“We’re still here/ we’re going strong/ and we’re getting tired of proving we belong.”
When I first arrived in Canada in 1956, you could say that I was a Chinese immigrant, even though I was the third generation of my family to be here. Over the next few years, people in Chinatown started identifying me as a jook sing,347 a not so endearing term used by the lo wah kiu to describe those young people who were losing their Chinese culture and identity. I was losing my ability to speak Cantonese and resorted to the Toishanese spoken by my parents and the people in Chinatown. More seriously, my mental functions were being taken over by the English language and the dominant culture.
The three hours of formal Chinese language training every Saturday was not enough to stem the powerful attraction of English from school and the popular cultural media of TV, radio and comic books. I abandoned the Monkey King for Superman.
I was impressionable; my mind absorbed any cultural stimulus like a sponge. The TV programs like Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver showed me an idyllic family life far beyond living in the back of a laundry. Every Sunday night, my father and I watched Bonanza on the eight-inch black and white Admiral TV, small enough to be taken from beneath the ironing table and placed on top when the day’s ironing was done. My mother never watched TV, not because she didn’t understand the language but because she was always busy in the background, keeping the laundry clean and preparing the next day’s chores.
On Bonanza, there was a character named Hop Sing—the loyal Chinese servant and houseboy to the Cartwright family. Veteran actor Victor Sen Yung, who was born in San Francisco in 1915 and a University of California, Berkeley, graduate, played the role. After a while, I started to look at Hop Sing differently. His pidgin English rendered him a stereotypical comic character. Even at eleven, I sensed that the Chinese characters on TV were inferior to the white characters; there was no pride to being Chinese.
There is a generational particularity to the Chinese diaspora. As the Chinese wandered around the world and settled in the far corners of the earth, we carried with us the regional cultural, social, political, dietary and linguistic baggage of the era. My father’s and grandfather’s world was that of early twentieth century China when they came to Canada. Their world-view—that of the Chinese peasant—was formed in the villages of the southern, semi-tropical countryside. Unprecedented events were happening in China that would shake their world outlook to the core; despite these vicissitudes, they managed to cling to their age-old belief system as peasants everywhere would.
In dynasties past, it is believed, the emperor did not allow his subjects to travel abroad. When they made their perilous journey across the Pacific to Gold Mountain, my grandfather and father felt they had no other choice if their family was to survive. As Cho-yun Hsu wrote in Daedalus:348
Many Chinese began to be aware of their Chinese identity only after leaving China to live overseas where they were often treated as aliens by the indigenous population of their host country. Such bitter rejection trained Chinese to view non-Chinese with distrust and suspicion and only strengthened their own sense of connection with China and other Chinese.
Throughout the world, there are more than fifty million people in the Chinese diaspora. I have read that the “search by disaporic Chinese for an authentic Chinese meaning is inherently flawed and futile.”349 However, as the first overseas Chinese pondered their existential significance, they also expressed the angst of living in a foreign land. Edith Eaton, a Eurasian, in the early 1900s wrote sympathetically, under the pen name of Sui Sin Far,350 about the diasporic lives of the Chinese men, women and children in Canada and the US. Many since then have enriched our souls and minds with the cultural and political expressions of our collective experiences in Gold Mountain.
The idea of the Chinese model minority, though, is a construct of the media, politicians and academics to depict how a minority should behave and function in the dominant society. The premise is that the model minority is an example for other minorities, does not create trouble, overachieves and accomplishes within the parameters of the prevailing social order; all this assumes that the group is homogeneous and limited only by the abilities of its members, and that everyone has equal opportunities.
The model minority is not real; it is a bogus construct to divide minorities—setting one against another. The Chinese Canadian community is not homogeneous; like any other community, it reflects the class nature of society and, therefore, the term “model minority” is meaningless. There are the few who make it to the top of the economic strata but the majority earn a living working in day-to-day jobs.
You only have to walk the laneways behind the restaurants and the curio shops of Chinatown and look into the sweatshops to see the Chinese immigrant working class. The majority of Chinese immigrants to Canada are now coming from Mainland China. Many of them have professional skills but fall into low-paying unskilled jobs once arriving here. They have not forgotten the socialist education they received in China, though, and as Justin Kong writes in New Canadian Media, they retain “a basic understanding” of the concepts of class, capitalism and exploitation.
“Labouring in the deskilling, dehumanizing and precarious Canadian economy,” Kong writes, “reignites in the Chinese worker the earlier internalizations of working class consciousness.”351 Once these contradictions are exposed and brought out into the open and discussed, the concept of the model minority will finally be debunked.
Pierre Trudeau’s state policy of harmonious Canadian multiculturalism was less an attempt to promote minority cultural identity than it was an effort to contain Quebec nationalism and the independence movement in the 1970s. People today criticize multiculturalism as an ideology from the right, left and centre depending on their political stand. Multiculturalism, nevertheless, offers a cultural space for minorities to participate in Canadian society in whatever form they choose.
The Chinese identity in Canada has ranged from the model of the sojourner to the assimilationist depending on historical circumstances and on how welcoming the policies of the Canadian government are at the time. However, a distinct identity has developed within the Chinese community, manifesting itself in the 1970s and 1980s. This identity was born out of the struggle to establish a sense of belonging and out of resistance to assimilation. But more importantly, it was based on a hundred-year history of struggle in Canada.
