In this lesson I say that it should be clear that the discourse on nationalism is also about ethnicity and ideologies of “race.” If you trace the historical overview of nationalism in Canada in the CanLit guide, you will find many examples of state legislation and policies that excluded and discriminated against certain peoples based on ideas about racial inferiority and capacities to assimilate. – and in turn, state legislation and policies that worked to try to rectify early policies of exclusion and racial discrimination. As the guide points out, the nation is an imagined community, whereas the state is a “governed group of people.” For this blog assignment, I would like you to research and summarize one of the state or governing activities, such as The Royal Proclamation 1763, the Indian Act 1876, Immigration Act 1910, or the Multiculturalism Act 1989 – you choose the legislation or policy or commission you find most interesting. Write a blog about your findings and in your conclusion comment on whether or not your findings support Coleman’s argument about the project of white civility. (Dr. Erika Paterson)

To answer this question, I decided to look at the Head Tax and Chinese Exclusion Act, legislation notorious for their racial controversy. One of the first things that caught my attention was the fact that these were enacted after the Canadian Pacific Railway was finished. Before, I have always assumed that these acts were enacted as a way to deter Chinese immigrants from “stealing” local railway jobs. Yet, I think the biggest effect of the Act was not taking away Chinese peoples’ intentions of working in Canada, but dividing families where fathers/husbands had worked on the CPR while mothers/wives and children had stayed behind in China, hoping to reunite someday (see details in hyperlinked sources).

While the head tax and Exclusion Act were clearly racist legislation, I can still sense the fear of infiltrating foreigners today. For example, many people grumble over foreign property purchases that are allegedly pushing up Vancouver housing prices (which—as a family dinner conversation brought up—may or may not be true). For a (rather controversial) list of reasons why the head tax was justified, read this. You can then make up your own interpretation…

But there’s a big difference here: most people today would lament immigration in general (if they would even lament) without targeting any specific origins. Indeed, I feel that any type of fear today is about lack of homogeneity in Vancouver society rather than a dislike for specific types of people. Metro Vancouver has so many cultural enclaves sometimes it’s hard to remember you’re in the same city. There’s a specificity in the Chinese Exclusion Act that strikes a nerve. In other words, an “Immigration Exclusion Act” would be more acceptable than a “Chinese Exclusion Act.” (Of course, there are problems with that too, but you see my point).

Incidentally, while researching, I stumbled on a rather incredible but forgotten story: that of 150 years of amiable shared relations between BC’s First Nations and BC’s first Chinese. United in their shared experience of second-class members of society and discrimination, this is a forgotten story in the Canadian lexicon, one that has perhaps been dwarfed by the “white civility” (qtd. in Paterson) Coleman mentions.

Cedar and Bamboo Teaser: Chinese and Aboriginal Relations since 1788 from MacRae Multimedia on Vimeo.

Journalist Justine Hunter calls this a “symbiotic relationship.” Her article is quite revealing: for example, the Sto:lo have named hills across the Coquihalla River as “Lexwpopeleqwith’aim” or “always screech owls,” a reference to the belief that ghosts of Chinese workers still haunt after their being killed in a blast. Here’s another insightful article about this forgotten history of Chinese and Indigenous co-operation.

I had heard of this relationship very briefly—maybe one line, or a phrase, spoken in a long-forgotten social studies class. So why is this story forgotten? Indeed, it feels like it is on the “periphery” of the rest of Canadian history. One may even ask why we should care: surely, nothing “productive” came out of this relationship of two rather powerless minorities—no laws, no big protest movement even, maybe a few mixed-heritage families at most.

Maybe it’s been forgotten because no colonists were involved, except perhaps in the context of a “common enemy” figure in the story. This is “1) the fictive element of nation building, and 2) the necessary forgetfulness required to hold that fiction together” Dr. Paterson mentions in her latest lesson (summarizing Coleman). Chinese people quite literally built an integral part of this country, and Indigenous peoples have been part of this country for millennia; yet, the contributions of these people and their partnership seem to have been forgotten in favour of the colonial story. As if Canada didn’t officially “start” until settlers moved in.

