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.
The issue over the hyphen to describe ethnic minority groups has become something I find important to discuss. The rhetoric over the hyphen is something I have put a lot of thought into over last couple of years, and, to be honest, I just can’t agree with the significance.
First, taking away the hyphen causes linguistic problems. Without the hyphen, the Korean in Korean Canadian becomes an adjective- while this may not seem too obscure, how would Fred describe himself? I almost think it is selfish for people of two cultural backgrounds like myself, you or Mr. Chong to deal with the hyphen in that way because we only need to balance the two cultures, but people who come from multiple cultures are involved in a much more difficult process. For example, primacy might become an issue. Which of your parents cultures do you put first? The hyphen does physically link words, and that is why it was placed there in the first place.
The more important issue I have over the hyphen is that it is an empty rhetoric. How does taking away the hyphen in any way actually mediate the oppression against foreign cultures in Canada? With no real social changes, (and there isn’t… look who’s being blamed for all the problems in Vancouver) does some academic or linguistic technicality affect cultural relationships? And, despite the lack of improvements, are we not just fooling ourselves to feel some sort of racial accomplishment?
Fred Wah found a place in the hyphen, and I view myself not Korean and Canadian at the same time, but as an individual who inherits traditions of both cultures. I forgo the hyphen out of the respect for the racial activism that the Asian community has engaged in throughout North America since the 60’s, but I think it is quite a vacuous argument.
I deviated from your post somewhat, but the hyphen is a major issue I deal with, and wanted to know your thoughts.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts Ed! I apologize for not replying earlier.
I don’t think a discussion of the hyphen is in any way a replacement for difficult cultural resistance and healing. However, I can see how for Wah it functions as a source of reclaiming space, as he articulated in class the other day.
I want to challenge the fact that, because I am “Han Chinese,” and therefore can be considered racially “pure” in my Chinese-ness, that I deal with only “two” cultures – Chinese and Canadian.
Before that though, I want to say that I do fully agree with your conception of how this discussion (in particular in the context of Chong, hahah) of hyphenation isn’t as meaningful as community work and building relationships. But at the same time, the hyphen does do work in the world, and the way in which individuals like Wah, you, and myself connect or disconnect to it underscores the work the hyphen does in our negotiation of identity. It’s merely a tool, a tack, a nail, or whatever you want to call it, after all.
I want to say that I don’t in fact come from two cultures. “Canadian” culture is something built on colonial violence against Indigenous people, which has inherited multiple Western traditions that has evolved on these lands’ history of settlements. Colonial violence and cultural genocide also meant stealing from Indigenous cultures. At the same time, China was also colonized, christianized. And then Mao’s cultural revolution came in to ‘smash’ imperialism and capitalism, with more ‘smashing’ of cultural engagement than either of those ism’s. He banned 17th century Chinese erotica (!!) and all Western scholarship from having a Chinese audience during his Communist imperialism, his cult of personality.
I want to acknowledge that I do have the privilege of understanding this history somewhat, because I am able to ask my relatives, at the risk of triggering them, about their experiences. For some of my relatives, they find it really interesting hearing me talk about how my engagement with Chinese-ness and Canadian-ness has changed over the years: they have a rather minimal relationship with Canadian-ness. And in many ways, I can’t claim the Chinese(-)Canadian relationship that many folks do have, as I’ve immigrated here at a time when folks like my parents were let in because we’re in an ‘economic class.’ More nation-building potential, perhaps? But certainly not with explicit exclusion and racist violence as a few decades before. It’s possible to say that our family has been tokenized as the model minority family (except for me. I can never fit. ha, I don’t know.)
I don’t think these experiences and my engagement with hyphenation take anything away from Wah’s conception of being mixed race. It’s possible though that I take too many queues from African American identities and their relationship with the hyphen, so I think that trajectory of engagement can be questioned and challenged for sure.
Glad that your comment was able to provoke these thoughts! I hope I make sense.
I’m interested in your discussion of how hyphenation can actually be an empowering element in forging an identity when individuals are separated from some or all their cultural roots and must negotiate multiple levels of “belonging” to different communities. As someone who is both British and Peruvian I can relate to this concept intimately, particularly how living in a certain environment where only one of these cultural identities is predominant defines to what extent one feels part of that environment. While Wah is positioning the hyphen as a tool in the construction of mixed-ethnicity individuals’ identity (putting their unique position into words), one could consider to what extent that hyphenation remains in future generations, and whether it reaches a point where it begins to act as a tool for ostracizing, and, as Chong said, creating conditions for particular groups of people to belong to the society they live in.
I thought it interesting to compare both you and Sunny’s response to the hyphen. You quoted Wah’s use of the hyphen to illustrate the idea of how “parts are not equal to a whole,” while I felt like Sunny’s quoted her sister as saying she felt “Chinese on the outside, Canadian on the inside” which I interpreted as its own kind of hyphen. I felt like you both approached the hyphen in different ways to expand the meaning of hyphenation in Diamond Grill’s context. With both interpretations combined, the hyphen comes to signify the indeterminacy and disclosure of not existing within a strict binary classification mode.
– Callie Hitchcock