“If you don’t have Chinese culture, baby, all you’ve got is the color of your skin.”
When a relationship or a marriage is freed from the political and ideological framework of the Movement, it has to stand on its own. The unresolved issues of culture and ethnicity have to be worked through. That was the hard lesson I learned. By 1985, the many differences and contradictions that affected us personally and as a couple came to the fore for Gillian and me. We decided to part ways. Once we’d agreed to the amiable terms, the divorce was simple and cost me the $80 filing fee after I prepared the legal document with the help of my lawyer friend Ian Wong. As Gillian and I stood before Judge John Gomery, he only had one question—whether our three-year-old daughter would be well taken care of. We told the judge that both of us loved Jessica so much that we would not let anything harm her. He granted us joint custody of our daughter, and the divorce.
During the process of the separation and divorce, I experienced a period of anguish. Gillian and I had been together for seven years. I went through the classical five steps of grieving the end of a relationship—denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance. It took me a year and a half to two years to come out of my daze, and to come to terms with my new situation. Amazingly, at the end of this period, I felt free and energized.
For the first time in my life I had to dig deep into myself to understand who I was without the external influences of society, politics and ideology or the traditional Chinese values of the institution of marriage. I began to develop an awareness of being Chinese Canadian—I needed to find myself. But I was in for a rude awakening. In 1985, there was little in the way of Chinese Canadian culture—the culture that expressed our experiences in Canada.
I continued to search for that elusive identity and sense of belonging. At first I explored the influences from within the Chinese North American culture that I could connect with emotionally. But I also needed to bond with the cultural roots of my forebears. Since childhood, I’d heard stories of historical events from the time of the various Chinese empires, but I’d never read the four main Chinese classical novels, despite the fact that one of them was Water Margin, the book my father had so often quoted from.142 The Chinese classics are to the East as the works of Homer, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are to the West, and they have influenced the cultural and literary thinking of the Chinese through the millennia. I wanted to dig into how those stories have crept into the psyche and influenced the cultural works of Chinese people around the world. In the end, I read the English versions of the four Chinese classics.
I read everything about Chinese North America and the Chinese diaspora that I could get my hands on. I attended Chinese film festivals wherever I could. In the 1980s there wasn’t much overseas Chinese culture to be had, but there was enough to drive my interest and imagination. Lacking Chinese Canadian materials, I took to the surrogate of Chinese American works. One of the first Asian American films was the 1982 film noir Chan is Missing by Wayne Wang, which left a lasting impression on me because it had a storyline situated entirely in the Chinese working-class community of San Francisco. This was ten years after I had been influenced by the Asian American civil rights movement, which came on in the wake of the African American movement: students went on strike in California universities for Asian American studies. Due to its greater numbers, the Chinese American cultural scene in general was much more developed and vibrant than what was happening in the Chinatowns of Canada. I felt a strong need to be aware of my identity and the need to feel proud of what I am.
I became a proponent of developing and promoting Chinese Canadian culture. I travelled to the Chinatowns of Vancouver and Toronto and met some of the pioneers of Chinese Canadian cultural expression. There was Barry Wong, one of the originators of Pender Guy, an English-language community radio program that offered local writers an outlet for their stories, satire and community action. Pender Guy is a play on words in English and Chinese. Guy is Toishanese for street. Barry was a community cultural activist and one of the few people I knew who could speak in grammatically correct paragraphs and in a mellifluous radio voice. There was the late Jim Wong-Chu, the author of a book of poetry, Chinatown Ghosts.143 His poems had a strong influence on me. (Later, I would use his poetry in my 1993 documentary Moving the Mountain.) Jim came to Canada as a “paper son” and he lived through the experience of all that entails. He was a founding member of the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop through which many Asian Canadian writers emerged. The prolific author Paul Yee is one of those writers that came through the workshop. I read his Tales of Gold Mountain to Jessica as a bedtime story.
I looked south of the border and was influenced by the writings of Frank Chin, a fellow railroader (he worked as a brakeman on the Southern Pacific Railroad). His writing was impatient and uncompromising—that was his appeal for me. This is one of his works:
The Year of the Dragon144
We’come a Chinatowng, Folks! Ha. Ha. Ha. … Happy New Year!
Fred Eng. “Freddie” of Eng’s Chinatown tour’n’travoo.
“We tell Chinatown where to go.” Ha ha ha. I’m top guide here.
