Elbows Up!, page 11
You must rid yourself of this delusion because, as I see things, there is no guarantee that the privileged position presently enjoyed by Canadians as “most-favoured serfs” will last. The day is near when the Yankees will see no further need to pamper us—they’ll own us outright. And then we may expect to be subjected to the same forms of direct oppression that have been inflicted on most of the other peoples inhabiting the two American continents. The steady growth of overt totalitarianism within the Master State itself brings ominous intimations that the good, fat days for the people who sold themselves into bondage may even now be drawing to a close. And remember—a man who sells himself into slavery does not earn the gratitude of his master: instead he earns a deep contempt. We Canadians have well earned such contempt—and a wise slave knows that a contemptuous master is more to be feared, in the long run, than an angry one.
Which leads me to an aside I think worth making. Not all Canadians have sold themselves. As you are well aware; the French-Canadians in Quebec don’t share our desire for self-immolation. They are resisting and thereby rousing our particular hatred and resentment. Why so? It is not because we really fear the development of a true federation of two nations (many other countries live with such federations, and live well); it is because we are deathly afraid that the intransigence of Quebec will draw the cold and hooded stare of the Eagle and thereby expose us, by implication, to the furies meted out to helots who revolt.
What I am trying to tell you is that nobody can, at this late stage, reverse the tide. Quebec, bravely as she may struggle, will fail. And so your own survival now depends on your becoming as selfishly inclined, as amoral as the men who have brought you and this country to its present sorry pass. You must needs become one of them, and you might as well become one of the overseer class, if you can make the grade. I recommend that you enter politics. Although you have not yet displayed the requisite capabilities for duplicity, cowardice, self-serving, and betrayal which pass for morality in high places, you might improve with practice. It is at least certain that a political career is one of the few available that will permit you to enjoy, with any security of tenure, the benefits accrued by renegades and sycophants.
You might conceivably consider entering the business world, as an alternative, but the opportunities it offers are strictly limited. This is the Holy of Holies, and since its true hierarchy is almost exclusively composed of citizens of the Master State (whether they are card-carrying citizens or only de facto citizens is of no import), the chances of a helot rising to those secure seats of power are almost nonexistent. But as a politician you would be employed in the services of the Business God, and as a valuable and trusted slave, you would be deserving of good treatment and assured of a safe niche. There is another course you might consider taking. You could follow the example of so many of your compatriots and anticipate events by journeying to Rome, before the Marines come north for you. As a beginning you could voluntarily enlist in the legions of the Eagle and thereby gain the jump on those of your generation who do not yet realize that the day approaches when the Ottawa satraps will join Australia, New Zealand, and other such in sending levies to fight America’s wars for her. Since you have no Negro, Indian, Eskimo, or other dubious blood in your veins, you ought to be able to wangle a cushy job far from the sound of battle and from the stench of burning babies. Eventually you could hope to be rewarded with citizenship in the Master State, and although this would require that you reject all you have heretofore been taught to believe is good in man, it would at least provide you with something you never had before—a verifiable nationality.
I have only suggested a few of the possible funk holes, and you will easily think of many more. The point is that you should be thinking about them very seriously, and right now. Time is running out for your fellow slaves who, complacent and myopic as they are, believe they have made a splendid bargain with a kindly master. The cold and brutal hour when they learn the truth, and when they learn the price of their betrayal of themselves and of their land, lies close at hand. God help them then, for no one else will wish to, if they could.
JEN SOOKFONG LEE
The Promises We Keep
1982: East Vancouver
It has been raining all day, the kind of summer rain that is an insult to everyone but especially six-year-old me, who only has three more weeks of school vacation left and here I am, stuck inside instead of riding my purple banana-seat bicycle like the wind down the alley. In the living room of our Vancouver Special, I am sitting cross-legged on the orange carpet, staring through the sheer curtains at the grey sky and greyer clouds. The trees are sodden.
To the south, I see a figure with an umbrella walking toward our house, a person who moves slowly but with perfect posture, a man in an overcoat, holding a big yellow envelope. As he comes closer I can see his fedora, and the cuffs of his suit pants as he steps around puddles. It’s Yeh Yeh, and I sigh. It could be someone interesting but instead it’s my grandfather, coming home from his daily bus trip to Chinatown. I don’t really know what he does there, only that sometimes he comes home with apple tarts from the Hong Kong Café or cocktail buns from the Keefer Bakery. But today, he is only holding an envelope, no doubt filled with boring documents from the Lee’s Benevolent Association, the kind he pores over in the evenings as he listens to the news on the radio. Same old, same old.
By the time my grandfather has shaken off his umbrella, hung up his coat, and retreated to his bedroom, I have already turned on the television.
* * *
—
When I was a child, we lived with my grandfather, and his past was almost totally unknown to my sisters and me. We only knew that he came to Canada alone, that he had lived for many years without his wife and children, running his three-seat barbershop in Vancouver’s Chinatown, and that my teenaged father had joined him in 1951. We were familiar with his present self: tall and thin, one shoulder slightly lower than the other, a habit of eating bacon and eggs every day for lunch. He didn’t offer any stories and we never asked him any questions.