Works Cited

“Chinese & First Nations.” Chinese Canadian Stories. Chinese Canadian Stories, n.d. Web. 24 June 2015.

Chinese Canadians and First Nations: 150 Years of Shared Experience. Chinese Canadian Historical Society of BC, n.d. Web. 24 June 2015.

“Chinese Head Tax and Exclusion Act.” Chinese Canadian National Council. Chinese Canadian National Council, n.d. Web. 24 June 2015.

Hunter, Justine. “A Forgotten History: Tracing the Ties between B.C.’s First Nations and Chinese Workers.” The Globe and Mail. The Globe and Mail, 9 May 2015. Web. 24 June 2015.

Jang, Brent. “Foreign Buyers Are Not Driving up Housing Prices, B.C. Group Says.” The Globe and Mail. The Globe and Mail, 10 June 2015. Web. 24 June 2015.

Ma, Suzanne. “A Tour Of The Deep Relationship Between B.C. Chinese Immigrants, First Nations.” The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 23 Sept. 2012. Web. 24 June 2015.

MacRae Multimedia. “Cedar and Bamboo Teaser: Chinese and Aboriginal Relations since 1788.” Vimeo. Vimeo, 2009. Video. 24 June 2015.

“No More Chinese!” Road to Justice. MTCSALTC, n.d. Web. 24 June 2015.

“Our History.” Canadian Pacific Railway. Canadian Pacific, n.d. Web. 24 June 2015.

Paterson, Erika. “Lesson 3:1.” ENGL 470A Canadian Studies Canadian Literary Genres May 2015. University of British Columbia Department of English, n.d. Web. 24 June 2015.

“Some Politically Incorrect Conclusions About The Chinese Head Tax and Chinese Exclusion Laws.” IWC. Immigration Watch Canada, 5 April 2006. Web (press release). 24 June 2015.

“Taxing the Chinese.” Road to Justice. MTCSALTC, n.d. Web. 24 June 2015.

Following Carlson’s discussions on literacy as “part of a broader genre of transformation” (61), try to explain what he means when he says that transformation is an “act of literacy.” This can be confusing at first, but if you follow his discussion beginning with “how Salish people understand the process or act of transformation in relation to literacy itself” and pay attention to how he uses etymology to shape his insights, you should be able to extract an explanation for conceptualizing transformations as writing and as readable. —Dr. Erika Paterson, ENGL470

To further understand this concept of orality-to-literacy transformation as a non-Native new to the idea, I will attempt to see it analogously to my own experience in writing fiction. (Note that the main difference between my experience and the Native conceptualization is that I am working with fictitious material; I will address this difference as well).

Prompt

First stories tell us how the world was created. In The Truth about Stories, King tells us two creation stories; one about how Charm falls from the sky pregnant with twins and creates the world out of a bit of mud with the help of all the water animals, and another about God creating heaven and earth with his words, and then Adam and Eve and the Garden. King provides us with a neat analysis of how each story reflects a distinct worldview. “The Earth Diver” story reflects a world created through collaboration, the “Genesis” story reflects a world created through a single will and an imposed hierarchical order of things: God, man, animals, plants. The differences all seem to come down to co-operation or competition — a nice clean-cut satisfying dichotomy. However, a choice must be made: you can only believe ONE of the stories is the true story of creation – right? That’s the thing about creation stories; only one can be sacred and the others are just stories. Strangely, this analysis reflects the kind of binary thinking that Chamberlin, and so many others, including King himself, would caution us to stop and examine. So, why does King create dichotomies for us to examine these two creation stories? Why does he emphasize the believability of one story over the other — as he says, he purposefully tells us the “Genesis” story with an authoritative voice, and “The Earth Diver” story with a storyteller’s voice. Why does King give us this analysis that depends on pairing up oppositions into a tidy row of dichotomies? What is he trying to show us? — Dr. Erika Paterson, English 470

Growing up in Catholic school, I remember one distinct teaching in particular. I don’t remember the particular teacher, but he or she said: there are many religions in the world, but only one of them is true; the truth of one religion automatically makes the other religions not true. 