Allaw week Chinee New Year. Sssssshhh Boom! Muchee muchie
fiery crake! Ha. Ha. Ha…
But you’re my last tour of the day, folks. And on my last tour of the
day, no hooey. I like to let my hair down. Drop the phony accent.
And be me. Just me.
I figure once a day, I have got to be me.
I was particularly provoked by Chin’s searing criticisms of literary stars Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston.
Tan’s Joy Luck Club made it big on the New York Times best sellers list and in Hollywood with a white feminist portrayal of Chinese immigrant families, in which the emasculated Chinese males were painted as insensitive misogynist louts. Chin regarded Tan’s work as “fake,” denigrating Chinese men and playing to the stereotypical racist assumptions of Chinese Americans depicted by popular white culture.
Maxine Hong Kingston’s books, China Men and The Woman Warrior, charmed me with the stories describing the early lo wah kiu (old overseas Chinese) experience in Gim Shan (Gold Mountain) through which I tried to situate the narrative of my father and grandfather. However, Frank Chin in his brash style shattered my impressions with his scathing critiques.
In his influential essay “Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake,”145 Chin lambasted Kingston, along with Tan and David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly), for perpetuating racist stereotypes in their works so they would gain easy acceptance by white America. He wrote:
These works are held up before us as icons of a Chinese culture….
Amy Tan opens her Joy Luck Club with a fake Chinese fairy tale about a duck that wants to be a swan and a mother who dreams of her daughter being born in America, where she’ll grow up speaking perfect English and no one will laugh at her.146
Chin accused writers like Tan of faking Chinese fairy tales to please Western appetites instead of using the real tales from China’s mythical past. As for Maxine Hong Kingston and David Henry Hwang:
In The Women Warrior, Kingston takes a childhood chant, ‘The Ballad of Mulan’ … and re-writes the heroine, Fa Mulan, to the specs of the stereotype of the Chinese woman as a pathological white supremacist victimized and trapped in a hideous Chinese civilization. … David Henry Hwang repeats Kingston’s revision of Fa Mulan and Yue Fei, and goes on to impoverish and slaughter Fa Mulan’s family to further dramatize the cruelty of the Chinese.147
Before you jump to your feet to accuse Chin of misogyny and professional jealousy, note that in his essay he touched on sexual politics and the emasculation of Chinese men in white popular culture. With a “stroke of white racist genius,” he said, Kingston had attacked “Chinese civilization, Confucianism itself, and where its life begins: the fairy tale.” Kingston, Chin wrote, “takes Fa Mulan, turns her into a champion of Chinese feminism and an inspiration to Chinese American girls to dump the Chinese race and make for white universality.” American publishers, he said, “went crazy for Chinese women dumping on Chinese men.” Chin cited the October 1978 issue of Cosmopolitan (after Kingston’s The Woman Warrior had appeared in 1976), in which Lily Chang wrote: “Once we have broken away from the restaurants of Chinatown, we prefer lovers distinguished by a freer, more emotionally flamboyant style. In short, Caucasians” (from the article “What It’s Like to Be a Chinese American Girl”).148
All right, enough of going against the tide. Chin gets “real” with three other Chinese woman writers; he writes glowingly about them:
Unlike the pack of Chinese Americans, Sui Sin Far (Edith Eaton), Diana Chang, and Dr. Han Suyin write knowledgeably and authentically of Chinese fairy tales, heroic tradition and history. … Chinese men who are not emasculated and sexually repellent in Chinese American writing are found in [their] books and essays. These three women are unique unto themselves, for they are Eurasians. Diana Chang and Dr. Han Suyin are the daughters of Chinese men. Sui Sin Far was the daughter of a Chinese mother and British father.149
Sui Sin Far is better known in the US than in Canada despite her Canadian upbringing. Her family moved to Montreal when she was little. Her early writings as Edith Eaton appeared in the Montreal Star, where she wrote about the plight of the Chinese working man in the early 1900s and criticized the burden imposed by the racist head tax. She later went to the US to write under her pen name, Sui Sin Far. Her writings were the only ones found at the time to be sympathetic to the Chinese as she used her pen to denounce the US Chinese Exclusion Act. There are at least two biographies of Sui Sin Far written by American authors. She died at age forty-nine, in 1914, and was buried in Mount Royal Cemetery in Montreal.150
In Chinese Canadian literary circles, the “Amy Tan effect” fortunately did not take hold. When I read Disappearing Moon Cafe151 by SKY Lee, I was prejudiced by Frank Chin’s critique of Chinese American women writers. However, SKY Lee, one of the first Chinese Canadian woman to be published, wrote with understanding and sympathy about the Gold Mountain men who were transposed from the Chinese villages to a hostile Canadian setting. Lee, who is also a feminist, wrote about the strong women who had to negotiate between Chinese and Canadian social mores while at the same time remaining true to their heritage, values and newfound sense of independence. She wrote real Chinese Canadian literature reflecting the racism encountered in Canada, and about both the early Chinese who fought to retain their feudal relations, and the younger generation that rebelled against these relations.