Some may say that we drew inspiration from the Asian American civil rights movement in the US, which in turn drew encouragement from the Black Power movement. I would say that modern-day Chinese Canadian cultural identity came of age in the late 1970s, as emerging Chinese Canadian writers penned words to express our experiences, and during the anti-racism campaign that ensued after CTV aired an episode called “Campus Giveaway” on its W5 program in 1979. The grassroots movement that came out of that battle against racism firmly planted Chinese Canadian faces in front of the media and Canadian society.
Before, during and after that anti-racism campaign, cultural creations from young people within the community started blooming to portray Chinese Canadian history and everyday life.
I was excited to see the first issue of the Asianadian magazine back in 1978. Tony Chan and Cheuk Kwan founded the periodical in Toronto. It spoke to me as the voice of a new generation of Chinese Canadians who proudly and resolutely advocated an anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic and pro-struggle perspective. It spawned a number of influential Asian Canadian writers like SKY Lee, Rick Shiomi, Jim Wong-Chu, Paul Yee, Maryka Omatsu and Richard Fung. There has been no other magazine like it since its demise in 1985.
Ten years later, Vancouver’s Jim Wong-Chu and the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop founded Ricepaper, which is still being published, and Edmonton’s Kenda Gee produced the short-lived Chinacity, but they never became the hard-hitting, righteously spoiling for a fight kind of journal that was the Asianadian.
In the late 1970s, I was still caught up in the Canadian Maoist movement; my Chinese Canadian identity consciousness was just beginning to sprout. When Siu Keong Lee of the Montreal Anti-W5 Committee tried to recruit me to this anti-racist struggle in 1979, I didn’t see the immediate significance of the issue; I was looking at the bigger class struggle and I tried to recruit Lee to the Workers Communist Party. The anti-W5 movement has become a watershed in the struggle of the Chinese Canadian community, whereas the WCP has become a footnote.
The refreshingly creative works of Chinese Canadian artists in literature, music, stage and film were in stark contrast to Pierre Trudeau’s multicultural song and dance. They put into context the struggles of my father, grandfather and other Gold Mountain men and women, and gave flesh and blood to their experiences. It may be a search for roots, but some of the firmest roots are within Canadian soil. All these works stirred in me a pride that I had never felt before as a person of Chinese background living in Canada. This identity consciousness ushered me from the margins and firmly planted me in this country as a Chinese Canadian.
The percentage of Chinese-ness and Canadian-ness is always shifting and under constant negotiation depending on the circumstances in society and within my life. Nevertheless, it is uniquely Canadian.
The partial victory of the redress campaign established our collective place in Canadian history. My twenty-year involvement in the redress movement was as much a pursuit for identity and belonging as a pursuit for collective justice. My travels across Canada to meet dedicated and fascinating Chinese Canadians from all walks of life gave me a sense of community that has cemented over the years. The friendships that I built through this long campaign have nourished my Chinese-ness. Although there were political and tactical disagreements in pursuing redress, there were no enemies among us, as we came together within the rubric of being Chinese in Canada, which held a bigger connection than any transient differences.
Winning the apology and recognition of our history in this country has solidified in me individual pride as a Chinese Canadian, as well as in the community’s bond to Canada. The enrichment of this experience and the friends that I made in the common pursuit of justice have contributed more profoundly than I can express to forming my Chinese Canadian consciousness.
With each new wave of immigration, however, the Chinese Canadian identity that I know is being submerged. The diverse groups of Chinese now living in Canada are creating new Chinese Canadian identities through their own experiences. This evolution does render the search for “an authentic Chinese meaning” futile, as that Chinese meaning is always changing.
It is a burden, but I resist assimilation of my mind and spirit, however subtle the forces of assimilation may be. It seems I’ve been chasing that elusive identity in the abstract—as an intellectual exercise. I am concluding that identity is a state of being, challenging to define and always in flux. But I don’t need to be defined by others; certainly, I don’t need to be validated by the norms of the prevailing society. Once I realized that I could define myself, that’s when I became comfortable in my own identity. I’ve discovered that cultural identity is as personal and unique as one’s experiences. I’ve realized that my Chinese Canadian identity may not be the same as that of another Chinese Canadian; however, there are similar strains within the framework of our common heritage.
Whatever we feel about our identity, the only important aspect for me is that I can be proud of who I am. Identity consciousness for me is shifting from the realm of the political to that of the personal.
I’ve been able to live my life with a sense of purpose and meaning. I don’t understand everything, but I have the ability to question why and how things happen. I’ve lived in pursuit of dreams; these dreams have evolved over the years but they remain slightly beyond the reality in which I live.
I am a lucky man. I have a loving, beautiful and supportive wife; I have two wonderful and intelligent children who are compassionate, socially aware and know right from wrong. When it comes down to it, my wife, Dong Qing, my daughter, Jessica, and my son, Jordan, have provided my sense of personal identity.
As I write this, I am in my late sixties and feeling comfortable in my own skin. There is a Toishanese expression, on lock—to be content, calm and at peace. I am starting to enjoy my on lock as I settle into my own Chinese Canadian identity. Dong Qing’s love has given me my sense of personal belonging.