I Come From the Flower People

A personal creative non-fiction essay I wrote for Schema Magazine's special series that features an array of  voices thinking through that question, "But where are you REALLY from?"  For the blog post with pictures, click on this link. 

 A note on etymology: Sino-Vietnamese people have been referred to as Người Hoa in a derogatory manner. Interestingly enough, hoa also means "flower" in Vietnamese.

 The Ethnic Inquisition

When I think back to all those times I've been asked--"But where are you really from?"--I can recall now with some amusement the unsatisfactory answers I have given, though not necessarily in the following order:

--I was born in Red Deer, Alberta, but I grew up in Edmonton.
--I've lived in Canada my whole life.
--My family came from Vietnam, but we're not Vietnamese.
--I'm Sino-Vietnamese.

Sometimes when I'm feeling lazy and lousy, I offer the following answers to my nosy inquisitors instead: "My ancestors are from China," or "I'm second-generation Chinese Canadian". But when I give these answers, answers so seemingly simple that they betray the complexity of what it has meant for people to come from China over the past 200 years, I still find myself compelled to give more answers, even when more questions are not asked.

Then I remember those moments when I'm not even asked this vexing question, moments that bring up feelings of shame and indignation from being categorized correctly or incorrectly. Most women of Asian ancestry know what I'm talking about--those embarrassing moments of being accosted by men in public with an abrasive ni hao?!--or ahn nyeong hah seh yo!!! These are the more aggressive moments when you'd prefer to be asked the vexing question instead. But my worst "I know where you are really from" moment happened to me on my way to the University of Alberta five or six years ago.


Strangers on a Train

I was on my way to class. I was sitting alone on the LRT when a man sat down across from me. We quickly exchanged polite smiles, but I could feel his intrusive stare, so I looked up and smiled politely again.

"What you got there in your thermos?" he asked.

"Excuse me?" I replied.

"Your thermos? What are you drinking out of it?"

"Oh, just coffee."

"Coffee? Why are you drinking coffee?"

Confused, I continued to stare at him, but I stopped smiling politely.

"You should be drinking tea, you know. It's a shame, you people losing your culture like that."

At that point, the LRT emerged from the underground tunnel. The man turned to squint at the sudden bright view of the North Saskatchewan River through the window while I continued to stare at the icy thermos numbing my fingers—palpably slipping away.


Native Tongue(s)

Many Canadians are proud to say, "I am Canadian." The term "Canadian" for them stands alone. They have no use for hyphens.

I, too, never had much use for hyphens when I was a kid. I used to tell people I was half Vietnamese and half Chinese since it sounded clunky to say that I was Chinese-Vietnamese-Canadian. Plus, I do not remember saying or even once thinking, "I am Canadian." I always knew I was born in Canada, but somehow I never considered myself first and foremost Canadian.

It's strange growing up in Canada yet never really thinking of yourself as Canadian. I was a busy kid, speaking English at school and Vietnamese at home. Vietnamese was my first language, even though everyone in my family spoke Vietnamese and Cantonese fluently. I used to think and count in Vietnamese. I once dreamt only in Vietnamese.

In grade four, I was sent to Chinese school on the weekends. It was a frustrating experience. I could never improve. I had a hard time remembering how to pronounce the characters, and my columns of ideographs were always marked with a red C+ in the top margins. The teacher expected the boxed columns in my notebook to be filled with an obedient army of strokes--well-centered, well-ordered, little pieces of art—none of the crooked, off-centered, unruly uses of space like my own. I never did understand how a pencil was supposed to imitate a brush.

I eventually gained a rudimentary understanding of Cantonese from watching Chinese films from Hong Kong with English subtitles. I also strengthened my conversational skills from working as a shampoo girl at my mother's hair salon in Chinatown. Though I managed to improve enough to engage in most conversations, today my Cantonese sounds broken at best.

Learning English was a different story. It was as easy as speaking Vietnamese. I always did well in Language Arts. I loved to read. I went through incredible binges. At age 10, I was carrying bags of books home from the public library so that I could lie in bed and read all day until my head hurt.

