> About 500,000 people in greater Vancouver have Chinese heritage, representing roughly 20 percent of the population, according to Canada’s latest census. The p

> About 500,000 people in greater Vancouver have Chinese heritage, representing roughly 20 percent of the population, according to Canada’s latest census. The proportion is highest in Richmond, just south of Vancouver proper, which is more than 50 percent Chinese. The suburb’s main commercial drag is No. 3 Road, a boulevard lined with big-box stores and shopping centers fronted by Chinese signage. The most elaborate is the Aberdeen Centre, a curvy mall sheathed in a colorful grid of translucent glass. It was built in 1989. > Over a lunch of steaming soup at Chef Hung Taiwanese Beef Noodle, a bustling second-floor restaurant, the mall’s developer, Thomas Fung, explains how he arrived at the idea. Fung, 67, is slim, with spiky black hair and delicate features. The son of a prominent Hong Kong financier, he arrived in Vancouver in the 1980s and did everything from running bakeries to film production. He soon grasped that the city was about to change dramatically. “I believed that in the coming 10 years, because of the 1997 issue in Hong Kong, there would be a lot of new immigrants coming over here,” Fung says. He knew they’d want the comforts of home, which led him to conceive of a shopping center that would stock the same goods as the megamalls of Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay. This capital influx problem has been decades in the making. I'm curious: what social problems are brewing today that we won't see the effects of until 10, 20 years down the line? How do you identify these trends? In Fung's case, it seems he identified the trend correctly by living directly in the midst of it. Is it possible for an observer to find these trends as well?