Winnipeg Chinatown
Monica & Jason's Engagement

Winnipeg Chinatown — The Gates & Gardens

Winnipeg's Chinatown sits just north of the downtown core along King Street and Alexander Avenue — a National Historic Site that has anchored the city's Chinese and Vietnamese communities for over a century. The visual landmarks are immediately recognizable to anyone who has grown up in this city: the ceremonial gate with its gilded Chinese characters, the pagoda-style pavilions in the outdoor courtyard, the carved stone balustrades and red lacquer columns that line the garden walkways. For Monica and Jason, whose Chinese and Vietnamese roots are woven into their shared identity as a couple, this was the only place to begin.

We started in the courtyard garden, working through the pagoda walkways in the soft morning light. Monica's white floral dress caught the light cleanly and lightly — nothing competing with it, nothing fighting the richness of the red and gold architecture around her. Jason's sky-blue linen shirt pulled the palette the other direction, cool and clean. The contrast between the lightness of their outfits and the weight of the Chinatown architecture produced exactly what Chinese and Vietnamese heritage engagement sessions should look like: the people in front of something that matters, somewhere that belongs to them.

From the garden we moved to the main ceremonial gate — the most iconic landmark in Winnipeg's Chinese community — and stayed there long enough to work through the range of what it offered. Wide compositions with the arch framing them and the city beyond. Closer frames that let the gilded characters and carved detail do the work of context. Monica and Jason didn't need to perform for any of it. They held hands, leaned in, and let the gate say what it needed to say. The best images from this section are the ones where they've almost forgotten I'm there.

Then the red staircases, the blossoming trees, the quiet side streets of the neighbourhood where the architecture layers differently and the pace slows down. By the time we finished the outdoor Chinatown section, we had close to 25 images I'd show in full. Not every one is perfect. All of them are honest.

Inside Sun-Wah Centre

There are two kinds of engagement sessions: the kind that happen in beautiful places, and the kind that happen in real ones. Sun-Wah Centre is real. It's the commercial heart of Winnipeg's Chinese and Vietnamese community — a grocery market that has been feeding the neighbourhood for decades, stocked with pan-Asian products on every shelf, bilingual signs in English, Chinese, and Vietnamese pointing you through the aisles, and Kim Tuong BBQ's roasted ducks and BBQ pork hanging in the window at the far end of the market. It is not a curated aesthetic. It is the actual thing.

Monica and Jason had a plan before we walked in. Jason climbed into a grocery cart. Monica grabbed the handle and started pushing. He pointed at the BBQ ducks hanging in Kim Tuong's window and laughed — the kind of laugh you can't manufacture, the kind you only get when two people are genuinely in on the same joke. This is the shot. It is one of the most joyful frames I've ever taken at a Winnipeg engagement session, and it worked precisely because they knew this place. They've shopped here. The familiarity is legible in every frame we took inside Sun-Wah.

We moved from Kim Tuong BBQ into the produce section, where the wall sign reads 菜 above the English word PRODUCE — two languages, one word, everything you need to understand what kind of neighbourhood you're in. Then into the dry goods aisles, where blue overhead signs list every product category in English, Chinese, and Vietnamese — canned goods, dry mushrooms, tonic soup, seafood — stacked floor to ceiling and lit by the flat commercial light that, in black and white, becomes purely architectural. In colour, Sun-Wah's grocery aisles are one of the most visually specific interiors in the city. You cannot fake this location. You can only know it.

The Second Look

Between Sun-Wah Centre and Kum Koon Garden, Monica changed into a deep red dress. Jason put on a charcoal blazer over a linen shirt. The shift was deliberate — from the warmth and casual ease of the first look into something elevated, formal, better calibrated for the restaurant setting ahead. Red against red, as it turned out: the dress would match the lanterns inside Kum Koon perfectly, without any planning at all. We shot a few transitional frames in the studio before heading over — quiet, intimate portraits in a still interior — and then we were ready.

Kum Koon Garden

Kum Koon Garden is one of Winnipeg's oldest Chinese restaurants — a community institution with a history that extends back decades in the city's Chinese and Vietnamese community. The interior is what traditional Chinese restaurants looked like before they were updated into modern minimalism: round banquet tables set with chopsticks and white rice bowls, red lanterns suspended from the ceiling, a decorative altar that photographs like a painting, walls that carry the accumulated warmth of fifty years of family meals. The light inside Kum Koon is amber and dim, the kind of restaurant light that wraps around people rather than illuminating them flatly.

Monica and Jason sat at a table and just existed in the space. They talked. They laughed. They looked around the room the way you do when you're somewhere that belongs to your history — not as visitors, but as people with actual memory of this place. Monica's red dress pulled the same tone as the lanterns overhead. Jason's blazer anchored everything. I worked around them, tight frames that caught the lanterns in the background, wider compositions that showed the full dining room, black-and-white edits that stripped the colour palette down to pure form. Every approach worked, because the location gave everything.

Then we went outside. Against the brick exterior wall with the carved stone lion guardian at the corner and the gilded crown crest of the Kum Koon Garden sign above them, Jason popped the champagne. The bottle sprayed. Monica threw her head back laughing. The Kum Koon Garden sign was right there in the frame, the red railing and the stone lion in the foreground, and the shot made itself completely. Some frames, you plan. Some frames, you just show up for.