english 474

Stories We Tell is an autobiographical documentary by Canadian actor Sarah Polley that tells the story of Polley discovering her true parentage. She discovers that her mother, Diane Polley, had an affair with a man named Harry Gulkin, and that she was the product of this affair. By the end of the film, it is unclear who the main subject is. It could be Sarah, who is the eye behind the camera; it could be Michael, the man who raised Sarah, and whose voice is a dominant narrator throughout the film. A strong argument could also be made for Diane, whose affair with Harry Gulkin is the reason the film is being made at all. 

Diane died when Polley was 11, so her voice does not appear during the film to tell her story. The film instead consists of Diane’s family and friends whose interviews about her construct an image of Diane as she was during her life. Polley constructs an image of Diane using photographs, interviews and recreated super-8 memories, but the audience never really gains a sense of what she was really like. Diane is the subject of the film, but she is offered as a relational other. Earlier on in the term, we explored the concept of “relationality” and the relational other, and discussed how the concept of identity and “I” is defined in relation to other people, communities, and societies (Lecture Oct. 10). A relational other, then, is a person we used to define ourselves in relation to; our identity is constructed, in part, by our relationship to this person.

Polley offers her mother Diane as the ultimate relational other in Stories We Tell. Everyone interviewed in the film has some connection to her, and she acts as an anchor to which all of the people in the film tether themselves to. Diane had, and remains to have, a profound impact on all of the people in the film and the way they identify themselves. All of her children appear in the film, and speak about the effect she had on their lives. Diane’s husband Michael appears in the film, as well as her lover Harry, and both men describe their love for Diane and how she still continues to affect their lives, even though she has long since passed away.

While I would argue that Diane could be the main subject of the film, I would also argue that it is not the story of her affair that matters the most. What Polley represents in the film is not the kind of person Diane was. What matters instead is how the people in Diane’s life remember her, and the way she continues to influence the way they view themselves.

Works Cited

McNeill, Laurie. “Lecture: Missing Sarah.” University of British Columbia. 10 october 2014. Lecture.

In our recent class discussions surrounding Maggie DeVries’ memoir Missing Sarah, about the disappearance of the author’s sister, an active sex worker, from Vancouver’s Downtown East Side, we have been talking about how missing women and sex workers are often framed in the media. Countless stereotypes surround sex work and the reason so many women end up on the streets selling their services. Perhaps the most prevalent stereotype is that women turn to prostitution as a means to support drug addiction. A lesser known, but still present stereotype is the motive of survival sex; in other words, selling sexual services to meet basic needs, whether it be food, shelter, clothing, or drugs. However, there is another reason women enter the sex trade, and these women are often referred to as voluntary sex workers.

Voluntary sex workers are sex workers that work in the industry willingly. They may have the skill sets to work in other industries, but they choose sex work. One of the more well knows cases of voluntary sex work is the case of Jeannette Angell, the Ivy-Leage educated Ph.D recipient. Angell chose to work as a call girl to make money faster than she would have elsewhere. (Angell has written a book about about her experiences as a sex worker titled Callgirl, which you can read about here.)

Some voluntary sex workers don’t enter the sex industry willingly, as did Jeannette Angell, but some decide to remain in the industry even after they no longer need the income to support themselves. Susan Davis, a local Vancouver sex work advocate, is one of these cases. Davis has been an active sex worker for more than 25 years, spending three of those years as a drug addict on the Downtown East Side of Vancouver. Now, Davis is clean and frequently lectures at universities on the history of sex work in Vancouver and is involved in advocating for the rights of sex workers with organizations such as the BC Coalition of Experiential Communities. She is now a business owner in the food industry and still is an active sex worker. I had the privilege of hearing a lecture by Susan last year in a class here at UBC. She spoke about remaining in the industry not only to give sex workers a voice through her organizations but because she enjoys the work she does. She shared with my class her experience with a regular client client, an elderly man dying of terminal illness. She said what she provided her client was more than a service, it was both physical and emotional intimacy. 

The stories of voluntary sex workers are seldom heard in the media. Media consumers are provided with dominant stereotypes of sex workers: the drug addicts and social deviants of marginalized society. If media representations of sex workers expand to include the experiences of workers like Angell and Davis, perhaps social attitudes might start to shift toward recognizing sex work as a legitimate profession. When sex work starts to become accepted as legitimate, its workers might stand a chance at moving away from the margins of society.

You can read more about Susan Davis and Vancouver’s sex trade here.

Rachel Safeek, a human rights advocate and founder of the #FightStigma campaign has a great blog post about voluntary sex workers that you can read here.

While reading Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill, which depicts Fred Jr.’s attempts to navigate the hyphen of his Chinese-Canadian identity as an adolescent, my mind immediately wandered to a book I read a few years ago in an Canadian Lit class here at UBC. This novel, called The Jade Peony, is a story by Canadian author Wayson Choy that depicts the struggles of three young Chinese-Canadian children living in Vancouver’s Chinatown in the 1930s and 1940s. This novel also highlights the children’s attempt to navigate their hyphenated identity. 

