A Many-Layered Record: A Review of Amy Ching-Yan Lam’s Property Journal
In Property Journal, Amy Ching-Yan Lam documents each time real estate, property, or housing haunts her life—her encounters, preoccupations, conversations—over a period of 13 months. The journal begins in December of 2021, four months after Toronto’s militarized eviction of Lamport Stadium Park encampment residents, six months after the Unity Intifada and protests over Israel’s attempted eviction of Palestinian families from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah. By the time of the journal’s epilogue in April of 2024, Palestine solidarity student encampments had started to spring up across North America. Between these markers of time, with its deceptively simple (and sometimes gruelling) method of daily accumulation, Property Journal becomes a many-layered record: of settler colonial land grabs, of a city in the rot radius of capitalist decay, of a writing practice attuned to affect, absurdity, and community struggle.
“Not that everyone needs to own a house,” Lam writes, “but in the absence of other forms of security, what else is there?” She spirals this question doggedly, tracing each property-related dream she comes across—her own, and those of her family, friends, partner—to its source. In bed at night, Lam compares dreams with her partner, Rice Cooker (she anonymizes the people in her life by replacing their names with objects). His fantasy of communal love and unalienated labour, her persistent mental image of “a house with lots of windows, surrounded by a green garden.” This dichotomy between the material and immaterial persists as Lam attempts to decouple aspirations of ownership from desires for stability, and the conditions of precarity from which both emerge.
At one point, walking through a condo showroom, Lam feels a strange sense of desire toward the glossy sample suite, the “nicely laid out” floor plans. She asks herself: “Is this desire mine, or has it been implanted?” In Toronto, where much of Property Journal takes place, the word “condo” has practically become synecdoche for gentrification and displacement. As a member of an anti-displacement group in Chinatown, actively organizing against such projects, Lam maps these points of contact—between the placid well-being promised by the condo’s showroom, her reflexive longing for it, and the violent enclosures required by its actual construction—from the inside out.
Stripped of extraneous detail and distraction, mundane life is dense with meaning—the idea of property structures not only our actions, but our feelings, moment-to-moment, in a seemingly inescapable way.
Property Journal works powerfully through the indexing and compressing of such contradictions. I started out trying to tag “meaningful” moments in the text with sticky notes, but quickly realized that to do so, I would have to cover every single page. Stripped of extraneous detail and distraction, mundane life is dense with meaning—the idea of property structures not only our actions, but our feelings, moment-to-moment, in a seemingly inescapable way. “I wonder about this relationship to an environment,” Lam says, “like it’s not something you can change .… A mixture of resignation and pragmatism, or maybe the two are the same.” So, then: what is to be done?
The book begins with the dedication, “To everyone fighting against property,” and ends with the assertion that resistance, in all its forms, is “fundamentally irrefutable.” It’s a sentiment that pervades Property Journal’s every page, a commitment not only to document but to be in service of struggle. Lam writes widely and eagerly about formations of resistance, both historical and contemporary. Squatting movements in 1970s New York City. “Proto-communist” Diggers, Levellers, and Ranters in 17th century England. 1600s Livonian werewolves (i.e., “peasants who fought landlords by attacking and stealing their property.”) Wet’suwet’en land defenders erecting blockades against pipelines and fossil fuel extraction on their territories. Toronto shelter hotel residents demanding housing plans and an end to police evictions.
Delightfully, refreshingly, the text makes no secret about where it stands in relation to these efforts. Lam has no time for cultural discourse that believes itself evolved beyond the need for political clarity (she skewers a poetry event’s “non-land-acknowledgement-acknowledgment,” rebranded as an “invocation,” which doesn’t even name the Lenape, whose stolen land the building is on). Nor does she shy away from describing the state’s tactics of repression against those who dare to disrespect property as capitalism’s sacred organizing principle, sending cops in riot gear and on horses to raid encampment residents and their supporters, levelling mischief charges left and right against Palestine solidarity organizers. “To point out that Canada supports Israel’s mass murder, debilitation, displacement, and starvation of Palestinians is to interfere with property’s enjoyment,” Lam writes. Property as both the object of, and the justification for, the state’s brutal projections.