We like to align ourselves and the cultural group we identify in with the truth. We like to believe that we are right. Western values include capitalism, freedom, and the individual. Contrast this with eastern values (ie. cultures like China and Korea) where the communal good is often valued more than individual freedom. Many of us would think it unjust if we were asked to sacrifice our dream job for running the family business, for example, but in an eastern culture, this would be merely respect.

Which civilization is “right”?

As Thomas King notes, the dichotomy is “the elemental structure of Western society” because “we are fearful of enigmas” (25). We can’t believe that there are a multiplicity of truths or a multiplicity of right answers. Instead, we align ourselves with one side of the dichotomy because we believe it to be right side. There is a moral aspect.

However, I’d like to examine Thomas King’s choice of stories more deeply. Notice that both the story of Charm and the Genesis story are supernatural ones. Both of them—at least according to the scientific/atheistic/”rational” perspective—are mythologies (which, interesting, has been summarized by one scholar as “other people’s religion”). Yet, many people in the western world would reject the Charm story and believe in the Genesis story. Both of these stories are supernatural and, depending on your private beliefs, equally believable and equally ludicrous. One is not more ludicrous or believable than the other.

So why choose one mythology over the other?

I think that was King’s point. People choose to believe in the Genesis story not because of some rational, progressive way of thinking. People choose it because it is theirs. The Genesis story has been part of the western narrative for centuries and so ingrained in our culture that we automatically find it more believable, although upon further investigation it is no way superior in “rationality” or “progression” than the Charm story.

In fact, many people in western culture reject the Big Bang theory story, or the evolution story. To our western Judeo-Christian worldview, such things—no matter how much sense they make—are merely stories.

When a new story comes and threatens the older one, we fear the new one. We quickly establish the new story as the evil other and our story as the original good. We attach a morality to it: the Genesis story is simply true because it is right. 

So I think King is saying that dichotomies are not rational. They are pushed by our feelings, our assumptions, and our comfort zones. It’s like reading a tragedy in the news. We read it, we know it actually happened, and yet we go through our day normally. Because in our bubble, that news story is just a story.

Works Cited

King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Toronto: House of Anansi Press Inc., 2003.

Murphy, Ryan. “Asian culture: collectivism, saving face, and sexuality.” Examiner.com. AXS Digital Group, 23 April 2011. Web. 11 June 2015.

Paterson, Erika. “Lesson 2:2.” ENGL 470 A Canadian Studies: Canadian Literary Genres may 2015. The University of British Columbia Department of English, n.d. Web. 11 June 2015.

Sevigny, Julie. “What is Mythology? What is Myth?” Business Insider. Business Insider, 23 May 2011. Web. 11 June 2015.

Read at least 3 students blog short stories about ‘home’ and make a list of the common shared assumptions, values and stories that you find. Post this list on your blog with some commentary about what you discovered. —Erika Paterson

Hannah Vaartnou: “Home is in your heart”

I found Hannah’s idea of home as “a never ending, twisting, turning, a constantly evolving journey” quite refreshing. We are brought up to believe that we grow up and live in a fixed place, and that might exist in fiction, but in reality our young lives go through so much change in their formative years. And I think this change is a fundamental part of what we call “home.” I love how Hannah describes the events and forces that shaped her childhood and how she connects all that with the idea of home, whether those forces were good or bad.

This leads me to reflect on the forces that shaped my own formative years. Like Hannah, I was raised in a Christian family and attended a Catholic school in my early elementary years. Sometimes I forget how much this experience has affected me, but it has. Growing up in an environment like that instills in you certain values and outlooks that are a core part of you and not easily changed.

