In Diamond Grill, Fred Wah explores two seemingly opposing themes: fragmentation and connection. In his illustration of what Julie McGonegal terms the “racially mixed subject” (n.p.), Wah depicts himself and his family as fragmented individuals, “chipped up into quarters and thirds and eighths” (84). Simultaneously, Wah engages with the hyphen as a space of connection, linkage, and travel between cultural, linguistic and genetic divides.
I have been intrigued by the hyphen for some time. As part of my name, it is something I engage with on a daily basis. Like Wah, I have mixed ‘racial origins,’ if that’s what we’re calling them these days. My mother is half-English, half-Irish and my father is ‘pure’ Chinese. Therefore, I = 25% English, 25% Irish and 50% Chinese. And yet, the story becomes more complicated. While my mother hails from Toronto, my father was born and grew up in Trinidad. When he speaks to his parents over the phone, I marvel at the Trinidadian-Chinese accent that unfolds from his mouth, seemingly out of nowhere. My mom said that when my father came to Canada for university, he learned to hide it well. He speaks good Canadian now. Needless to say, I have some experience living on the hyphen. If only you could see the family reunions.
In his afterword, Wah highlights the negative aspect of hyphenated identities, calling the hyphen “a real problem for multiculturalism; it’s usually a sign of impurity and it’s frequently erased as a reminder that the parts, in this case, are not equal to the whole” (178). He draws on the colonial language of “dilution” (125) to illustrate the historical (and presently experienced) racism that racially mixed individuals endure. The following passage exemplifies Wah’s use of this language:
“Better watch out for the craw, better watch out for the goat. That’s the mix, the breed, the half-breed, metis, quarter-breed, trace-of-a-breed true demi-semi-ethnic polluted rootless living technicolour snarl to complicate the underbelly Panavision of racism and bigotry across this country” (53).
While in some passages Wah resists the hyphen as an oppressive tool that segregates, he also explores it as a space of negotiation, the in-between. His use of the door as the hyphen, separating the kitchen (“The Orient”) from the café (“The Occident”), is a tenuous, fluid boundary between his cultural/linguistic/ethnic identities.
Curious about the uses of the hyphen, its limits and possibilities, I searched some of the additional references Wah gives at the end of Diamond Grill. Julie McGonegal, in “Hyphenating the Hybrid ‘I’: (Re)Visions of Racial Mixedness in Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill,” discusses Wah’s use of the hyphen as “a powerful paradigm of liberation” (n.p.). This hyphen operates in contrast to the concept of ‘hybridity,’ which is steeped in colonial connotation. Wah’s hyphen
“let[‘s] us know know that racially mixed people aren’t forever trapped in an unending psychic cycle of perplexity and uncertainty, but that they are often engaged in the counter hegemonic activity of transgressing boundaries between races, cultures, and languages and of transforming different practices and meanings in the process of translating them” (n.p.).
In this hyphen, Wah can resist the fragmentation inherent in his ethnic origins. Here, he can traverse the boundaries between his “Orient” and “Occident,” perhaps finding not a comfortable, but flexible space to exist between the two. In her conclusion, McGonegal explores the hyphenation as a way to connect communities, and for racially mixed subjects, a way to bridge separated communities. These “small connecting links” may allow those who exist in the in-between to feel whole, not fragmented; connected, not alone (OED definition of “hyphens” qtd. in McGonegal).
For me, there are some hyphens that I do and don’t like. I despise the term ‘Asian-Canadian.’ I think it’s racist and serves to segregate Canadians who are marked as different by physical features – who therefore require hyphenation. If we’re going by these standards, why isn’t the term English-Canadian thrown around too? However, I do like my last name. I see it as an acknowledgement not only of my mother’s feminism but as a visual marker of my uniquely combined heritages. When others see my name, they cannot reduce me to one racial category; it refuses exclusion and essentialization.
– Anna Butler (hyphen) Koo
I felt compelled to reply to your post Anna, because of your concluding paragraph. The term “English-Canadian” is actually a term that I have used as a “French-Canadian” when speaking in response to some of the preconceived notions some Canadians from outside of Quebec have towards people from that province. For example a lot of people ask me whether I am a separatist or blatantly telling me: “Oh, so you speak the funny French.” This has made me realize however that we do use these hyphens as tools to “other” certain groups of people, I am considered French-Canadian and I’ve never set foot in France. It doesn’t seem fair to stamp on these hyphens on people without understanding their background.
Hi Melanie,
Thank you for your comment. I think your reply touches nicely on how the hyphen can be used, and interpreted, in multiple ways. As you say, it can be used for labelling, categorizing and othering. Used in this way, the hyphen is imposed on certain subjects, perhaps without their consent- or as you highlighted, full understanding of who they are. It can also be a reductive term, one that labels an individual, with complex and diverse experiences, in terms of ethnic heritage only. And yet, there are some positive ways of interpreting and using the hyphen by subjects themselves, perhaps as a kind of self-claim to cultural/ethnic/_________ complexity and intricacy. The hyphen can at once essentialize and resist essentialization.