In On Property, Rinaldo Walcott draws a line from police violence during the 1992 Yonge Street uprising to the kettles and mass arrests of the 2010 G20 protests and the subsequent mischief charges faced by many of those activists. He asks, “What is it about property that demands that we, as a society, collectively sanction this kind of violence to protect it?” The question, in some ways, is rhetorical. Walcott himself, and many others, have written extensively about policing’s origins in maintaining slavery and settler colonialism. “If the first police were formed to manage and protect the slave-wealth of white masters by policing the actual body of the Black enslaved person,” writes Walcott, “then the accumulations of modern or even postmodern life now partially transfer those policing practices to managing property and the assumed transgressions against it.”
Lam, too, reminds us that “real estate speculation has always been foundational to so-called Canada,” and that what people generally learn about the imperial Hudson’s Bay Company, even in DEI’d versions of Canadian history—that it played a key role in colonization via the fur trade—is only half the truth.
In a real nepo baby narrative, the British monarchy granted the company 200 years’ worth of “royal rights” to “Rupert’s Land,” which included all of what is now Manitoba, most of Saskatchewan, southern Alberta, southern Nunavut, and northern parts of Ontario and Quebec. At the end of that period, the Canadian government purchased the land back from the company, via the Rupert’s Land Act of 1868. This is where the company’s true value was held. Of course, throughout these cursed transactions, the Crown dismissed any possibility of Indigenous land title, enacting its own form of settler squatters’ rights.
Lam maintains a deft self-reflexiveness about her entanglements in an extractive property system, without indulging in self-flagellation. It’s an impressive balance to strike for a book that puts every impulse and affect under examination.
A century and a half later, Lam describes the Toronto Islands’ land-trust-based leasing system, which keeps the price of houses there relatively affordable—a system won by mostly white islanders who fought against city expropriation in the ’70s and ’80s and won. “Before they were stolen,” she writes, “the islands were an important ceremonial and healing place, a sacred medicine place for the Mississaugas of the Credit. An example of the success of land claims as tied to race: white families in the 1970s vs. Indigenous people since forever.” Another jarring juxtaposition rooted in astute observation and crystallized anecdote, revealing one of settler colonialism’s fundamental contradictions: Property Journal’s bread and butter technique.
Several months into a fruitless housing search between Toronto and Montreal, Lam and Rice Cooker walk through Hochelaga, a historically francophone working class neighbourhood, guessing at the price of housing. She comments, “It’s gross, actually, wandering through poor neighbourhoods wondering how much the houses cost. Acting like settlers.” Lam maintains a deft self-reflexiveness about her entanglements in an extractive property system, without indulging in self-flagellation. It’s an impressive balance to strike for a book that puts every impulse and affect under examination. An inclination to be more disciplined about the frequency of her journal entries leads to a lesson on the creation of standardized time as a colonial project—by the same man, Sandford Fleming, who was a lead engineer on the Canadian Pacific Railway, infamously exploitative of Chinese labourers, and an essential part of Canada’s nation-building project.
It feels apt that the book’s interior is essentially an elaborate visual joke. In Property Journal, humour is not only a literary device, but a political ethic: one which exists in the same universe as the Rastafarian 'irreverence for individual property' that Walcott gestures to in the opening of On Property; or the dismissiveness that Steven Salaita proposes (in 'The Importance of Being Flippant') as a discursive tactic toward Palestinian liberation in the face of Zionist settler insecurity.
These passages, which take Lam’s practice of writing as their subject, draw attention to the book as an object. It is satisfying that a book so deeply concerned with materiality does not neglect its own conditions of existence. At Property Journal’s Toronto launch event, I learned that a version of the text was originally presented in wall calendar form, as part of a Richmond Art Gallery exhibition called a small but comfy house and maybe a dog. Each day, a gallery worker would enter the space and rip a page from the calendar; over time, the floor was strewn with journal entries. Lam also shared that the text’s distinctive, frenetic, black-and-white backgrounds were inspired by a post on the Instagram account @dank.lloyd.wright, mocking the zigzag pattern of a Toronto condo’s floor plans—a design made to maximize the number of possible apartments, yet completely nonsensical as a living space.
It feels apt that the book’s interior is essentially an elaborate visual joke. In Property Journal, humour is not only a literary device, but a political ethic: one which exists in the same universe as the Rastafarian “irreverence for individual property” that Walcott gestures to in the opening of On Property; or the dismissiveness that Steven Salaita proposes (in “The Importance of Being Flippant”) as a discursive tactic toward Palestinian liberation in the face of Zionist settler insecurity. Dismissiveness refuses to “prioritize the settler’s comfort at the expense of the native’s well-being.” Dismissiveness “aim[s] to create a world far better than the one brought about by colonization.” Humour as an abolitionist tactic: reject the premise of the world by laughing at it!
