Intersectionality: on Class and Race in Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill
by ninaxu
Fred Wah’s biotext, Diamond Grill, is a semi-fictional account of his life growing up mixed race in small-town BC in the 1950s. Wah’s grandfather is a Chinese man who moves to Canada in adulthood and marries a white woman; Wah’s father is half-Chinese and half-white, grew up in China, and lives his adult life in Canada, marrying and having children with a white woman. Diamond Grill explores the intergenerational experiences of Jim Wah, Fred Wah Sr., and Fred Wah Jr. and their experiences in and responses to a white racist Canada.
Intersectionality was coined by Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989 to examine the ways in which different forms of oppression intersect and inform a person’s experiences and argues that said forms of oppression – based on gender, race, class, ability, sexual orientation, etc. – do not act independently of each other. It provides a useful analytical tool to examine Wah Jr.’s experiences in Diamond Grill as Wah Sr.’s status as a restaurant owner and businessman conflicts with his status as a racialized person.
Class is a constant companion to race in Diamond Grill: Jim Wah’s gold tooth, a marker of wealth, is a frequent descriptor and he is “a spiffy dresser who sported a gold nugget stickpin and diamond cufflinks… You could tell he was attracted to living the spiffy life” (Wah, 58). It is one of the reasons Wah’s mother may have first been attracted to Wah Sr.: “Well you can imagine Swift Current being like a farmer/working class town… A rather risque element… these Chinese kids with a little change in their pockets. Which would be very appealing for young girls” (Wah 94). Class allows these Chinese men to move beyond their racial limitations in order to date pretty white girls – much to their parents’ chagrin – and to participate in social circles they may not otherwise be allowed to, as when Wah Sr. joins the Lions Club. Wah Sr. explicates the importance of money to Wah Jr., “[advising him] to get into the food business. He said you’ll never get rich but everybody has to eat so you’ll always make enough to get by” (Wah, 42). While Wah Sr. doesn’t like it when he sees people “putting on airs or using class advantage” (Wah, 69), he is accutely aware of class: “It’s not class itself, really, but how you use it” (Wah, 69). Wah Sr.’s status as a restaurant owner is leveraged for a small amount of security against the constant disadvantage of his race.
Yet race is always there, always a threat to Wah’s business: “No matter what, you’re what your father is, was, forever… Race makes you different” (Wah, 36). Wah Sr. was able to marry his white girlfriend, but she was “shunned… for marrying a Chinaman” (Wah, 42) until Wah Jr.’s “blond hair and blue eyes… ease her parents” (Wah, 43). Wah Jr. himself has a highly charged confrontation with the father of his first (white) girlfriend:
“He says I’ve got nothing against you or your family but I don’t want my daughter marrying a Chinaman… I know your father’s a respected business man downtown but you’ve got sneaky eyes and I don’t want you seeing my daughter any more so don’t let me catch you around here again and no more phone calls either… I can’t even speak Chinese my eyes don’t slant and aren’t black my hair’s light brown and I’m not going to work in a restaurant all my life but I’m going to go to university and I’m going to be as great a fucking white success as you asshole and my name’s still going to be Wah and I’ll love garlic and rice for the rest of my life.” (Wah, 39)
Wah Jr.’s middle class privilege is explicitly brought up and rejected here, his father’s status as a businessman not enough to protect him from racial oppression. In fact, Wah Sr. seems to live in a constant state of high alert: the one time we hear of him hitting his son is when Wah Jr. taunts a bus driver – an innocuous act for any white kid – and Wah Sr. worries that this will be a threat to his business: “I can’t fool around out there when my father’s a business man, a Chinese business man, and I’d better not talk back like I did today, to anyone, particularly when they’re white, because it all comes down on him, my father” (Wah, 101). And, heartbreakingly, when Wah Sr. joins the Lions Club, he stumbles over the word “soup” and feels obligated to mock himself and his race in order to ingratiate himself to the white audience (Wah, 65).
