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.

I know… what an introduction, right? Well, let me say it’s not really that bizarre once you get where I’m coming from.

I’m Vanessa Chu, the fingers behind this little blogging space called “colour coded” – a place where I hope to open up the discussion of race and it’s intersections with politics, identity, media and science. 

I must admit that although I have thought about this topic a lot and have many ideas to share, I realize that the topic itself is so vast and has been so little discussed in the our every day lives in a critical manner that I find myself struggling with where to begin. So for starters, this blog will in itself be an experiment and exploration of how such a topic will develop in this open arena. I will try my best to introduce the topic and to introduce ways of discussing it through my background in Communication. 

So I guess before I begin delving into the topic at all, I should introduce myself and explain where I’m coming from and why I’ve started this blog. 

I think we all can be a scholar on the topic of race because we all struggle with our identity and all of us are racialized. We each have a unique understanding of race and how it has affected our lives. I guess, I just chose to study it. In 2007 I earned a MA in Media Studies from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada where I completed a thesis on race and biotechnology. This blog gives me the opportunity to not only share some of my thoughts and research on race, but allows me to open up a discussion with others about the topic, which I believe is fundamental to the interactions of individuals, communities and nations alike. Because of its’ salience in our every day lives, I think it warrants that we closely look at what race really means in our communities and how it has shaped our view of the world around us.

As a Chinese Canadian who was born and raised in Canada, I have always been keenly aware that my racial identity could never clearly be reconciled. This feeling of belonging and unbelonging was rooted in the divisions that race has created. Not completely chinese, though I look like one, neither white either, though I often identift myself with those who call themselves white, not brown enough it seems, and definitely not black I am told. So like so many who share this ambiguity, I became “a banana”, a description that was created by the Asian Canadian community to define itself in a country that although diverse has not yet developed the vocabulary to talk about racial identity in any clear way. So as a Chinese born Canadian (CBC), I am a hybrid with a yellow exterior wrapping a fleshy white interior, an identity I never liked and always wanted to shed, but could not. I never settled well with either yellow or white, a twin identity that never mixed, yet was never separated either. So having always questioned the legitimacy of my own identity, I started to look at race in a more structured and systematic way.

When I started seriously exploring the notion of race, I was presented with more questions than answers. What is race? How is it defined? Who defines it? Where did this idea come from? Is race real? How is race real? How does it affect our lives? How have I been racialized?  How does race shape our identities? How has race perpetuated in history? How has it perpetuated in our every day lives? What does it mean in science? How is race discussed in the media? How is race discussed in the various institutions of society? And how is race political? 

I hope to start a discussion based on these questions and to introduce some communication theory (which shares its discipline with history, sociology, cultural studies, anthropology and philosophy) that can help us slowly understand and see how the history of race continues to affect our every day understanding of individuals, communities, and institutions. 

So if you’re curious about the subject, I invite you to follow along and even participate! I’ve been mulling over this topic for some time, but I don’t believe great ideas come alone. I welcome questions, suggestions, thoughts, criticisms, links, and even blogs of your own!

Also, please check out the first ever Diversity Camp on Feb. 7, 2009 in Vancouver, BC Canada. Hopefully this blog can get the race discussion juices flowing and ready for barcamp diversity style!