Two of The Jade Peony’s narrators are Chinese-Canadian children Jook-Liang and Sek-Lung Chen. Their parents were born in China, but they themselves were born in Canada. They are also very in touch with their Chinese heritage and traditions; their Grandmother Poh-Poh is the matriarch of the family and the arbiter of the Old Chinese Ways. She speaks numerous Chinese dialects, practices old Chinese medicine, tells the children Chinese folk-tales and generally immerses them in Chinese culture despite their living in Vancouver. In contrast, Diamond Grill’s Fred Jr.’s father, Fred Sr., is a multi-racial Chinese-Canadian like his son. Throughout Diamond Grill, I did not get a sense of Chinese culture being as omnipresent or as potent as I found it to be in The Jade Peony. While reading Diamond Grill, I found the Chinese culture present in Fred Jr.’s life to be diluted and mixed in with Canadian culture. The only time Chinese culture features prominently is when Fred Jr. references food. 

I found myself thinking back to The Jade Peony while reading Fred Jr.’s story, and wondered if there had been a dominant figure like Poh-Poh in Fred’s life, perhaps he might have been more sure of his identity. Fred mentions his Aunty Ethel who went to China as a young girl, but whenever he asks her about China, “she doesn’t want to talk about it” (Wah 89). The Chen children have Poh-Poh to firmly root them in their ancestry, while Fred has no such figure, and the Chinese ways of his family have been interspersed with the ways of his Scandinavian mother and his Scots-Irish grandmother, as well as with the Canadian culture Fred Sr. has assimilated into. A prime example of this is the menu at the Diamond Grill; it features Salisbury Steak, pies, and donuts, and “the Chinese section of the menu is quite small” (45). This highlights the way in which the Fred Sr.’s and Jr.’s Chinese ancestry has been overshadowed by Canadian culture in an attempt to assimilate. The result is Fred Jr.’s occupation of a liminal space of identity. 

Even though Fred Jr. makes it clear throughout Diamond Grill that he is glad to appear Caucasian, I feel as though a more solid rooting in his Chinese heritage would have helped him find a more comfortable footing in his identity. 

You can listen to an interview with Wayson Choy about The Jade Peony here.

Works Cited

Choy, Wayson. The Jade Peony. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1995. Print. 

Wah, Fred. Diamond Grill. Edmonton: NeWest, 2006. Print.

Today in class, two questions were posed: Who does Facebook encourage us to be? What role does Facebook play in shaping our lives? Especially with the addition of the Timeline layout in recent years, Facebook has encouraged us to become a society that documents even the most banal events of our life, and to seek validation through these events. Facebook encourages us to write our own autobiographies, asking us about every aspect of our lives. Some people have wholeheartedly embraced this aspect of the social media site, documenting not only their weddings and the births of their children but also what movie they’re watching or what they had for lunch. 

Essentially, Facebook has encouraged us to be a society that relies on validation. From photos of your wedding to photos of your lunch, you feel validated by the number of “likes” and the number of comments these posts generate. The action of “liking” or commenting on a post signals to you that what you did was important. Within the past few years, Facebook has added a feature called Year in Review that highlights the “biggest moments” of your year on Facebook. When I looked at this feature on my timeline from last year, what I noticed was that the events Facebook had selected for me was not based on the significance of the event, but by how many “likes” each post had generated. In fact, the majority of “big moments” in my Year in review were merely articles I had found interesting and had shared, or photos I had shared from my connecting Instagram account. I would not have selected any of these events as being the most important events of my past year, but Facebook took the liberty of doing this for me based on others’ validation of my activities. 

Often people feel as though things aren’t really real until posted on Facebook and have garnered the expected validation through “likes.” A classic example of this is in romantic relationships. How many times have you heard the phrase “Facebook official”? People feel that unless their status, whether it be romantic or otherwise, is broadcasted on social media, it doesn’t exist because others don’t know about it. People need validation through others. Even the act of having a Facebook account is validating — not having Facebook is almost taboo in this day in age. How are others supposed to know you exist? How are they supposed to know about your life? Having recently deactivated my own Facebook account, I noticed the social networking site’s attempt to get me to stay. It reminded me of the people who will “miss me” without an account. As mentioned in class, it encourages a sense of anxiety that others will be unaware of your life via social media. A fellow blogger on facebookdetox.com asks, “Have you left [Facebook], later to find out that your life has progressed since leaving [it] behind?”  One will find that even though the validation that Facebook provides is no longer present after deleting Facebook, life does progress as normal. 

We need to be aware of this consuming need for self-validation that Facebook creates. The driving factor in anyone’s life should not be how many “likes” or comments something is going to generate on a social media site. We need to become more ware of our intentions for doing things, and start to move back to doing things because we want to do them, not with the intention for social media self-validation.