On October 11, 2022, I attended Barbara Lee’s talk on Asian representation in media. She started with background information about herself, some of which applied to me as well. I chuckled when she said “as a good Asian daughter, I went into academics” because it’s relatable. It’s part of my story too. I’m sure that many other Asians in the audience saw bits of their lives in the story that Lee told too.
photo of Barbara Lee, Founder of Vancouver Asian Film Festival (https://vaff.org/board-of-directors/)
When she talked about our community being seen as the model minority, that got my attention. Yes, we’re polite, law abiding, and ended up being seen as successful but like Lee said, it’s based on hard work and putting in the extra hours. This made me think about a reading I did for my sociology class called Makúk by John Lutz that mentioned how colonizers in the 1880’s in British Colombia preferred to hire Chinese immigrants in chapter 3. Chinese immigrants were described as being willing to ‘be on call all the time’, ‘reliable’ and ‘exotic’. The jobs that they got were tiring manual labor such as farming or housework. Lutz said that it’s because as immigrants with no other income, they had no choice but to work whatever jobs there were. This ties into Lee’s story where she mentions that when her family came to Canada, they became farm workers, and everyone was expected to help out.
Book by John Lutz (https://www.ubcpress.ca/makuk)
Photo of Souvankham Thammavongsa and her book of short stories How to Pronounce Knife (https://www.cbc.ca/books/how-to-pronounce-knife-1.5419553)
In her talk, Lee also spoke about Canada trying to get well off Asians to immigrate by using incentives and targeting them specifically. I wonder if my family was one of these. My father held a high position in a company in China as did some of his friends that moved to Canada before we did. When my parents arrived, they had to start again in much lower jobs like the father in the short story How to Pronounce Knife by Souvankham Thammavongsa. Thammavongsa wrote “They’d had to begin all over again, as if the life they led before didn’t count” and it feels so true and painful. Her stories capture the challenges faced and the emotions that come with them after making it across the border. Why did Canada want certain families to come if this would happen to us?
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