Asian Avenue

Parkdale, Toronto, was once known as the village of Parkdale. The streets Brock, O’Hara, and Dunn reflect the names of some of the neighborhood’s first European settlers. Now, walking down Dunn at the corner of King, you’re likely to catch a glimpse of the youthful clergymen of the Holy Family Parish, leaning off balconies and peering out behind the church’s double doors. At the corner of King and Jameson, their pale bone-white robes contrast with the deep maroon worn by another group of clergymen. Parkdale is home to the largest diasporic Tibetan community outside of Asia. Beneath their robes, the neighborhood’s many Buddhist monks sport burgundy Air Force 1s or orange and magenta Hokas. 

My personal connection to Parkdale began online. Through websites like Tibet Chat and Asian Avenue, I met other young Tibetans across the world. Both websites have long since shut down, and most of my childhood memories of them are foggy and uncertain, the relationships buried in the ether. Parkdale at the time seemed a world apart from my desk in the suburbs. 

I first went to Parkdale in the summer of 2007 to visit my aunts. They lived in an apartment building called Sunset Tower, while a friend of mine from Tibet Chat, Tibboy89, lived in West Lodge. West Lodge comprised two curved buildings facing each other. The buildings were tall and densely packed with windows looking into over seven hundred apartment units. At the center, sandwiched between the towers, was a courtyard. Standing there it felt like you were in the inverse of a panopticon, always being watched.  

In the courtyard, Tibboy89 held my hand while we stood under a maple tree. I noticed he had an extra thumb. He had never mentioned this to me during our online correspondence. He told me his parents had convinced him to keep this additional phalange, and when he fell off a roof in Nepal, it had saved his life. I didn’t make it inside West Lodge, as I was on a strict curfew. Instead, he walked me back to Sunset Tower.

I met TwiztedTib on Asian Avenue. We started out chatting but later progressed to talking on the phone. I was still in high school, while he worked for the border patrol. He would call me during his late-night shifts, talking to me until I fell asleep. In 2009, he mailed my little brother a pair of basketball shoes.  

That fall, I went to visit my aunts again, and I found myself back at West Lodge. TwiztedTib lived on the top floor, where if you stepped out onto the balcony, you could feel a breeze from a flock of pigeons swooping downwards. From time to time, you would look straight ahead. Your eyes enjoying an excursion, sweeping across window to window. According to my journal entry, he told me about a security guard who quit on the spot after someone pushed a cinder block off a balcony while he was walking by. “At least he made it out alive,” TwiztedTib said, “unlike the guy who fell to his death from the nineteenth floor.”

Another friend of mine, UniqueTyb who lived a couple blocks down on Jameson, told me to be careful while walking through the West Lodge courtyard. If any of the people watching from above were to see me and TwiztedTib together, word would reach my aunts within hours. They called it the “Tibetan BBC” for how quickly gossip would spread.  

In one week, West Lodge became strangely familiar. These adolescent memories of Parkdale are a mix of fall and summer, skimp, and hazy, held together by a few names, a giant silhouette of boys met online.