Mattias Marten:”The Sense of Placelessness”

Like Saarah, I love Mattias’ ending idea that “home is a habit that builds up around you” and that he “find[s] home wherever [he] happen[s] to be, in welcoming country, earnest minds, and the smiles of strangers and strange familiars.” Not only was this ending paragraph poetic, it offers some hope and comfort to what I think are lots of individuals in this generation who are transient. The environment is becoming one of impermanence with more blurry lines of ownership, for example. Life is fast in the twenty-first century: one moment you may be doing this, another moment something else across the country. The idea of “settling down” is something that happens much later in life, yet, young people are often pressured to do this.

However, I don’t think a life of moving around automatically makes your conception of home impermanent. I think at the end of the day, home is associated with permanence—home is something you can “go back to.” I’m not saying home has to be a permanent space, more that home is the familiar. I once talked to a Go Global student advisor who said that, if she felt homesick while abroad, she and her Canadian friend would go to a sushi restaurant and talk about Vancouver (since sushi is bountiful in Vancouver.

Debra Gooei: So This is Where I Know is Home

In her post, Debra describes the changes her hometown of Singapore has gone through since she’s come to Vancouver, and the also the stereotypes and assumptions held by people outside the city. This is a highly relatable post to me because I also grew up in an area that has since been heavily developed.

Not speaking about my neighbourhood per se, but I can also see stereotypes and assumptions outsiders may have towards Vancouver. Debra notes that many people assume she is Chinese rather than Singaporean due to what she looks like. I can say the same. In my travels abroad, many people still believe Canada to be a predominantly white country. Yet, there is a large Asian population in Vancouver, and as a visual representative of that population, I’ve occasionally been questioned about my Canadian-ness. Our communities are becoming more mixed, and so are our backgrounds. These things are difficult to express, but they exist—for example, in the heavily globalized city of Hong Kong (where my family is from), there is now a company that addresses this multi-background-ness through art and festivals.

This post leads me to believe that it is natural for homes to evolve, to change and grow as we change and grow. Sometimes we may not like it (no one likes their favourite park or wooded sanctuary bulldozed over), but these things happen do in the twenty-first century. Home is also a diverse place, a place where not everyone is uniform, even if we’ve been conditioned to believe that certain places hold certain people.

Works Cited

Bale, Sung. “Third Culture – Where Transient Millennials Can Explore Their Roots.” South China Morning Post. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd., 21 Mar. 2015. Web. 8 June 2015.

Gooei, Debra. “So This is Where I Know is Home.” Oh Canada! An Interpretation. The University of British Columbia student blogs, n.d. Web. 05 June 2015.

Marten, Mattias. “2:1—The Sense of Placelessness.” Centre of Mass. The University of British Columbia student blogs, 04 June 2015. Web. 05 June 2015.

Mincer, Jilian. “The Allure of ‘no Ownership’ for Millennials Is Moving beyond Housing and Cars.” Business Insider. Business Insider, Inc., 28 May 2015. Web. 08 June 2015.

Paterson, Erika. “Course Schedule.” ENGL 470 A Canadian Studies: Canadian Literary Genres may 2015. The University of British Columbia Department of English, n.d. Web. 5 June 2015.

Vaartnou, Hannah. “.home is in your heart.” Hannah and Canada. The University of British Columbia student blogs, 5 June 2015. Web. 5 June 2015.

Prompt: Write a short story (600 – 1000 words) that describes your sense of home; write about the values and the stories that you use to connect yourself to, and to identify your sense of home. (Dr. Erika Paterson, ENGL 470)

—

I liked this house.

Unlike the apartment we’d just checked out, this house was a little older, so there wasn’t that nauseating new paint smell that made me want to throw up. I don’t remember why, but I was so very happy in this house, even though it was much smaller than the only other one I remember: our house in Toronto, whre I was born.

The moment I got my shoes off I darted in and sat in front of the empty fireplace. Then I hopped up the stairs, singing a wordless tune I’d made up.

While I was doing this, Mom, Dad, and Grandma—my housemates—had a conversation with my aunt (a realtor) I’d later learn was very brief. “She looks so darn happy in this house,” Grandma said. “We should get this one.” And Mom and Dad agreed.