Wah Jr.’s mother tells us “there was a lot of racism in those days… [miscegenation] isn’t like it is now, a completely accepted thing” (Wah, 14), but her words belie the lived reality of racialized people in “the West”: class does not protect against racial prejudice as race does not protect against homophobia as other forms of privilege do not protect against transphobia. Intersectionality remains as relevant today as it has ever been.
I find the idea of intersectionality very interesting and very applicable to Diamond Grill. I was wondering about one word from the list that isn’t touched upon much in the post, gender, and how it interconnects with race, class, and ability as well. The examples of women’s experiences are not very overt, but provide an interesting undertone to the book that women are often unwelcome or punished for their decisions – Donna Mori and her sister, for example, are initially unwelcome due to their race; Mrs. Morrison is judged by Shu for intruding on a male, Chinese territory; Fred Junior’s mother Coreen is estranged from her parents after marrying Fred Senior, and Florence is ignored in her please to keep her children at home, and equally so in her pleas and her attempts to bring them back from China, where an equally marginalized woman was abandoned by her husband and given another woman’s children as a sort of consolation, and of course Ethel is abandoned and only returns by being married off to Chinese man she hasn’t met who is already in Canada. Even small anecdotes suggest marginalization such as how Granny Erickson “wasn’t allowed in unescorted” to a beer parlour (35). How much of this marginalization is connected with ability and with class? Simply through marrying Chinese men, Florence and Coreen seemed to have been knocked down a hypothetical class peg, at least in the eyes of their parents. There is also mention of Jim not liking Florence working in the cafe, whether because of her ability or through possessiveness or control is not entirely clear. What I find more difficult is how to connect these women’s marginalization with our discussion in class of faking it – is there evidence of these women faking their way through their issues as well?
There is definitely a theme of disenfranchised women running through the book: as you note, Fred Sr.’s mother pleads with her husband to get her children back, but she doesn’t have the power to make that decision herself; her husband’s first wife must take care of these children, whether she wants to or not – and we have no real information about her thoughts and feelings on this. This polygamous arrangement is, of course, a reinforcement of a very patriarchal, sexist, heteronormative set of values.
I’m not sure what you mean by “how much of this marginalization is connected with ability and with class” – I don’t remember any of the people in Diamond Grill being explicitly identified as having a disability. Could you clarify what you mean by “ability”?
Women were still a very low percentage of the labour force in the 1950s, so I suspect there’s a class element in Fred Sr. not wanting his wife to work in the cafe. What does a working woman say about her personality, her husband’s personality, and her husband’s ability to provide for the family in the 1950s? Was it still shameful (as it was a few decades earlier) for a woman to earn money as opposed to living as a non-working (or at least, doing labour only within the household) housewife?
Simply through marrying Chinese men, Florence and Coreen seemed to have been knocked down a hypothetical class peg
I disagree with this, as I think it’s fairly clear in one of the passages I quote above that Fred Sr. had more money & was lower middle to middle class while the Ericksons were working class (Wah 94). The Ericksons’ disapproval was very much about race and racial taint; given they were put somewhat at ease by Wah Jr.’s “blond hair and blue eyes” (Wah 43) and the repeated theme of Wah Jr. being Chinese despite the blond hair and blue eyes (both an external identification, e.g. the teacher who tells him so, and an internal identification, e.g. his love of garlic and connecting that to his Chinese-ness), I think there’s a one-drop rule or “blood will out” type of anxiety occurring here.
I suspect the Mori sisters would have been unwelcome regardless of gender (this was very soon after World War II, and while China and Japan have historically had very bad relations, WWII made things much worse). I’m not sure how I read Mrs. Morrison’s invasion of the kitchen, myself – as you said, she’s intruding on a male, Chinese territory – which creates a combination of a traditionally disenfranchised group (women) invading that of a dominant group (men), but it’s also a dominant group (white) that has historically made a point of claiming and colonizing spaces that aren’t theirs.