In the interview that Fred Wah provided for Canadian Literature in September of 2000, he highlights contemporary issues of race within his experiences. Diamond Grill takes up issues of identity, ethnicity and responsibility throughout, but what is interesting is how Wah’s experiences have shaped his interactions with current Asian students of his about race. In the interview, Wah expresses his uncertainty with who the Asian students are in his class and how to breach the topic of race with the class. It’s important to note that since the Chinese were only allowed to bring their families into Canada after 1947, the 1950s still contained abundant racism towards Chinese people. In modern day classrooms, taking into account racial diversity and teaching the youth about it are experiences Wah never had himself growing up during the 50s; in fact he had the opposite. This can be seen in his childhood memory of his school teacher forcing him to identify as Chinese, and not Canadian on a form he had to fill in, despite Wah being both.
Wah explains the difficulties he faced about teaching about race by making the point that ‘we almost tried to talk about this in the class, you know, the whole sense of what’s all this whiteness doing examining, gazing on this race problem, and we tried to turn it around a little but didn’t get very far with it’. It can be challenging to teach an increasingly diverse group of students about issues of gender, race and class, without disrespecting anyone in the class, and teaching ideas which can then possibly be misconstrued by the student. Some scholars, however, have suggestions to ameliorate these difficulties. As Marilyn Cochrane-Smith points out in her article entitled ‘Color Blindness and Basket Making Are Not the Answers’, “if we are going to prepare teachers to work intelligently and responsibly in a society that is increasingly diverse in race, language, and culture, then we need more teachers who are moved by their own intelligence and actively involved in communities that engage in “the heresy” of systematic and critical inquiry” (520). Essentially, if teachers begin to think individually and from a critical standpoint about how race is being taught in education, we can begin to teach about it in an informative and respectful manner. In Wah’s comment, he refers to his inability to use his own race to discuss the ‘race problem’, as he terms it, with students. Perhaps as classes further diversify and teachers commence this ‘critical inquiry’ of which Cochrane-Smith speaks, this problem will not be as potent in the coming years as it is today.