And so I came to reside on the traditional and unceded homeland of the Musqueam from the age of three. I attended elementary school, high school, and now university practically on the doorstep of this house.

Between the hours of high school monotony and during the brief summer months, us teenagers took our bikes and explored campus’ nooks and crannies. D.Y. and I pretended to be Katniss Everdeen and challenged each other to scale various trees around the hood. J.C. took me to photogenic deserted beaches with still water, silence, and long waving fronds of grass. A.C. showed me where she’d found ostriches (yes, UBC keeps ostriches for…research?!) behind a badly-boarded fence at the back of a building development. We only had to peel back the boards to peer eye-to-eye with the birds.

With those I lived with I went on different adventures. Picking up boatloads of groceries at the Chinatown-Stadium T&T, baking in the open concrete parking lot during the summers. Later, long drives down Marine Drive and across the bridge to Richmond, gathering items like gai lan, bok choy, and tilapia. If I was being good, bubble waffles at Parker Place.

My friends from school also spoke English at school and climbed trees/biked/explored beaches after. Then, they’d go home and go to different places, speak a different language—very likely an East Asian one, since many were Asian immigrants.

Paraphrasing conversations a year or so ago: I sit eating dinner with my parents in the dining room. The summer’s long evening sunlight filters through our tall windows, and outside birds and people alike chirp with energy. “Two more years,” my dad sighs, “until I get to retire.”

“Have you found any other places?” I ask my mom and dad.

“We were just saying the other day, picking you up at Joyce, that that neighbourhood seems convenient,” he says. “Then of course there’s Richmond. All our favourite shops close by. Of course, you’d have to account for the potential flooding.”

I roll my eyes. “You’re being paranoid, dad.” But wherever they ended up matters little to me. By the time they move I’ll have graduated and started my own life. These days when I go out I also vaguely look at Vancouver’s various neighbourhoods for yuppie-living-potential. I really like the West End and downtown, but of course that would be out of my price range. Maybe somewhere like Mount Pleasant or Strathcona, somewhere close to Main and my favourite cafes and record stores?

It’s funny. As a ten year-old I would dream of big detached houses with trees that could be transformed into treehouses. Now I look for compact places with minimal cleaning needs and judge on their proximity to artisanal coffee roasters.

“Remind me again,” I say, “what’s so complicated about living in UBC that makes us have to sell?”

“We don’t own the land, so we have to pay extra taxes.”

“Right. The Musqueam own it.”

“No, we lease the land from UBC. We pay an extra tax, along with the usual Vancouver property tax. That’s why it’s so expensive to live here.”

I didn’t understand the incredible privilege I had of living in such a beautiful neighbourhood, nor did I understand the true history behind it, until my later teen years. All I saw were trees to climb and memories to be made. During my high school years, when UBC started to get heavily developed, I looked on as, bit by bit, the forests I’d learned to love and know transformed into apartment blocks. It used to be that my neighbourhood was the only residential neighbourhood in UBC—all along Wesbrook Mall was forest. Now we had several neighbourhoods.

But did our home belong to us in the first place?

That’s a tricky question, but I’d like to think that as long as you’re free to roam the wooded trails and breathe the ocean breeze, you are home. And I hope the Musqueam, who have done that for thousands of years, will continue to do so for countless generations to come.

Works cited

Paterson, Erika. “Lesson 2:1.” ENGL 470A Canadian Studies: Canadian Literary Genres May 2015. The University of British Columbia Department of English, n.d. Web. 3 June 2015.

Todd, Douglas. “Mapping our ethnicity Part 2: China comes to Richmond.” The Vancouver Sun. Postmedia Network, 2 May 2012. Web. 4 June 2015.

“University Lands Press.” IndigenousFoundations.arts.ubc.ca. First Nations Studies Program at University of British Columbia, n.d. Web. 4 June 2015.

All photos belong to me.