oh, Chinatown!

My spacial proximity to Chinatown has many benefits and delights, including readily available cheap produce, an abundace of milk crates for creating fashionable furniture, and the presence of co-passengers on the streetcar, laden down with plastic bags with exotic scripts and strange smells. But today, the concept of a "city within a city" has been taken to a new level. All day there has been a tremendous comotion outside our house. While the comotion is usually due to either drunken students, or recently released patients from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health across the street, today it centres around a huge pile of dirt. Presumably, this dirt was placed there by municipal workers in preparation for the spring gardening they'll be doing at the park across the way starting Monday morning. I'm affraid, however, that they will have to start a new pile afresh, come Monday, as there has been a steady stream of Chinese ladies from the neighbourhood poaching the goods! They come with carts, waggons, buckets, spades, garbage bags, and (occasionally) husbands to supervise, and in little more than three hours, the pile is down to half what it was. Every once in a while I'll hear the screech of car tires and a house-wife type will be out there, in her kakhis and sweater-around-the-neck, filling the back of the SUV with precious, precious sod.

In a more serious note, I like how this event fits in to my post-colonial studies mind frame. WHat? It's just dirt. No, wait. In my political science course last semester, we talked about various ways in which citizens revolt against authoritarian post colonial states, from revolution to what is known as "quiet encroachment of the ordinary". In this form of revolt, individuals undermine the state through a variety of (primarily urban) actions, such as tapping the power grid. While it's simplist to understand today's dirt theft through a purely pragmatic lense- why buy dirt when you can get it from the sidewalk for free?- I like to think of it in more political terms. Despite our government's highly "developed" nature, we, as Canadian Citizens, still reject the notion of complete complicity to the State, and choose instead to express our non-compliance through simple acts of soil appropriation.