The following disclaimer is how Fred Wah, author of Diamond Grill, ends the book’s acknowledgements:
“After all that, I must take sole responsibility for this text. I wish not to offend any of my family or any of the Chinese Canadians who have known and experienced some of these stories more tangibly than I have. These are not true stories, but, rather, poses or postures, necessitated, as I hope is clear in the text, by faking it.” (x)
I’m struck here by several things: that is, the absence of the hyphen, the care with which Wah positions himself as an author who has postured/posed, rather than told “true stories,” and the idea that readers of the text of a particular identity group could have experienced “these stories more tangibly” than the author.
In the following letter to the editor, Gordon J. Chong, former councillor of Toronto city, writes that the hyphen in ‘Chinese-Canadian’ needs to be abolished. He insists that “Canada needs unhyphenated, unconditional Canadians period.” His argument is that if a group of people are to be considered real Canadians, they are not a different kind of Canadian than other Canadians, especially not those who would call themselves Canadians without any other qualification. That hyphen, according to Chong, creates conditions for Chinese Canadians’ claim to being part of this country.
Throughout Diamond Grill, however, Wah invokes the hyphen over and over as a concept. While he recognizes Chinese Canadians as a group, addressed directly in this disclaimer, as unhyphenated, “the hyphen is crucial to the composition of” (Wah 179) his biotext (noted himself in the afterward).
Because Wah sees that hyphenation suggests “parts… are not equal to the whole” (178), he actively takes the opportunity in Diamond Grill to explore how the hyphen does operate for him as a mixed race person. Here he has an exigence to openly display this shifting, troubled, loud, and impure conception of racial self – embedded in the autobiographical self’s physical movement with the door, for instance – because this is a way for him to avoid his experiences being appropriated.
So on the one hand, Wah avoids hyphenation in this disclaimer in order to respect readers part of the Chinese Canadian community (who after all ought to represent their lived experiences on their own terms). At the same time, he delineates new boundaries for autobiographical truths when he imagines the importance of the hyphen. His is not yet another story that contributes to Canadianism and its colonial nation-building projects. Rather it is an exploration of how posing, posturing, or ‘faking it’ are crucial to experiences of racialization, and perhaps especially so if that racialization involves being seen as ‘impure.’
As a side note: I want to draw attention to how the subject of the op-ed in The Star is on representations of Chinese Canadian conservatives. This was the first article I found on hyphenation of Chinese Canadian whilst doing a quick google, which I find curious given my own radical leftist politics and subsequent browsing habits. Given this perspective, I can appreciate the need for Wah to want to ‘cop out’ of speaking for a racialized group when he is aware of so many political tensions, not merely diversity, within such a broad community, and to not wish to rock the boat or dilute any historical narratives that invoke purity/resistance to hyphenation in relation to Canadian-ness. If one’s ancestors and relatives fought so hard for that Canadian-ness, the trust between Wah and specific readers would be broken if he neglected to position himself in this way.
Smith and Watson writes that “autobiographical truth resides in the intersubjective exchange between narrator and reader aimed at producing a shared understanding of the meaning of a life” (16). Along this line, I feel strongly that Wah’s undertakings in posturing and posing autobiographical selves create spaces for potential readers to feel far more at home in exploring identity issues of Chinese Canadian-ness. For instance, to say that other Chinese Canadians have experienced these stories more tangibly than the author is to say both that when he speaks of others’, he is more so speaking of his own relationships with them and how they have contributed to his experiences with ‘faking it,’ rather than speaking for them.
Additionally, he is taking on responsibility for his creation, not the stories which have different meanings in others’ conceptions of identity and history. In this sense, I find that Wah’s work is important for Chinese(-Canadian) settlers like myself, who have a jarring relationship with Chinese-ness, belonging, place, and nationality.
Personally, after stumbling upon Fred Wah’s interactive poem/collection of digitized oral histories found here, I felt nourished and welcomed by the title “High Muck a Muck: Playing Chinese,” which conceives Chinese-ness in its action, and within the logic of gambling, and being mapped upon British Columbia.
Can I ever fully reject being “Canadian” if it means living with the privileges that I do, with the citizenship that I have which others in my community (though none of them my ancestors) have suffered in order to obtain? How can I sit easily with being “Canadian” if that construct is ostensibly illegal and violence against Indigenous people of these lands?
Alternatively, can I ever fully embrace being “Chinese” if seeking communities involve encountering violence, political tension, and histories I can never myself claim ownership to? What forms of identity am I coerced to take on when I call myself either Chinese, Canadian, or both, without feeling uneasy with these terms? The concept of “Playing Chinese” invokes a performativity that, I feel, actually empowers me, and offers me more potential to ‘pose’ and ‘posture’ as myself. To me that is how I can actually resist the violence of hyphenation and racialization.
Reclaiming the hyphen and simultaneously resisting ‘hyphenation’ through insisting on the hyphen’s ‘noise’ could certainly be one goal Fred Wah’s biotext achieves.