As an adult now, with a child of my own who is endlessly curious about my family’s past, it seems odd that my sisters and I didn’t wonder about his old life, about the decades he spent living in a single-room occupancy hotel, saving money that he sent home to a small village in China. These were tumultuous political years, not unlike the moment we’re in right now, when anti-Asian racists routinely vandalized businesses in Chinatown and harassed the people who lived and worked there. These were the years of the Head Tax, the Chinese Exclusion Act, and then the Second World War, which saw many Chinese-Canadian soldiers fighting for the Allied forces, only to return home to a country where they were stateless and still being denied the right to vote. I was a child of the 1980s who attended public school and the University of British Columbia (which, back then, was sometimes derisively called the University of a Billion Chinese), and it wasn’t until I was nineteen and roaming the public library that I stumbled across the seminal book Saltwater City: An Illustrated History of the Chinese in Vancouver by Paul Yee, and learned about any of these pivotal events, all of which my grandfather had not just witnessed but lived through. But by then, my grandfather had been dead for five years.
Perhaps we never asked because the history we were taught of the early twentieth century barely included Chinese Canadians at all. It was the building of the railways, blank space, the gold rush, more blank space, so much smooth and boring blank space that our curiosity never took hold. We never asked because we were told there was nothing to ask about.
The blank space where knowledge should be felt personal. Because it was personal.
1997: The University of British Columbia
In this class of twenty-four students, an advanced seminar in Canadian Studies, I am the only racialized person and I barely speak. My professor, who I actually really like, is a big man in even bigger plaid shirts, who provides us with a reading list that is typical of the CanLit canon, with authors from long ago paired with more contemporary ones, as a kind of mirroring-through-time exercise: Robertson Davies and Timothy Findley, E.J. Pratt and Robin Blaser, Susanna Moodie and, of course, Margaret Atwood. Including the authors, I am still the only racialized person in this class.
In the middle of term, I finally find the strength to ask the question that has been bothering me for weeks. “Why are there no authors of colour on this reading list?”
Instead of answering the specific question—why couldn’t the reading list be expanded for this particular course—the professor launches into a mini-lecture about immigrant communities and their lack of engagement in the arts (he does not address Indigenous peoples at all, which does not surprise me). “The first generation who arrives here,” he says, broadly smiling at me in that benevolent way in which many white men with power will smile at me for the rest of my life, “are too concerned with survival, with making sure they have enough money to eat and find housing. The second are too worried about moving up in the world, becoming doctors and lawyers for both the money and the status. It’s not until the third generation that we begin to see any cultural output—the books and the films. Most of you haven’t been here long enough.” And he continued smiling, expectantly, as if I was supposed to agree with him. I said nothing.
What I could have said: my great-grandfather came to Canada in the 1880s, chasing the gold rush. He returned to China after being chased off stakes by white men, after years of working in a laundry, disappointed and resentful. Later, my grandfather came to finish his father’s story and stayed, but he also couldn’t bring his wife and children to join him for forty years because of the Exclusion Act. My mother came to marry my father in an arranged marriage because all those old immigration barriers had ensured that every Canadian Chinatown was full of men and precious few women.
Yes, my sisters and I were the first to be born here. But my family has been here a very, very long time. None of my family’s stories fit this professor’s theory, but there was no way of explaining that to him in front of a class full of other students, all white, so instead I wrote my final paper on Margaret Atwood and got an A+.
* * *
—
The history of Canada is marked by ugly truths: the purposeful genocide of Indigenous peoples, the shameful rejection and deaths of the Indian passengers on the Komagata Maru, the internment of Japanese Canadians, and many more. None of these were taught to my sisters and me with honesty, or through the voices of the oppressed and abused. Mostly, they weren’t taught to us at all. Rather, we were taught to celebrate our multiculturalism and ostensible peace, without any interrogation of what obscured atrocities those things had been built on, or whether the contented diversity we were trained to see was real at all.
As I started to dig into my grandfather’s life and the shared history of hundreds of thousands of Chinese Canadians, I began to learn all the components of his life that he had never tried to tell us, and that we had never asked him about. He had gotten married and conceived all four of his children on brief visits home every few years. He renamed his barbershop after my father’s birth, calling it Mon Sun Barber Shop, loosely translated as My New Son’s Barber Shop. He was one of the first Chinese men to apply for and be granted Canadian citizenship, in 1948. He volunteered at the Lee’s Benevolent Association for most of his life, helping newcomers with job applications, housing, and language. He bought his first home, a narrow yellow house that still stands, just down the street from Kingsgate Mall, for my grandmother, when her immigration application was finally approved in 1956.
Do you see the life emerging here, peeking through the crevices that oppression and hardship can sometimes overlook?
Why didn’t he tell us any of this? I think the answer is simple but complicated. My grandfather came to a place the Chinese called Gold Mountain and discovered that the promise of it—prosperity, peace, home—was false, just as his own father had a generation before. He wanted to be a scholar, maybe even an academic, but he wound up cutting hair and translating the stories in the newspapers for his customers. He hoped to see wealth in his lifetime, but in his old age he realized that the wealth he had worked for would not be earned by him or his children or, even, most of his grandchildren. He endeavoured to build a legacy for his family that was safe and secure, only to watch silently as his teenaged granddaughter came home from the bus stop covered in mud after young white men pelted her with handfuls of wet dirt while calling out racist insults.
