The Far Table – Knox Vancouver

On the people I sit away from, and why.

October 27, 2026
by Richard Yung Chung

So… there is a Starbucks in the Lougheed mall where I do most of my writing, and it sits beside the food court.

Most afternoons, about half the tables out there are occupied by Korean men and women of roughly my age. They come in the early afternoon and stay. They drink coffee and they talk; loudly, comfortably, all of them at once, in Korean, for hours.

I take a table on the far side, put in my earbuds, and face the other way.

I have told myself for a long time that this is about concentration. I need quiet to work. It’s a reasonable explanation and it is not true, or not mainly true, and I know it isn’t, because of what I actually thought the first time I noticed them.

What I thought was: what is this, Korea?

And underneath that, the thing I would rather not have written down anywhere: I don’t want people to think I’m one of them.

I want to be honest about this.

Those are sixty-something Korean men and women. I am, by every available measure, one of them. And some part of me scans the room, locates my own people, and moves to the far table so that nobody walking past will file me with them.

I have been a minister for a long time. I have preached about welcome more times than I could count. I would like to tell you that I wrote that sentence in a moment of unusual weakness, but I said it out loud in a sermon, to a congregation, on purpose, without apparently noticing what I was admitting.

Now let me offer my defence, because I do have one, and it is partly true.

I do this to everybody.

A few weeks before that, I went out to Chilliwack with friends, and I had exactly the same reaction in reverse. Too many white people, mostly younger ones pushed ( i.e. priced ) out of Vancouver, all of them the same. Too much of one colour. It reminded me of my years in Kelowna, where I used to think the same thing constantly… too white.

And where I am genuinely happy is English Bay. I lived there three years and I loved it, and what I loved was standing on that beach among every kind of person there is… colours, races, ages, languages, the whole catalogue, side by side, nobody in the majority. I keep thinking I should move back. Be a beach bum. Swim occasionally.

So it isn’t Koreans, I tell myself. It’s sameness. I have an allergy to monocultures and I apply it evenhandedly.

That is a good defence and I have leaned on it for years.

Well…

Because when I looked at the white crowd in Chilliwack, I thought: this is boring.

And when I looked at the Korean tables in Lougheed, I thought: I don’t want people to think I am one of them.

Those are not the same thought. The first is about the room. The second is about me, and about being seen as, and you cannot be mistaken for a white Chilliwack retiree, which is precisely why looking at them costs you nothing.

So where does that come from? I’ve been reflecting on it for a while.

Here is my verdict:

I came to this country at seventeen. And what a seventeen year old immigrant learns, almost immediately, and without anyone teaching it, is that you are being sorted. You walk into a room and before you have said anything; you have been filed, and the file is not Richard, it is Korean, with everything the person doing the filing already believes about that.

So you spend the next fifty years working, quietly and constantly, to be seen as a person rather than a category. You adjust the pronunciation of your name so English mouths don’t struggle. You learn the humour. You learn what to say about hockey. You become, if you are diligent, someone people describe as not like, which is offered as a compliment and which you accept as a compliment, for decades, before it ever occurs to you to ask what it is a compliment against.

And then one day you are sixty-seven and you walk into a food court and there is a whole table of the category, and everything you trained into yourself for fifty years stands up and walks you to the far side of the room.

It isn’t that I don’t like them. It’s that I have spent my entire adult life not wanting to be filed, and they are, through no fault of their own, the file.

Here is the part I find hardest, and it is the reason I keep coming back to it.

Those men are me.

Same age, near enough. They came across the same ocean in the same decade for the same reasons. They raised children here who speak better English than they do and who are slightly embarrassed by them at restaurants. They have the same knees. They are, statistically, going through the same things I am going through, on the same schedule, about forty feet away.

And I can hear every word they say.

That is the thing I have never mentioned to anybody. I don’t sit at the far table because they’re strangers making noise in a language I don’t follow. I sit at the far table because I understand all of it. From across the room, with earbuds in, I can hear them talking about their grandchildren, and their blood pressure, and what things cost now, and the old country, and who has died.

You can be anonymous among strangers. You cannot be anonymous among people who would recognise you instantly.

And I suspect that is also, if I am honest, part of what I love about English Bay. I’ve always said it’s the diversity, and that’s true, and it’s also true that on a beach with a hundred kinds of people nobody can place me at all. I get to be nobody’s category. I get to be a man on a beach.

Freedom, some of it. And some of it just a better hiding place.

I am not going to end this by telling you that I went over and sat down with them, because I didn’t. I still take the far table. I took it this week.

But I’ve stopped pretending it’s about the noise.

Most afternoons there are twenty or thirty people in that food court who crossed an ocean when they were young and built a life here in a language that was never going to fit properly in their mouths. They are having the loud, ordinary, comfortable conversation that people have when they don’t have to translate themselves for anybody.

And fifty feet away, facing the wall with earbuds in, there is a man from the same boat, writing about them.

In English.

Richard