Monthly Archives: September 2014

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.