Unfortunately, going to school in Anglo Canada has reduced my fluency in Vietnamese. English nouns have permeated my mother tongue. I used to think that my Vietnamese was excellent until I would speak to my mother in front of my white Anglo-Canadian ex who surprised me when he could understand us and add to our conversations in English--I suppose I've been speaking Vinglish.

I never did have much use for hyphens. I've spent most of my life in translation. But at some point, my mind switched to English without telling me, leaving me convinced that I was still half Vietnamese and half Chinese, and never first and foremost Canadian.


May 18, 2006

"We lack a place of origin. We have no homeland, no country, no nationality."

"Why is that?" I asked my father.

"Because in Vietnam we were always Người Hoa. And in America, even after all these years, we've never really been considered American. Here, we're Chinese."

"So we really have no home?"

"No."

"Not even China?"

"How? We never lived there."

Blood
 
In my early 20s, I lost half of my ethnicity. I learned that I did not contain a single drop of Vietnamese. Being 100% 'pure' Chinese was not something my family ever told me, that is, not until my mother corrected me one day after she overheard me telling my friend about our supposed half Vietnamese and half Chinese heritage.

It probably seems strange that I never bothered to ask my family about our ethnic background, but it seems just as strange to have ever bothered asking since I was never confused about who we were. I grew up in a close-knit immigrant community in Edmonton that spoke Vietnamese and Cantonese interchangeably, a community of Vietnamese and Cantonese speakers known as the Hoa people, or the boat people, the second generation and sometimes third generation overseas Chinese who were exiled from Vietnam to places like Hong Kong before migrating to places like Canada in the last 40 years.

We tend to claim cultural identities through the percentages in our blood. This ridiculous notion of spooning identities into separate jars was even a law in the U.S., a law that determined a person's race through an equation of fractions. But what can blood mean in our globalizing world? With the forces of war and transnational capital pushing and pulling migrant bodies around the world, who can claim to be pure anything these days? Who can be pure Chinese? Or pure African? Or pure Aboriginal?

For some of us, the lack or presence of blood can be terribly painful. The bigger the drop, the bigger the pressure to maintain ethnic 'purity.'

Belonging

We don't belong anywhere since the Revolution. The old China's disappeared while we've been away.
--from Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts

The question--"But where are you really from?"--has as much to do with race as it does with place. Assuming that race equals place, it's a simple and seemingly more polite way of reducing our identities to the place(s) our families come from. But our passports and birth certificates can never tell the whole story. They can never document what it's like to be constantly reminded by this vexing question that you and your family don't belong.

After settling for three generations in Hanoi, my family never did belong in Vietnam—nor did they belong in Hong Kong with their fluent Cantonese. They've been pegged either as too Chinese or too Vietnamese. It doesn't matter how fluent they remain in either language. They are always read as foreigners, especially in white settler colonial societies like Canada and the U.S.

I've come to realize that we'd be better off without place. We'd be better off building our sense of belonging not to the places we come from or the indigenous territories we currently occupy but from the relationships and connections that we've made along the way. I believe this because it explains why I feel an extraordinary sense of belonging whenever I hear my childhood tongue being spoken by strangers in public. Too shy to converse with them and too embarrassed by how child-like my Vietnamese has become, I silently listen to these strangers, not even sure if they are Người Hoa or Vietnamese immigrants, but happy all the same to be hearing my first language in a public space where we are all expected to blend in and speak perfect English.

Book Review | Vincent Lam's The Headmaster's Wager

A book review of Vincent Lam's The Headmaster's Wager I wrote for Schema Magazine (for the blog post, click on this link):


When I received my review copy of Vincent Lam's epic tome, The Headmaster's Wager, I immediately dropped everything important in my life to read it—it cost me the better part of an afternoon. You can say that I've been waiting my whole life for a Sino-Vietnamese epic of this kind to be written. I was extremely excited that a talented Sino-Vietnamese author has finally written this story, one who has been enjoying great success in the mainstream publishing industry (Lam won the Giller in 2006 for his debut short story collection Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures). And in the telling this story, Lam holds nothing back.