In a depiction of a more esoteric view of identity, the Chinese men and women of the era in SKY Lee’s novel were governed by the cultural and moral values of the times. They clung to their identity as overseas Chinese because, indeed, they were inassimilable as determined by the laws of this country and by the colour of their skin. They all took pride in their Chinese-ness; since childhood they’d been taught that their culture was superior to that of the barbarians, even though in Canada, they were at the mercy of these same barbarians. As time went on, the thinking changed and Chinese identity started to become Chinese Canadian identity. This transition found expression in the cultural works of the other early Chinese Canadian writers.
The American Chinese found their cultural expression in the ’60s and ’70s and the Canadian Chinese cultural workers expressed their Chinese-ness a decade or two later. It is through these cultural works that my quest for identity got fleshed out, and when my search for clarity and belonging became political, it became a demand for a rightful place in the cultural makeup of this country.
The Malays have a word, peranakan, to describe the Chinese born in Malaysia, Indonesia and in Southeast Asia. The peranakan Chinese have acculturated into the indigenous society and gradually lost their Chinese language and culture. Assimilation was easier: after a generation or two, the physical racial features become indistinguishable. Since the reunification period in the 1950s, the peranakanization of the Chinese born in Canada, or who came at a young age like myself, has been a natural process. Assimilation of the mind if not the body has taken place. Many have fought to retain some degree of the Chinese cultural heritage implanted by their parents and the Chinese ancestors of an earlier period, despite the strong attraction of the dominant popular culture. In this process, a Chinese Canadian cultural identity has emerged. This identity is no longer governed by the millennia-old Confucian culture of the early Chinese. This Chinese Canadian identity was born out of the experience and reality of today’s Canada.
Due to the immigration restrictions of the past hundred years, the Chinese community in Canada is still an immigrant one. The language patterns have evolved: first the majority dialect was Toishanese,152 then Cantonese starting in the ’70s, and now Mandarin is becoming the dominant dialect. The Toishanese villagers brought with them their culture and values of a hundred years ago; the Cantonese brought with them the more modern urban Hong Kong values; now the immigrants from Mainland China come with the values distilled from a socialist educational system over the last half century. Many of these came as professionals, in order to qualify for entry into Canada; some eventually joined the working class when they could not find jobs in their chosen field.
Interspersed over this period were the arrival of the Indochinese and Vietnamese Chinese, and the Taiwanese and Chinese from Southeast Asia and other exotic locations, like those coming to Quebec from the French-speaking islands of Mauritius and Réunion.
Then there is the intergenerational gap, as the Canadian-born Chinese educated in English and/or French, integrating with mainstream Canadian and Québécois cultural values, started to lose their ability to speak Chinese. Perhaps it is the members of this generation of Chinese Canadians who have the most questions about identity consciousness. Still, the ancient ancestral culture continues to gnaw at their souls. They can leave Chinatown, but Chinatown never leaves them. With all this diversity, Chinese-ness in Canada has many meanings and it is constantly shifting and evolving.
Identity consciousness for the Chinese in Canada invokes many contradictions and interpretations, and it presents a minefield—each misstep can provoke division and scorn from all sides, and, worst of all, self-doubt. It is even more difficult to negotiate a Chinese identity in Quebec (see Chapter 17).
You build a cultural identity by being aware of your place in history and in staking your claim of belonging. This is not an easy task. The dominant society tries to assimilate your mind; it denies your race, your culture and your language. To fight back, you want the right to know your race, your culture and your language. You want the right to be proud of your cultural heritage. This is when that self-doubt becomes self-awareness and self-affirmation.