a landed immigrant last year. [Read More]

ESL in schools reconsidered
Ana Torres still has nightmares about the year she immigrated to Vancouver from Guatemala, when she was 10. To train her Spanish ears in English, her parents bought her a bright-orange Texas Instruments Speak & Spell machine. It helped, but the real learning and the deep shock came when she was tossed into an English-only classroom at Vancouver's Saint Joseph's elementary school. [Read More]

BOOKS

Clarkson lets down her guard
For the first three decades of her life, Adrienne Clarkson stayed away from Vancouver. Speaking from her home in downtown Toronto on October 16, the engaging and insightful former governor general explained to the Straight that the West Coast had negative connotations for her family while she was growing up. [Read More]

Revisiting a rich, rebellious childhood in India
When people quote L.P. Hartley's famous maxim “The past is another country,” they mostly mean to say how remote the past seems to us, how foreign. For Delhi-born Madhur Jaffrey, however, that maxim holds near-literal truth: the past really is another country. [Read More]

FOOD

Fasting ends with Eid treats
For some, it's sweet vermicelli pudding. For others, it's semolina biscuits. Still others dive into a full-blown feast of curries and cakes. The food may differ, but one thing's the same: it signifies the end of fasting.Ramadan, a month-long period of prayer during which many Muslims refrain from consuming food or drink during daylight hours, draws to a close this week. [Read More]

Diwali sweets lighten up
After a childhood spent cooking rich Diwali sweets alongside her mother at Golden, B.C.'s Sikh temple, Roman Bains was out of her element in the Art Institute of Vancouver's culinary diploma program. Spices, the 21-year-old learned at school, are to be precisely measured, not experimented with. The dhal and samosas the students made in the Asian cooking course were unrecognizable to her. [Read More]

ARTS

Casting Diwali in a new light
In mid fall, communities throughout South Asia prepare for the dark months to come with an ancient five-day celebration of light and life known as Diwali. Outside their homes, people place rows of welcoming small oil lamps, called diyas, painted in vivid colours. These diyas have become the symbol of Diwali. [Read More]

Blues salutes historic black community
Soon after Savannah Walling moved to Vancouver from Oklahoma in the early '70s, she dined at Vie's Chicken and Steak House. The Southern-style cooking and cheery hospitality of the little place on Strathcona's Union Street felt familiar, reminding Walling of African-American eateries she'd known back home. It was one of the last vestiges of what, for six decades, had been a thriving black community in the East Side neighbourhood. [Read More]

MOVIES

Hopefuls fight stereotypes for Pepper-like success
For Lannette New, dancing in a bikini and belting out smutty lyrics in the 2005 Arts Club Theatre production of Miss Saigon was the best part of her day. Awake before 7 a.m. every weekday during the show's two-month run, New worked from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. as an office bookkeeper. Then she raced home, ate a quick dinner, and her husband drove her from their home in Burnaby to the Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage at 12th and Granville. By 8 p.m., the 31-year-old was ready to titillate and entertain a packed theatre. Bedtime was a midnight affair. Each morning, it started again. For two months. [Read More]

HIGH TECH

Diversity and tolerance outweigh idiocy on-line
Once in a while, a story hits the traditional media about some nasty hate-mongering Web site hanging out there in cyberspace where young people or other impressionable minds could find it. It's true that such things do get established, but it seems to me that they're greatly eclipsed by the number of sites that either actively promote tolerance or provide a forum where people within an ethnic group can discuss common problems (and people from outside the group can drop by and learn something). [Read More]

STYLE

It's always crunch time for Wanny Tang
“I think I must be some sort of crazy person,” says local fashion designer Wanny Tang, referring to the way she handles every aspect of her business by herself. She's not very big on giving herself a lot of time to get it all done, either. [Read More]

HEALTH

Translators give new voice to patients
The waiting room is packed. Some of the idle conversation is loud, some whispered. You can hear at least four different languages. The renal unit at St. Paul's Hospital sees hundreds of people a day. Close to half of them speak little or no English. [Read More]