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Comment by nomdep | Hacker News Reader

Why almost every store have their names written in Chinese (?) and English.

Is the post a joke with photos from Asia malls (or AI generated)? Or it’s just common in that part of Canada?

I'm curious where you live that this seems so unusual.

I'm in the USA, and any area with a large immigrant population will have a shopping mall or at least a few stores where signage is in English & the language of the local immigrant population.

In most of the southeast you're only going to see English. Even in medium size towns. Texas is completely different however, where you can easily see 3 languages alone set of store fronts.

I was wondering about the same thing as GP. I live in a European capital (one of the smaller ones), and I basically don't ever see anything like this. If there's any signs in other languages then they're almost always in English. (We don't get much immigration from English-speaking countries.)

Interesting! Is that because you don't have large immigrant populations, or is it more cultural where it's seen as important for newcomers to assimilate to the local culture?

In the US & Canada, of course, the vast majority of the population is descended from people who immigrated here. It would make sense for it to be more normalized here for public spaces to cater to those who don't yet speak the local language.

We do have large immigrant populations, but have a fairly active integration policy. It's not a major success, but at least free language education seems to have helped a lot.

There's foreign languages on "call family in your home country" type ads and on various official information (e.g. posters during the pandemic), but very rarely on storefronts and the like.

It's common in Canada for ethnic malls and stores whose proprietors and customers are mostly first- and second-generation immigrants, that they'd have signage in their own language. There's no rule enforcing it and no rule against it, except maybe in Quebec.

Quebec's language laws are fascinating, the newest version "requires non-French signs to be accompanied by French descriptions that are twice the size." Since the goal is "to ensure French predominates the visual field of storefronts," you can have the logos be the same size as long as the tagline is in French.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-storefront-si... https://montrealgazette.com/news/quebec/new-regulations-will...

I think the word you are looking for is "totalitarian". The legal system there virtually guarantees French as the only acceptable language. Even native-born Quebecois who are also native English speakers need to go through a process to be permitted to school their children in English.

Go to any large/well-known US city and you will with almost 100% certainty be able to find an area where this is absolutely common. I live in Texas right down the street from one of many asian street malls/plazas in my city where the majority of the store names are first written in either Chinese or Korean. I'm certain its likely the same in Canada

I grew up here. There's a lot of people in this area (generally non-working members of first gen immigrant families, think gma and gpa) who don't really speak English. My parents took me to these malls for a glimpse of the culture where home is (and to make me practice mandarin). As second-gen immigrants grow up, some have opened their own businesses too, combining aspects of Canadian and Chinese culture. To me now, it feels like home.

The bakery in Denison Square is a clear example of a cultural mishmash - they offer many of the traditional hk style breads like pineapple buns, but also many twists that definitely have a Canadian influence (smoked beef sandwitch with milk bread).

There's many pockets in Toronto with high density of Chinese commerce, the area around Steeles east of the IBM campus is one. Pacific Mall mentioned in the article is only one of the commercial centers in the area. There's also Metro Square a few blocks west, the T&T plaza next door, Skycity on Midland/Finch, and various other small plazas around the area, full of Chinese food goodness.

Not sure about Toronto, but there are a lot of places like that on the BC side. I don't know if it's true or not, but I heard once that leading up to the handoff of Hong Kong from Britain to China there was a lot of immigration to Canada, due to their easier process than that of the US. It could also just be an Asian neighborhood like you'll find in pretty much every major city.

That was one of the major events, but in general there has been a steady trickle of immigrants from Japan and China to American and Canadian west coast settlements for the past 150 years or so. As with most diasporas, the way it usually works is that the first people come there because it's cheaper and/or because there's work available, and then once they establish a local community, more immigrants start coming there preferentially because they have friends and family, because there are services available in their language etc.

In BC, Richmond in particular has been a recipient of many of those immigrants from Hong Kong, which is why its population is still majority ethnic Chinese, and even many official signs are bilingual.

That area of Toronto has a huge Chinese diaspora. I have many memories of trekking to Pacific Mall (also mentioned in the blog post) on public transit with my anime-watching friends in highschool to buy pirated DVDs and other merch. A nearby Walmart has bilingual English - Chinese signs inside.

Yes, almost all US cities have at least a couple grocery stores that stock imported products and have signage in multiple languages. most common is Chinese or general “Asian” but larger cities have more specific stores that specialize further on Korean, Vietnamese, etc.

I don't know about Canada but SF, LA, NYC,

https://bestneighborhood.org/race-in-san-francisco-ca/

Zoom out can you can zoom into any city and see at least in SF, LA, NYC there are huge areas where you can expect non-English to possibly be common. Sorry it doesn't cover Canada but I'm sure some searching can bring up something similar.

I see that everywhere in USA also.

You see names written in Chinese and English everywhere in the USA? Or did you mean something else? Because if that's what you meant to say, that is absolutely not how things are "everywhere in the USA".

I live in Texas, and have lived in California and New York. In all three of these places the areas with a large Chinese presence will have stores with names in both Chinese and English.

This is absolutely common in the US in pretty much any large city, I can't imagine someone having never seen this before in the US unless they never lived or went to an area that was diverse. And its not just Chinese, many places will have Korean names, Japanese names, and of course on the other end Spanish names accompanied by english but most are more used to this.

As someone who regularly shops at those sorts of places, there is a large part of the US population that ignores or is otherwise unaware of them, most of my family included. I've had multiple conversations where people have been shocked when informed that there's an Asian or Mexican market a short distance away that they had no idea existed.

We all live in private worlds that are overlaid on top of the same geography.

The Mexican market near me has the best bread in town. I’m often the only English speaker in the store when I stop in.

I see it in Chinese restaurants, sure. And in Chinatowns. (And with Spanish in the southwest.) I don't see it on "almost every store" "everywhere in the US", though.

I think you're simply taking "everywhere in the US" too literally then if your interpretation of that was "almost every store".

"Almost every store" is a direct quote from nomdep.

Nomdep was referring to the pictures in TFA -- the rest of the comments are explaining why a mall may look like that. Not an entire city.

A reasonable interpretation of "you see that everywhere" is "most cities have a mall or neighborhood that would result in a similar set of pictures.

It's incredible how many "hackers" in this thread don't understand how quantifiers work in contexts other than code. How the hell does this industry translate business needs into code without this rudimentary skill?

Did you really think that OP meant that literally almost every single store in the U.S. has Chinese names written on their storefront?

Yes, it is very common in urban and even suburban USA to find stores, and in larger cities entire neighborhoods of stores, where names are in both Latin and some other script, and other text is in English and some other language (whether or not both use the Latin alphabet.) It's not too uncommon in, say, California to see this for several different east asian languages (Chinese being the nost common generally, but there is regional variation), Spanish, and maybe Arabic and/or Russian, in a single moderately sized city.

Even out here in the sticks, the local Chinese restaurant has both English and Chinese menus.

It’s quite likely that the only people around here who can read the Chinese menus work there or are related to those who work there.

From what I've seen, it is an established and expected cultural practice for "ethnic" restaurants in US to have bilingual menus regardless of their actual location. It could be a Mexican restaurant in an area that is 99% white Anglos, and it will still have menu in English and Spanish.

Personally I think it's great; it means that you get some exposure to other languages even if you never leave your corner of the woods.

I’ve been twice in USA recently and I didn’t see that anywhere.

It's like the 21st century "China town". Many new migrants prefer avoiding downtown and the old China towns so have built new ones, complete with huge parking lots.

The immigrants have no interest in the culture of their host country. They are only there for economic convenience.

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