The Asian Heritage Month event was excellent. Seven people read and the variety kept it interesting; the crowd of about 40 received all of our work with gracious applause. I thought my reading went quite well.

On the ferry trip over to Victoria I stepped outside for some fresh air. I could hear music playing somewhere and thought, is the ferry piping music outside now? Venturing upstairs I encountered a band playing on the top level of the ferry - a jazzy three piece consisting of a drummer, a bass player, and a guy playing a Chapman Stick, an eleven string instrument that he held like a saxophone. They were incredible and kept everyone bumping and grooving for most of the trip. Naturally, with about half an hour to go, some ferry guys came along and shut them down. Apparently you need a permit to perform on the ferry. I really need to start carrying a camera.

Here is a truncated version of what I read in Victoria - I had to ad lib some parts so there not written down here.

When I was Chinese: A Travelogue


The first time I was Chinese happened in a public swimming pool in Montreal, during the heady summer of 1984. Prince and the Revolution were heating up the airwaves with “When Doves Cry.” About a year later I would do a somersault in that same pool and bang my teeth on the edge. I remember the spray of blood in my hands, the trip to the dentist, the flat spinning disc he used to smooth out my one tooth, which is still shorter than the other.

On that day I was practicing those same somersaults, a skill I had only recently acquired, spinning my body in a tight tuck over and over again until my head rushed with the rotations and lack of oxygen. My heart was free. I had yet to develop the all-encompassing crush I would soon have on Angela Saini; had yet to discover girls at all except as a strange counterpoint to my own confusing existence. It was the beginning of my flying dreams, the ones where we'd travel as a family to a villa in the country with a giant rock in the crook of the winding front drive. I would climb up onto the rock and launch myself into the sky with a gentle breaststroke, kicking my feet like a frog the same way I had just learned to do in the pool. The flying dream was always the same, and I woke up with the sheets tied in a knot around my legs.

Over and over I turned the somersaults, breathing in quickly as my head broke the water, blowing out with my nose, smiling as the bubbles grazed my face. Sometimes I would force my way to the surface clutching my head, the water having found its way up my nostrils and I assumed, directly into my brain, causing that uncomfortable sensation so similar yet distinctly different from the head freeze of a slurpy. It was in one of these rotations that I bumped into a bigger boy.

The bigger boys scared me. They used words I knew they shouldn't use and with a casualness that I found both alarming and enticing.

I was in mid-somersault when I felt my head bump into something soft, felt my arm being tugged and then pushed, and suddenly I was standing on the pool bottom rubbing my eyes and looking into the face of an older boy, who was scowling at me like a disapproving teacher. Then his face broke into a smile and I thought everything was all right, hey, just a joke, sorry about that whole bumping into you thing, I'll be on my way, except I couldn't turn around. His smile turned serious again, and he pointed a finger at me. "Watch it, chink." Then he swam away.

I went under the water and tried to force tears from my eyes. I wanted to be upset, really upset, so that when I related the story to my mother she would find the boy and destroy him. It was such a strange thing to do—sit on the bottom of the pool trying to cry—that looking back on it now I wonder if it really happened at all. And so, the first time I was Chinese was also the first time I questioned if I really was.

****

The second time I was Chinese didn’t happen until I moved to Vancouver from Montreal. No one asked me if I wanted to come here. No one. I must have known we were moving for a long time: there was the selling of the house, the packing, the loading of the trucks. I must have known. But in my memory it happens like this: My parents come up to me and say we’re moving to Vancouver; the next day I’m on a plane.

There were more Chinese people in Vancouver than I had ever seen concentrated in one place before. There were also not a lot of black people. I took to counting them and stopped when I reached 25. That took me three years. I also started to count Mercedes-Benzes but got sick of that game very quickly.

The Chinese kids in school wore their ethnicity as a badge of honour. For one thing, Chinese people can swear in an entirely different language, and being able to swear without anyone knowing that you’re swearing is, God knows why, one of the greatest weapons in all of childhood. As the new kid that would have been my "in," except, of course, I don’t speak Chinese. People ask me why all the time, and the short answer is my mother is Scottish, and my parents never spoke it around the house, but I just recently realized that the answer could be much shorter. Cause I don’t want to. How you like that, loser? is just one example. Others are: Because I hate it, because you speak it, because the Chinese will one day rule the world and I will be the last man standing against them.

Can you believe that at one time in the past people feared a Yellow invasion? I remember seeing a cartoon from the early 1900’s that featured a rather scared looking man sitting on a chair, surrounded by pigtailed, bucktoothed, squinty-eyed malevolents. He was, if you’ve never seen it, the last white man in BC. Despite this it seems that younger Asian people are far more eager to appropriate the subjugation of African Americans than their own race. When you see two Vietnamese guys saying, "What’s up nigger?" as a greeting you know we’re through the looking glass.

Speaking of rap music, one of the most telling signs I’ve seen lately of Asians becoming dominant in popular culture, apart from when they’re flying through the air kicking the crap out of each other, is in music videos. Busty blonde Asian ladies in tight skirts and hoochie bras are now the objects of attraction. I suppose some might call that progress.

The few white friends I had were never allowed to forget the colour of their skin. When they weren't insulting them in Chinese and Korean, my Asian friends were abusing them with historical allusions and general mistruths: I had slaves that looked just like you back in China; are your mother and father cousins; white people taste just like chicken. Even though I couldn't understand them any better than my white friends, I made sure what side of the dividing line I fell on.

