The biotext Diamond Grill written by Fred Wah recounts the author’s experiences of growing up with mixed race heritage in a predominantly white town in the 1950’s. The Diamond Grill, a café which served both Western staples as well as their take on traditional Chinese fare, opened up shop in Nelson, B.C. It was a family business owned and operated primarily by the Wah’s, led by Fred’s father, Fred Wah senior.

While the world has become far more open minded and accepting of different cultures, this was not the case in the 1950’s. Canadians were especially cruel to the Chinese following the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway, which saw a large influx of Chinese workers migrate to Canada. Though the project was completed in 1885, many people harbored a mistrust and fear of the ‘foreign others’ long after, and mistreated the Chinese community greatly. Chinese workers were not given due credit for their involvement in building the CPR, and famously re-staged the iconic photo of the last spike being driven into the ground, calling their version “The Other Last Spike”.

Wah junior discusses how his ethnic makeup and racial background of being 75% white and 25% Chinese gave people from both ends of the spectrum reason to be racist towards him. Even though he had blonde hair, blue eyes, and appeared more Caucasian than Oriental, Wah junior was simultaneously too white for the Chinese population and too Chinese for the White population. This unacceptance by the people in his community caused Wah junior to question his own identity and ask exactly what it meant to be Chinese or Canadian, or both.

One key theme which Wah junior raises in his biotext is this idea of “faking it”. There are both positive and negative ways in which to view this concept and depending on which angle you take, there are different definitions of exactly what “faking it” means. For Amy Cuddy, a prominent Social psychologist in her field, “faking it” means assuming a specific bodily pose or body language to boost your confidence. Cuddy puts a positive spin on this concept and believes that if you look powerful, you will feel powerful, which is embodied in her motto “fake it ‘till you make it”.

For Wah senior, “faking it” means covering up your true feelings and acting in a certain way to please others. This can be seen in the section of Diamond Grill where Fred senior joins the Lions Club and gives a speech, mispronouncing the word ‘soup’ and instead calling it ‘sloup’ (66). Although Wah senior feels embarrassed, he covers it up by cracking a racial joke at his own expense. For a young and impressionable Wah junior, this reiterates “…that when you fake language you see, as well, how everything else is a fake” (66).

For Smith and Watson, two literary scholars who analyzed and questioned autobiographical truth in their article, their definition of “faking it” is more logical. They believe it means to embellish events for entertainment purposes, and that it comes in many forms such as “…enhanced or exaggerated experience…; ethnic impersonation; fantasized alternative lives; lives plagiarized from another’s text;…and false witnessing to human rights abuses or trauma” (17). While we have no way of knowing for sure whether an autobiography is completely true or only has hints of “truthiness” as Stephen Colbert would say, all that we can really do as readers is trust in the author to be honest and deliver a stellar story.