{"id":62,"date":"2016-02-08T11:11:16","date_gmt":"2016-02-08T18:11:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/engl470canadianstudiesblew\/?p=62"},"modified":"2016-03-11T15:39:13","modified_gmt":"2016-03-11T22:39:13","slug":"assignment-2-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/engl470canadianstudiesblew\/2016\/02\/08\/assignment-2-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Assignment 2.2: Delineations of Home"},"content":{"rendered":"

Write a short story (600 \u2013 1000 words) that describes your sense of home; write about the values and the stories that you use to connect yourself to, and to identify\u00a0your sense of home.<\/em><\/p>\n

I chose to write this assignment as a series\u00a0of vignettes<\/a>. What started as a project to describe my hometown Richmond turned into a meditation on what it means to feel “at home.” And that’s when I realized that my own city\u00a0didn’t feel “at home” at all. In fact, it began to feel like a disembodied hand…<\/p>\n

\"via<\/p>\n

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In 2004, my family returned to the rural district of Pun<\/em> Yu<\/i>\u00a0for the latter half of my grandfather\u2019s funeral rites. That\u00a0first night in a\u00a0tiny farming village where squat toilets were a rarity, I was greeted by a parade of first, second, and third cousins, \u201cThis is your xiang<\/em>! Welcome home, little sister!\u201d This is home<\/em>, they insisted. They took me to the Lew family house. They showed me the Lew family record: you\u00a0are the 32nd<\/sup> generation. They pointed to each other: everyone had the same mole on their right cheek.<\/p>\n

Xiang.<\/em> Roots. Home.<\/p>\n

Yet to say that roots are home, regardless of what the Canadian brand says, would not be altogether accurate. The first part of grandfather\u2019s ceremony had taken place in Hong Kong. WWII\u00a0refugees, my grandparents had uprooted and resettled in Hong Kong, raised a business and a family. Grandma calls Pun Yu\u00a0xiang,\u00a0<\/em>but when the Vancouver\u00a0chill starts to nip at her bones and grandma\u00a0tells us that she’s booking the next flight home, we know she means Hong Kong.<\/p>\n

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Back in\u00a0grade one, if you wanted to know where\u00a0someone came from, you didn’t think about their skin tone, or\u00a0peer into\u00a0their lunch box, or do the smartest thing–just ask.\u00a0You looked at their clothes tag.<\/p>\n

Micah\u00a0was from ‘China.’\u00a0Tina’s shirt read ‘Taiwan.’ Shawn came from this mysterious place called ‘Do not Bleach.’<\/p>\n

The wisest\u00a0of us soon suspected that the grade two’s had been pulling our leg, since everyone seemed to come from either China, India, or Taiwan. Regardless, there was one label that stumped us every time, and that was ‘MIC.’\u00a0The trick about the MIC was\u00a0that you could\u00a0never be sure what \u201cC\u201d stood for. Chile. Cameroon. Czech Republic. Cote D’Ivoire?<\/p>\n

When my parents immigrated to Vancouver in the 1990\u2019s, my mother was already six months pregnant with me. So, if I was born with a t-shirt label, it would probably read “MIC.” Made in China? Delivered in Canada? Chinese-born Canadian? Canadian-born Chinese?<\/p>\n

In many ways, Richmond too, is horrigably, ambiguously MIC. Located in Canada, but populated by ethnically and (until recently) stoutly non-politically Chinese citizens, it’s been touted as the laid-back, West Coast replica of Hong Kong. Home both is and isn’t Canada.<\/p>\n

Oh, and it gets even more complicated.<\/p>\n

———————————————————————————————————-<\/p>\n

“The sad fact is that the history of settlement around the world is a history of displacing other people from their lands.” –Edward Chamberlin<\/p>\n

Until UBC Imagine Day, I had never known\u00a0that my home was built on\u00a0the “unceded territory of the Musqueam and Squamish people.” What?! The True, North, Strong, and Free not actually free?\u00a0<\/em>When my parents settled in Richmond, they were only two in a sea of people who were fleeing the repatriation of Hong Kong in 1997. In a\u00a0sense, they, like my grandparents, were political refugees as much as immigrants chasing the Canadian Dream.\u00a0I don\u2019t think my parents\u00a0were ever aware that their new home was already a contested site,\u00a0or that their homemaking only perpetuated the homelessness\u00a0another people.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/p>\n

So what is home? Richmond is a transplanted tree<\/a>, twice removed from native soil. Richmond\u00a0is\u00a0a disembodied hand, a broken branch. My access to xiang<\/em>, my cultural heritage and my roots, will always be through the prosthesis of my parents\u2019 memory. And perhaps most troubling of all, to be transplanted\u00a0is also to be foreign.\u00a0Richmond, home, is an invasive species.<\/p>\n

But I like to think that grafted branches can also bear good fruit, and when the old and the new adapt to one another, the whole tree is made stronger.<\/p>\n

————————————————————————————————————<\/p>\n

Works Cited:<\/p>\n

“3,500 Year Old Tree Transplant.” The Big Trees Blog<\/i>. Web. 08 Feb. 2016.<\/p>\n

Buzard, Kurt. “Myrrh and Frankincense.” Travel To Eat<\/i>. 28 Dec. 2012. Web. 08 Feb. 2016.<\/p>\n

Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?: Reimagining Home and Sacred Space<\/i>. Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim, 2004. Print. 78.<\/p>\n

Donne, John. “Meditation XVII.”\u00a0Devotions Among Emergent Occasions.<\/em> 1624.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

“The Disembodied Hand That Strangled People.” The Calvin and Hobbes Wiki<\/i>. Web. 08 Feb. 2016.<\/p>\n

“Vignette Writing Tips.” Vine Leaves Literary Journal<\/i>. Web. 08 Feb. 2016.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Write a short story (600 \u2013 1000 words) that describes your sense of home; write about the values and the stories that you use to connect yourself to, and to identify\u00a0your sense of home. I chose to write this assignment as a series\u00a0of vignettes. What started as a project to describe my hometown Richmond turned […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37981,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[305208],"tags":[265],"class_list":["post-62","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-unit-2","tag-home"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/engl470canadianstudiesblew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/engl470canadianstudiesblew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/engl470canadianstudiesblew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/engl470canadianstudiesblew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37981"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/engl470canadianstudiesblew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62"}],"version-history":[{"count":38,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/engl470canadianstudiesblew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":151,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/engl470canadianstudiesblew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions\/151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/engl470canadianstudiesblew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/engl470canadianstudiesblew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/engl470canadianstudiesblew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}