Reading Diamond Grill as a Canadian-Iranian, I felt many moments of intersection between Fred Wah’s personal narrative and my own. I was born in Canada shortly after my parents emigrated from Iran to Vancouver, as young entrepreneurs, who escaped the Iranian revolution. My parents like Fred Wah’s parents opened their own restaurant, catering Mediterranean food to the Western palette. Growing up, I despised eating the food my parents cooked both at home and at their restaurant and I tried to integrate myself into Western culture as much as possible, for fear of being marginalized by the dominant race or being labeled as a “FOB” if I brought ethnic food to school for lunch. As I grew older I began to embrace coming from such a rich culture, and in my adulthood life, I have noticed that I have unconsciously adopted many Iranian values into my predominantly Western way of thinking. Growing up in a home that embraces a culture that parts from the West, albeit at times difficult, especially in developing a sense of identity that encapsulates both my family’s values and my own, it ultimately allowed me to span my local understanding of people to an international one, heightening my emotional intelligence and perspective of people from various cultural backgrounds.

As an adult, I am proud to be Canadian-Iranian, but like some peers have already underscored, I have found my identity undermined by those who ask me “What I am” and “Where I’m from” to which I respond, “Iranian” and “Here-I was born in Canada”, but this answer usually does not suffice. It is followed with, “but you’re not full Iranian, you definitely do not look it, what’s your other half?” This last question is usually answered with an internal frustration, to which I think to myself, just because I do not look like your conception of an Iranian, I am no less Iranian. Moreover, the way in which the latter is asked is commonly coupled with a stigma of what being Iranian means and how one must look in order to look like a “generic Iranian” or what an Iranian looks like from a Western lens.

David Kertzer and Dominique Arel assert in their article “Censuses, identity formation, and the struggle for political power”,

“The compulsion to divide people into racial categories has never been far from the drive to divide them into ethnic categories. In fact, the two concepts are often blurred, a confusion having largely to do with a belief that identity can be objectively determined through ancestry” (11).

As such, I’d like to pose a question for the class, using an interesting excerpt from Diamond Grill where Fred Wah recalls,
“The teacher telling us who we get to be, to write down what our fathers are. Race, race, race. English, German, Doukhobor, Italian. But not Canadian, there’s a difference between a race and a country. No matter what, you’re what your father is, was, forever” (36).

While there is certainly a difference between a race and a country, Canada is not a pure bread country; rather it is comprised of diversity and a land of immigrants with many different cultural experiences. I am interested in hearing what my peers think of what it means to be Canadian, in particular.