Quote from a Chinese friend of mine form over the holidays (currently in Canada on a work visa, applying for a PR shortly, started as an exchange student in highschool):
“I really like coming back to [jmb99’s hometown], it’s all white people. Nice change from Toronto.”
I hadn't been to Toronto in years until recently. We went to some parks (i.e. Parks Canada / Provincial Parks) around.
Little did I know that you now have to register online to book your visit. You used to just go and pay cash at the entrance and that's it. This time you had to have an account and prove identity by logging in through your bank account for example, before they'd even let you purchase said ticket.
We didn't really think much of it until later on but then it struck us: All, and I mean, literally all of the people we saw looked "Indian" (some may have been Pakistani etc. but you get what I'm trying to say). We were actually taken by surprise at one place, when we saw a bunch of (non-Indian) Asians in one of the parks. And once we saw a white couple. The Algonquin was completely booked and overflowing. Like you wouldn't even be able to just park and hike illegally.
All of the Parks Canada staff was White or (non-Indian) Asian.
All the registration stuff around parks and conservation areas is a product of COVID, when these places were overflowing and needed reservation systems all the sudden.
Many organizations simply refuse to give up the "convenience" of having people booked in like that. Also the numbers have continued to be hard for these places to manage.
It's the same as tourists complaining about tourists, hilarious irony. Does your Chinese friend at least realize that he's the one causing it? Even on HN I see the sentiment very often, people going on 5 holidays per year and complaining that certain places have become touristy. You literally wouldn't even know the place had become touristy if you wouldn't have gone there as a tourist!
Maybe I should have expanded a bit more. He lives in downtown Toronto in the financial district, and went to university in Waterloo, both heavily Asian (Chinese, and to a lesser extent Japanese and Korean) immigrant populations. The Indian immigrants people complain about these days are (stereotypically) centred in the Mississauga and Brampton suburbs, with far fewer in other parts of the GTA. He is explicitly complaining about the large number of Chinese immigrants that he went to school with and are in his area in Toronto.
“I really like coming back to [jmb99’s hometown], it’s all white people. Nice change from Toronto.”
Definitely a common sentiment.