How do you say these things to young girls who are singing along to Grease and trying to feather each other’s hair? How do you tell them that you wish you could have done better for them, that life is long and hard and you don’t even know if the success they want—whatever it is—will even be available to them? How do you warn them that a country that you think is home can betray you, over and over again?
You don’t. You see? Simple but not.
In 2020, when the covid-19 pandemic was sweeping around the world, a woman standing on her apartment balcony yelled a racial slur at me as I walked by with my arms full of dog food. Online, I was harassed for weeks because of one joke tweet I wrote about white people’s assumptions of Chinese wet markets. On the television, I saw elders being pushed and punched in Chinatown for no reason at all. Or, perhaps more precisely, for just existing.
Gold Mountain was a promise that Canada never intended to keep.
2023: Toronto
I am sitting at the bar of a very nice restaurant with a dear friend after the launch of my first memoir, celebrating with a prawn cocktail and glasses of wine. When he leaves to go to the washroom, I check my phone, looking for the Globe and Mail review. There it is, and it’s glowing. But more than that, they have printed photos from my past: one when I was almost nineteen years old and on a trip with friends to Hawaii, and another taken in my family’s wood-panelled basement when I was five, my hair in crooked braids. I sent the photos when they asked weeks ago, but never expected to see them accompanying the article at all. It seems so improbable that my old self—that girl from East Van whose best friend liked to date gangsters, who poured rum into the Slurpees she bought from the local 7-Eleven, who learned to play pool in a hall off Hastings Street so that the boys in the Metallica T-shirts would think she was all right—would be invited into the national newspaper of record. I have become someone else in all the years since then, a respectable and reliable author who dresses appropriately and doesn’t make a face when drinking red wine, and my current self, the one who writes books and makes slightly naughty but still tasteful jokes at writers’ festivals, is the one who has a relationship with the Globe and Mail. Not Teenaged Jen who drank piña coladas until she puked. And certainly not Little Jenny with the braids and the collection of headless Barbies under her second-hand bed.
When my friend comes back to the bar, I am crying into my napkin. “Is it the Globe review,” he asks, concern etched into his face. “Is it that bad?”
“No,” I say, “it’s wonderful.”
“Then why are you crying?”
“I wish I knew.”
But the truth is I do know, but I don’t know how to say that there is nothing more my five-year-old self would have liked than to be featured in a big-time newspaper, and that this moment is for her, the one whose grandfather lived his whole life for her to have this opportunity. Here I am, being celebrated for writing a memoir, my story, and he never got the chance to tell anyone his. I feel pride and surprise and grief. And shame. We can’t forget the shame.
* * *
—
So, what are we fighting for now? Am I fighting for the idea of Gold Mountain, the idealized version of Canada that prompted my grandfather to leave his village at the age of seventeen? Am I fighting for Canada as I know it to be, scarred by colonialism and oppression, the deaths of children at residential schools, indentured Chinese labourers on the railway, and drug users felled by a poisoned supply? Or am I fighting for the Canada I think we could be, the Canada that might emerge from this mess of trade policy and misinformation and anti-trans and misogynistic ideology? Or is it worth fighting for at all, when this is the country that gave my grandfather hope and took it away, that gave my mother a home and five daughters to care for her, but that also kept her at the fringes through language and culture? Is it too poisoned from the roots up?
My grandfather chose to stay here. In the almost forty years he lived in Vancouver alone, he didn’t once choose to permanently go home to his village, to finally live with his wife and children, to pump water every morning from the communal well, to walk his three daughters and one son to the same school he once attended. He was lonely. He ate almost every meal in a diner. He saved every paper napkin and packet of ketchup. Instead of moving back, he chose to focus on bringing everyone together in Canada, even if it took forty years, one world war, and three immigration policy changes. And he succeeded. My father, my aunties, my grandmother, cousins, and second cousins. By the 1970s, they had all arrived, and my grandfather had everyone he had ever loved, right in front of him.
This, to me, is the most beautiful part of my grandfather’s life that remained hidden for so long. Every day he spent alone in Vancouver meant he was one day closer to his family joining him. Every dollar he saved meant he was one dollar closer to buying my grandmother that house near Kingsgate Mall. Every letter he wrote back home was a promise that he fully intended to keep.
I am choosing, then, to believe that Canada can be the country my grandfather once dreamed of, but that it can also be the Canada that I would wish for my children and grandchildren. Because if there is anything I have learned from researching my grandfather’s life all these years, it’s that short-term success can be a distraction and that our long-term goals—the wishes that are core to the very definition of our being—are the ones worth pursuing. My grandfather came here and eventually brought everyone with him so that I, his youngest grandchild, could have every option available to me, so that I could be whatever I wanted. He came here and didn’t achieve wealth. He came here, worked, loved, and died, and I became a writer.