Lam takes on the challenge of narrating a historical epic of an elite overseas Chinese community who lived and prospered throughout the successive waves of colonization in Vietnam. And talk about colonial turnovers to the nth degree: for the longest time the Chinese were in charge, then the French, then the Japanese, and then, the story we're most familiar with, the Americans. Fictional treatments of the Vietnam War, if not told from the Vietnamese point of view, have mostly been told from the American side. The Headmaster's Wager takes us through all the historical developments that lead up to the Vietnam War from the perspective of Percival Chen, a Chinese headmaster of Saigon's most prestigious English language academy, and the view isn't flattering.

Percival is a detestable character. He is a gluttonous, opportunistic, alcoholic womanizer who gets whatever he wants because his hands are lodged deep in the pockets of many corrupt government officials. He's also an unapologetic racist. Though he and his father before him have been lucky enough to escape famine and poverty to live and prosper in Gold Mountain, what they have come to call Vietnam, he steadfastly refuses to 'go native' because he believes the Vietnamese are racially and culturally inferior, an ethnic pride that lands his son into serious political trouble.

In the end, Lam offers up a humanizing portrait of a Chinese patriarch who has struck gold in life only to lose everything to save his son. And just when his misfortunes could not possibly get any lower, Lam's protagonist places everything on the line, on the ultimate wager. After all, this is a story of a compulsive gambler, who after losing everything dear to him, wins the heart of a stunning métisse woman (his half Vietnamese, half French lover) and gains a replacement son. This is, indeed, a story of second chances, but even cats have only nine lives. From his first downfall, you will want to rip through the rest of the novel to find out how Lam's protagonist miraculously manages, yet again, to land back on his feet—and along the way, you'll receive doses of romance, terror, suspense, and sorrow. It's one of those thrilling novels—rare for most historical fiction—that you can't put down, that you won't stop reading, that you must finish in one sitting—I'd bet on it.

Book Review | Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

Book review of Amy Chua's controversial memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother that I wrote for Schema Magazine (for the blog post, click on this link): 

The paperback version of Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother was released at the start of 2012. To review a book like this after all the hype and controversy has died down was a challenging but intriguing exercise. What had sparked the initial excitement over Chua's memoir last year, thus guaranteeing that it would be a bestseller and receive excessive media coverage and attention online, was a carefully packaged excerpt, "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior," published in the Wall Street Journal just days before the book release.

As a sampler, Chua's excerpt would lead you to believe that her memoir functions as a parenting handbook on raising stereotypically successful Asian children, a how-to guide on rearing your own Math whizzes and musical prodigies the "Chinese way", but at a heavy cost—the cost of a child's love and happiness, and even a parent's humanity.

It's hard not to read Chua's memoir in this way considering the hype centred around these three aspects: one, the strict authoritarian "Chinese" approach to parenting that demands and expects excellence is superior to the relaxed and liberal blind encouragement model exercised in most "Western" households; two, Chua's extreme "Chinese" commandments barring her daughters from sleepovers, play time, less-than-A grades, and any hobbies (for example TV, computer games, and crafts) and extracurricular activities (such as drama) that would not eventually result in winning a prestigious award; and three, the heartless, Chua disciplining her children and pushing them until their piano and violin pieces are perfected and performed brilliantly.

It's too easy to hate on Chua for her extreme parenting manifesto or for her repeated overgeneralizations about "Western" and "Chinese" families. Chua's memoir is written to provoke; it practically goads you into judging her. In a heavy-handed way, it sets her up as an evil mother figure who will receive her come-uppance, a mother who'll be redeemed by the lessons on work-life balance that she finally learns from her sister's near death experience with leukemia and from her rebellious teenage daughter's violent public outburst. In the end, these moments humble Chua; they balance out the parodied caricature of herself that she has painted to entertain her audience. But is this all that her book amounts to--an entertaining story of a Chinese mother-tyrant who finally softens after a simple epiphany?

Sure. But then there's her class and genealogical anxieties. Chua's worst nightmare is producing soft, entitled children, a third generation "pampered and decadent like the Romans when their empire fell." The third generation, according to Chua, are at risk of losing their grandparents' poor immigrant work ethic and drive to improve their social status. With this exaggerated fear in mind, Chua's memoir is still a worthwhile read: not as an extreme "Chinese" parenting guide-gone-wrong, but as a vexed memoir of a second-generation mother's unapologetic attempts to assimilate and elevate the social status of her family line in America.