Since living in Toronto, and by the very nature of my areas of interest and study, I’ve been much more sensitive to the issues of race, identity, belonging, and my relationship as a person living on this land. As a “Canadian”.
One of the most beautiful and simultaneously distressing thing I learned during master’s degree was my complicated relationship with being Canadian. Ever since my formative years, I always had so much pride to be part of this land. In one of my assignments last year, we had to describe our relationship with immigration, and my vivid memory was my parents asking my brother and I why we were cheering for Canada during the Olympics. We must have only lived in Canada for less than a decade, but we loved this place, it was unfathomable to me to be anywhere else. I always threw July 1st Canada Day parties with unalloyed pride, the bustling crowds, the fervent cheering of the parade down on Moncton for the Salmon Festival — those were the memories and symbolic gestures of my love for my home.
But learning about immigrants’ relationship on stolen land, and reflecting back to the history of what I was celebrating and cheering for — it broke my heart, but also opened my awareness. Reading inspiring work from Tuck and Yang (2012), Amar Bhatia (2013), and others opened my eyes to the need to the efforts to decolonize my education, my upbringing, and my life here. Thus, beautiful to gain awareness, but distressing to know the glaring holes in what I still don’t know.
Which I guess brings me to conversations I have been having with friends — sometimes on purpose, occasionally it was an unsolicited comment — on the nature of what it means to be Chinese, an immigrant, “Canadian”. Throughout my life, there were always questionable comments that I would hear, neither good nor bad, but just comments that make me ponder more about my identity. I don’t have a cohesive commentary here, but perhaps I can illustrate with an example.
On Being Canadian
A year ago, my two friends from Brazil that just moved to Canada and I were having dinner at their place. They mentioned about their recent roadtrip to the interior of British Columbia (think rural, gravel roads, farmland, highways stretching into the distance — think where Doug Stamper chased down Rachel Posner vibe), where it was the first time they met real Canadians. That was the first time that it caught my attention and it clicked for me — as I was sitting there chatting with them — they didn’t consider me Canadian! What I never got clarification on was whether that was because I was an immigrant, or was it because of my skin-colour. I have to admit the first time I heard this, it was a blow to what I thought was my ‘identity’. Being “Canadian” was always the part that made me feel different than my cousins in Hong Kong. It was what gave me that extra privilege that accompanies me everyday.
That interaction has always been on my mind, and no, aside from that initial shock, I was never offended. I was just so curious what Canada appears like through the eyes of newcomers. But it was also an attachment — maybe for immigrant children like myself, there is always that sense of attachment. We were denied attachment upon moving away, and we desperately cling on to the place that welcomed us. This place was not initially welcoming — it didn’t allowed me to sit with girls who looked like my Barbie dolls. It made me ashamed of my accent and broken English as a four year old. It made me resent my place of birth, my family’s roots and background. This land wanted nothing of me initially, but then it required my steadfast loyalty.
What a strange existence of have an identity tied to a country! Why is there so much power given to a place? I think it’s in our innate human nature to belong, but tied into the stereotypes, prejudices of what a place should look like. Which brings me to a second conversation I had recently recently with a friend about meeting Canadian friends. We have been friends for around a year, bonding over a mutual newness to Toronto. As we sat by a serene park bench in the middle of a garden in suburban Ontario, he mentioned to me he has not yet met any Canadian friends. Again, preface, no bad feelings, just genuine curiosity. I think he sensed the questioning look on my face immediately, and said he meant Canadians as people that are at least second generation of people born in Canada. It wasn’t because of skin colour. So even if I was White but not born in Canada, he would not consider me his “Canadian” friend, but a Chinese-Canadian, or Canadian-Chinese (whichever hyphenated adjective I would prefer). We discussed that there was a special “Whiteness” to Canadians, it was rooted in more privilege. I think this specialness constantly demands conformity. We engaged in a lengthly discussion around what it meant to fit in to Canada, what are mannerisms Canadians have.
As an immigrant — and I would argue, as a person of colour — there is always a duty to justify. We are always questioned on our level of belonging, of our identity is tied to the land. In her 2002 work, gender scholar Sherene Razack talks about the concept of “unmapping”, and she quotes Richard Phillips: “To unmap, is not only to denaturalize geography, by asking how spaces come to be but also to undermine world views that rest upon it”. For immigrants, our world views come directly to how I perceive — and receive — this land. I play by the land’s rules. I step out of line, my identity and loyalty to this land will be immediately questioned. But from my two conversations above, does it really matter any more what I feel to this land? I don’t mean this in a facetious sense. But really, why should I care if I am someone’s “Canadian” friend anymore? We mark identity based on our ability to follow the rituals, the norms of the land. But I guess as a child, I never asked if these rituals and norms are doing me any good. It makes me feel defeated why I have to play by these unspoken rules. Is there a subtle hierarchy of people there is to meet? And if so, then why are newcomers never referring to the Indigenous peoples of this land if they really want to meet “Canadians”, people who have been here myriad generations? Where is the gap in our education and our exposure for newcomers/immigrants that really, there is no true “Canadian” friend?
I often wondered if these conversations take place with an elder of this land, how baffled they would be. Here we speak of identity and belonging, but we have not once reflected on what this identity and belonging had meant for an erosion of Indigenous history and land. And this notion of conformity — if I can tell my four year self again, I want her to be able to retain her identity, to stop conforming to what is expected of her to fit in on a land that really didn’t have identity in the beginning. And even after all the trying and effort, you will still be seen as an immigrant, not Canadian. But then be freakin’ proud of that.
