An Epigraph
“Hablas Espanol?”
“No sorry I don’t speak Spanish!”
“Oh sorry, you must be Italian! No wait, Portuguese”
“No, none of those!”
“Oh come on, what is your name”
“Yael”
“Yael! You must be Israeli then!”
“No I’m not Israeli”
“Then why do you have an Israeli name”
“Because I am Jewish?”
“What’s your ethnicity than”
“…Canadian I guess?”
“But your grandparents?”
“Canadian”
“But where is your family from then?”
“I dunno, like England, Poland, Russia. I guess I’m a mix”
“What no way! With such dark skin and features, and a name like Yael, no way”
“Uh okay”
Typing out this dialogue seemed to take an unnecessary amount of time, and may be in excess of what is common for a blog post. However, imagine having to go through this conversation at least once a day. In fact, in the past 24 hours, I have had almost an identical conversation three times, with three different people. The countries will often change, or the order that these questions get asked in, but the length and content are always consistent. There is always a disbelief in my “true” heritage and ethnicity.
Using this dialogue to think about the epigraph from Diamond Grill, where Fred Wah states “When you’re not ‘pure,’ you make it up”, is especially useful to understand what I think Fred Wah was pointing out. The pressure for one to make up where you are from and what your family background is becomes more evident through these conversations. People don’t want to believe what I tell them, are unaccepting of the term Canadian as a way to describe your “ethnicity”, and are disappointed when I am not from somewhere more “exotic”. In fact, this pressure from other people used to annoy me so much when I was younger that I did make up where my family originated from. This dissatisfaction of many people with a not “pure” answer is what drives the need, or desire to make things up, to have a simpler answer than you have, which can become extremely frustrating. In a world that is becoming constantly more globalized, and families will become less and less “pure”, this dissatisfaction and these kind of conversations, that I witness with many other people, need to become a little less hostile. If someone says they are Canadian, or a mix of many things, or they do not really know, that should just be accepted.