{"id":1,"date":"2015-01-05T09:16:08","date_gmt":"2015-01-05T16:16:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/florenceng\/?p=1"},"modified":"2015-01-05T22:17:57","modified_gmt":"2015-01-06T05:17:57","slug":"hello-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/florenceng\/2015\/01\/05\/hello-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Hello\/Bonjour!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Welcome!\u00a0This blog is part of a larger body of discussion in ENGL 470A, officially known as Canadian Literary Genres<\/em>. Unofficially, the course has the rather skeptical name of Oh Canada! …Our Home and Native Land?\u00a0<\/em>In this course, we will be taking a look at a number of ideas and stories about being Canadian. Probably.<\/p>\n

My name is Florence Ng, I’m an English Literature major and a first generation Canadian. In other words, I’m that skeptical question mark at the end of the title. I moved to Vancouver when I was 5 years old, and I am one of those kids who know where home is, yet don’t. Being first generation is a very interesting status where your “motherland” shifts according to your mood. In fact, your background is almost like a trophy that you show off to certain people when it makes you feel special, but hide when it doesn’t. Like a trophy for being #1 in grade 5, you might want to hide it when the #1 kid in grade 6 comes over to play. Here is a real world observation:<\/p>\n

Last year, when I went on exchange in the UK, my friends and I traveled a lot. Whenever we met new people and they asked us where we’re from or who we are, we would say, “Canadian!” Of course, a number of jerks pushed on: “No, where are you REALLY from?”<\/p>\n

“Um, Canada,” we’d reply.<\/p>\n

“Where are you PARENTS from?”<\/p>\n

“…Canada.”<\/p>\n

And that’s when we’d leave, thinking, “Oh my God, that was so rude.” A lot of the times, it seemed like they wanted us to\u00a0admit<\/em> that we are not just Canadian, because saying you’re Canadian is a cop-out. Like they wanted us to stop pretending we prefer poutine over dim sum, pizza over sushi, forks over chopsticks, and just ADMIT that we belong in another culture.<\/p>\n

To be fair, I don’t really understand\u00a0why it’s so hard to say, “I’m Chinese.” Let’s face it: I only speak Cantonese to my parents, my family eats Chinese food 90% of the time and Japanese food the other 10%, and our Thanksgiving dinner consists of a Costco rotisserie chicken, despite how many times we’ve asked for a turkey.<\/p>\n

Still, I probably should have said, “I’m Chinese-Canadian.”<\/p>\n

\"My<\/a>

My friends and I in Paris. We were hoping to be the first 83% Chinese-Canadian girl band pop act. I’m in the middle, third from the left. The one who breaks up the band and gets a solo career, obviously.<\/p><\/div>\n

At the same time, I feel like much of this identity crisis is afforded by Vancouver’s cultural diversity. I’ve heard many times that Vancouver is not “real Canada,” whatever that means. Last semester, I learned a lot of rather exclusively Canadian words (a lot of which are found here<\/a>). I always thought language is a big part of culture, but weirdly enough I’ve never thought of “Canadian” as a language, or even thought about it much as a dialect. In high school, a teacher told me that the spirit of Canada is encapsulated in one song by the Barenaked Ladies (you probably know the one!)<\/a>. That was kind of the extent of my understanding of Canadian language.<\/p>\n

I’m a big fan of language; learning about it, using it, etc. That’s why I’m very excited for this course! I want to get to know Canada, and get to know the way language is used in the stories we don’t talk enough about.<\/p>\n

Nice to meet you, everybody! Let’s share and learn a lot from one another \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Welcome!\u00a0This blog is part of a larger body of discussion in ENGL 470A, officially known as Canadian Literary Genres. Unofficially, the course has the rather skeptical name of Oh Canada! …Our Home and Native Land?\u00a0In this course, we will be taking a look at a number of ideas and stories about being Canadian. Probably. My…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28788,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[311821],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-unit-1"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/florenceng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/florenceng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/florenceng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/florenceng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28788"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/florenceng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/florenceng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/florenceng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions\/13"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/florenceng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/florenceng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/florenceng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}