I’m not sure where I’m going to start this post, so I shall just begin perhaps where the story ultimately ends.

A couple months ago, my mom-in-law showed me a book she got at a local library book signing. It was a little Canadian novel called End of East by Jen Sookfong Lee, a book described as “An exquisite and evocative debut from one of Canada’s bright new literary stars”. I held the hardcover for a few uncomfortable seconds before mustering the right words to respond to it. Its musty green cover with its pale faced asian girl fanning herself in qi pao and jasmine tea had me swallow an uncomfortable sigh. Here again, is a book about me as this porcelain girl sipping tea with chop sticks, I thought. An internal fury burned in me. This, I told myself, is the narrative I wish not to write, yet here she is, an exquisite and evocative debut from one of Canada’s bright new literary stars – my myth retold in exquisite prose.

I couldn’t quite explain at that moment to my mom-in-law what my hesitation was in the book. It is a fine story, I’m sure, I said. In fact, a likely accurate foray into the historical struggles of Chinese Canadians. Yet, I couldn’t explain why it made me feel so uncomfortable. I summoned up some stupid explanation about generation gaps and the typical melange of narratives of the diaspora. None of this though hit the heart of the matter. I left it as that, the topic was let to distill.

It’s taken me months to realize though what was truly wrong with the End of East and why I was so noxiously offended by it. It was the fact that stories like End of East don’t belong in Canadian society any longer, and it’s writing and rewriting of the Chinese Canadian diasporic experience has kept me, a Canadian girl with dark hair, brown eyes, olive skin, and a pair of flat cheekbones, suffocating under the narrative of the foreign – foreign families, foreign problems, foreign parents, foreign culture, and the foreign Canadian.

More than a hundred years later, the Chinese immigrant who fathered and mothered many generations of daughters and sons on this land, are still telling stories of us as if we had just stepped off the boat and dug the first hole for the nation’s railway. Each edition of the same story told through eyes of another Chinese Canadian generation, telling the same struggle of racism, prejudices, cultural isolationism, and generational fissure. We get it! I think to myself.

The truth is, my family came from all those stories written in musty coloured books. I was and am a child of the cultural divide. My great grandfather lived through and paid the Canadian head tax to come to this great nation. I am a child of the stories told of Chinese Canadians in this country. But where it stops becoming instructive is when the history no longer serves to inform my own narrative. Where the telling and retelling of what “Chinese people are” overshadows what we really are – Canadians.

After being a victim of a strange assault of suburban racism, I have come to realize what is wrong with the cultural narratives within our country. We haven’t really told a true story of what it’s like to be a Canadian in a hell of a long time. We’ve told plenty of stories of Chinese Canadians, Hindu Canadians, Inuit Canadians, but what about just the Canadian?

We simply have not begun to tell today’s stories of Canadian lives. Not Chinese lives, not white lives, not hindu lives, or black lives. I’m talking about Canadian lives. We honestly have not truly grasped what that means yet, and our foolishness is in our telling and retelling of stories from the past that has rendered us paralyzed and constantly in reference to the diaspora and my racial struggle as an olive skin black haired girl.

It is no wonder that I cringed at the thought of the book’s title, End of East. There was never an end of east or a beginning of west. That’s the story we keep telling ourselves – that we came from the east and ended up in the west and suddenly broke free. That narrative may have been relevant 30 years ago, but today, it only serves to perpetuate a cultural divide. I believe we need to explore narratives that see Canadians as beginning in Canada, period.

Canada’s cultural policies on “multiculturalism” is passe. We are past the point of tolerance. The word itself is from a history that no longer suits our needs. We need to move towards interculturalism* because Canada is a culture that defines itself by its interactions and not by its tolerance of divisions. We need to critically explore the notion of Canadian before we can truly understand the struggles of a nation.

Racism is as much a product of other’s prejudices as it is a product of a our own narratives of ourselves.

I demand that we tell our stories with this in mind.

My first line will be, where the end of east never began…

* Note: I don’t actually go by the definition provided by Wikipedia for Interculturalism. I’ll write a follow-up post about my thoughts on interculturalism after I’ve done some research as well to substantiate my own thoughts. For now, my definition of interculturalism is a social schema for viewing culture. It inherently sees cultures as interfused. There are no pure cultures, nor distinct ones. Interculturalism looks at how cultures are intertwined and richly involved.