My flirtation with Chineseness shifted again in university, and I can trace the switch to two sources - Chinese varsity clubs and Braveheart. The latter, released in 1996, suddenly made it very, very cool to be Scottish, and I could feel that quarter of my DNA rising with a swell of pride. I told everyone who cared and many who didn’t about how I came to be the heir to William Wallace’s fighting spirit, ambushing people with this information in answer to their “Why don’t you speak Chinese?” queries and their many questions about the size of my nose. Yes my nose is mighty, I would tell them, as mighty as William Wallace’s when he stood before proud Edward’s army.

But if Braveheart had me creeping into the Scottish camp, Chinese varsity clubs pushed me all the way in. Inevitably called the Dragon Chinese Flying Sword Varsity Dragon Sword Chinese Varsity Club, such clubs entire purpose seemed to be holding dances and fundraisers. One such enterprising club was famous for its sushi nights. I went to one, and being the little shit I am pointed out to one of the club members that sushi isn’t Chinese. Her response, which has stayed with me until now and in all likelihood, will until the end of my days, was “Sushi isn’t cultural. It belongs to all Asians.”

Of course nothing is more popular now than to be from mixed heritage, making all of my struggles seem academic at best. More than once I have been privy to conversations that went something like this:

Caucasian friend: I’d really like to marry an Asian person.

Me: While we are great, I have to ask why?

Caucasian friend: We’d have the cutest children.


The next time I was Chinese was in education, where I was told in no uncertain terms that it was wonderful I was Chinese. Absolutely fabulous. We need more Chinese people in teaching, they told me, apparently to show the Chinese students that if they work hard enough they too can be at the front of the class. The more I heard it the more I thought – they’re right. We do need more Chinese people in teaching. And it was my job to say why.

(Missing ad lib part here.)

My question became then what it still is now: Do we need more Chinese teachers or more teachers who look Chinese?


The last time I was Chinese came with a request to write something for one of the new Asian magazines that was coming out. Once again I set out determined to discover what it meant to be Chinese in North America, a topic much discussed before me and probably long discussed after. Yet each time I set out to write it I couldn’t shake the thought that, like the Emperor walking naked down the street, someone would pop out and announce, “But look! He is not Chinese!”

Recently I went to a magazine store to read some of these magazines. Most have been named after food, cleverly choosing an item that is yellow on the inside (get it, yellow, Asian – except for Indian people of course) and white on the outside because we suffer from a debilitating skin disease and like to take baths in bleach. Or something like that, my understanding on this point is a little shaky. From these magazines I gleaned the following useful facts:

Asians like to have sex.
They like fast cars that they cleverly call rice rockets.
They eat Asian food.
They watch movies.
They congregate with other Asians.
They are interested in fashion.

I only feel Chinese when that identity is used against me, or when I feel threatened by racist screwheads. In a way I wonder if that isn’t a little racist itself.

Usually I feel ambivalent or even negative towards things I perceive to be indicative of Chinese culture. Every time I hear my girlfriend’s aunts say to her, “Wow, quite the appetite tonight,” or “You look better. Losing weight,” or “Here Thomas, you eat that, she doesn’t have to eat any more,” I want to shove the food right up their noses. Just once I want to make a pre-emptive strike on my own aunts and say, “Hey, you’re looking good. Put on a little weight, haven’t you? I couldn’t do that with my slim figure, but the extra weight really works on you.”

I hate Chinese music and Chinese popular culture, the homophobia and constant fixation on over-eating.

And I hate the way Chinatown is treated like a Chinese theme park, a cultural landmark to be celebrated. Come see the Chinese people in their natural environment; they’re just like hobbits living above ground. Let’s forget that the reason Chinatown is located in BC’s poorest neighbourhood and not in Shaughnessy or Kitsilano is that they weren’t allowed anywhere else. I know, I know, we’ve appropriated Chinatown, we now decide on the sign and the signifier, we are the masters of its meaning, just like the colour yellow, and even the squinty eyes, the buck teeth. Meanwhile Chinatown is moving to Richmond.


I told a friend that I was coming to Victoria for Asian Heritage month. He said, “It’s Asian Heritage Month? But I don’t feel anything. Shouldn’t I?” I feel the same way when I see Molson Canadian ads. When the American actor listed through all the reasons why he’s Canadian I remember thinking, “I’m not Canadian.” What does being Canadian mean? Thinking about being “Canadian” makes me think about charges of being “Un-American” and nothing is scarier than that. And if there is such a thing as being “Canadian,” than there must be its opposite – Louis Riel, if I remember my history correctly, was Un-Canadian.

I feel the same way about being Chinese. In the same way I often feel Un-Canadian in my dislike of beer, songs about hockey, and ham, I also feel Un-Chinese, but not, if this makes any sense, Not Chinese. Clearly I am Chinese, if only by quirk of fate, but that is enough for me. I am Canadian in much the same way. If my parents had waited another month I really would have been Scottish, although to the Scottish I would have always been Chinese.

You might wonder, with my sense of identity so fragile, why I bothered to come and read at an Asian Heritage Month event. It’s because I believe in it. I believe in community, in gathering, and, most of all, celebration. I don’t need to believe in being Chinese in order to believe in those things. I’ll go to Canada Day events, sing the national anthem with my eyes closed, eat my maple syrup and take pictures with Mounties because I believe in celebrating. Canada is a beautiful country – it was before any of us got here, and it will continue to be should we manage to wipe ourselves off the planet. And that’s worth celebrating.