Often, humour reveals itself in Property Journal through the recording of absurdities as facts (“facts are a way to try to nail down a shared reality”). Sleeping becomes a felony. Cemeteries become unaffordable (“Saw the headline: ‘Even in your death, they squeeze you out’: How cemeteries have also become out-of-reach Toronto real estate”). Gallery curators become landlords become oblivious dinner hosts, giving tours of their own swanky mansions to artists who can barely afford rent. Humour works where there is a gap between how things are and how they could, or should, be. Surely, Lam seems to ask, everyone sees that something is terribly wrong here? “Maybe the most difficult thing was this tension within myself, between how I lived and what I thought was ‘right,’” Lam writes.
Like Mercedes Eng’s Prison Industrial Complex Explodes, which juxtaposes government reports, her father’s prison correspondence, photographs, lyric poetry; or Jordan Abel’s NISHGA, which gathers legal documents, concrete poetry, his father’s art, academic fragments; Property Journal is a text that teaches a method of reading the self and the world. It discourages passivity. It avoids skepticism (it is relieving, Lam suggests, just to engage in the act of thinking of alternatives with others). It analyzes individual experience not as a symbolic or psychoanalytical project but an immediate and material political one, at every turn.
To this end, Property Journal puts forth an ethic of resistance without romanticizing its outcomes. Community groups are co-opted by rival developers to appeal Chinatown condo developments at the Ontario Land Tribunal, wasting everyone’s time and putting even the meagre amount of affordable housing, promised as a community benefit in the original contract, at risk. Land trusts are one of the main objects of the organizing that Lam engages in over the course of the year. They are also presented as imperfect solutions at best, subject to the vicissitudes of non-profit laws, run by activists and tenant organizers who find themselves suddenly in property management without the appropriate training or disposition. Apron, a comrade who appears at several points in the book to advise on matters related to organizing, adds that “land trusts have become a way for the city to offload social housing it no longer wants to maintain,” and that “it’s important to assess their work clearly.”
The text may be troubled by these shortcomings, but it doesn’t dwell in them. Life goes on, day by day—and so do the actions taken by Lam and her comrades, in an effort to fight against predatory evictions and displacements in Chinatown; so do her sister’s house renovations, in an effort to make a safe and peaceful home for their retired parents; so do Lam’s navigations of property-related power dynamics with friends, landlords, curators, studio mates. It is here that Property Journal locates a great tenderness, in mundane relationality. A partner who is “never scared to be bored,” who repeats silly phrases like “they’re buying things for the bees!” just to make her laugh. An undocumented and unhoused elderly Chinese woman who refuses the crumbs of a time-limited cash subsidy allotted to her by her social worker (foot soldier for the state) and instead demands permanent social housing. A brother-in-law who believes in bootstrap capitalism but sweetly offers to help her buy her own place.
Resistance and grief, Lam says, hold some of the same power; 'They move together.'
Lam’s renaming of the people who appear in the book as household objects is not thingification, in a Marxist sense. By rendering her subjects as objects, decoupled from judgments about their value or use, Lam has actually restored their relationships to the foreground. There is an insistence here on yet another kind of gap: the one between commodified personhood and its deadly consequences on the one hand, and an anti-individualist refusal of these conditions on the other. This is the gap out of which the abolition of property might spring. Keeping each other alive, housed, safe, by any means necessary. So much has been lost in the name of property. Resistance and grief, Lam says, hold some of the same power; “They move together.” Property Journal moves through the stuckness of talking about property simply by doing it again, and again, and again. The act of dreaming has not yet been gentrified.
On Property Journal’s back cover, there are three equally sized images: one of a house, one looking out from the house into its yard, and one of a walking path, presumably nearby. On closer examination, it becomes clear that the same sky has been comically photoshopped into each of the images. The same brazen blue, the same cloud shapes. These were the photographs used by the real estate company to sell Lam’s parents’ house in Calgary, before they moved in with her sister in Toronto. "[A house] is a grave in reverse," said Hiroshi Nakao, the architect who designed the Ikebana artist Kosen Ohtsubo's house. A dream projected into the world, passed through, and then sealed off. In Lam’s hands, a house is also a fascist control fantasy, a permanent debt, a kaleidoscopic structure investigated through infinite angles, something to be proud of, something to be ashamed of, a record of life.
