Anonymous Community Member Submission
There has recently been a disturbing pattern of hateful rhetoric and physical violence directed at Asian Canadians. While distressed at these events, I am not particularly surprised. Canadian history is full of such incidents during periods of great stress – recessions, unemployment, country at war, periods of mass immigration and now pandemics – but also during periods of change from one “normal” to unknown future.
I have been lucky in my life; I have not faced a great deal of anti-Asian discrimination. This does not mean that I was unconscious of the difference between myself and my classmates, friends, and neighbours.
I remember well when the issue of “race” first pushed into my conscious mind. We lived across the highway from the local school that held classes from grades one through grade nine. Every day I walked from home to school and back across the school playing fields.
On a particular day when I was in the 5th or 6th grade, I happened to cross paths with two female students who were a grade or so behind me. Politeness required me to at least say “hello” and so I did. One of the girls was the daughter of the school principal who lived in the teacher’s accommodation in the far corner of the schoolyard. We were all terrified of Mr. B but not of his two children.
“Hi you Jap” came the reply.
The two girls continued on to wherever they had been going, looking back, and giggling into their hands. This incident imbedded in a shy, fat, near-sighted and awkward child a harsh lesson never to be forgotten. As confused and hurt as I was, I never related this incident to anyone.
Over the years there were other instances of unfairness so obvious that it was difficult not to interpret the situation as one of discrimination against my obvious Asian-ness. But I simply did what all of our grandparents and parents and uncles and aunts did: put your head down, stay under the radar and work harder than everybody else.
Shikagata-nai. Nothing can be done. What cannot be changed must be endured.
Anti-Asian racial discrimination has been tolerated for a long time in our country. At times it has been encouraged by government policies. The Chinese Immigration Act of 1885 imposed a head tax to discourage Chinese men from bringing their families to Canada. In Vancouver in 1907, mobs of whites rampaged through Chinatown vandalizing the businesses owned by Chinese Canadians and physically assaulting those who tried to fight back.
The Komagata Maru incident in 1914 was a blatant example of Canada’s attempts to discourage immigrants of South Asian ancestry. Throughout the early 1900s Asians were denied access to jobs, licenses, union memberships and the right to vote.
Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour was incentive for the United States to enter WWII but it was also the beginning of a mass relocation of citizens of Japanese ancestry throughout the Americas. In British Columbia, all residents of Japanese ancestry were rounded up, detained and later relocated to internment camps in the interior of the province or to farms in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Their businesses, boats, cars, and homes were seized and sold by the government to help pay for their own incarceration.
The above are well documented and part of the Asian immigrant experience in Canada. All have caused pain, suffering, and sometimes directly led to deaths. We cannot escape our history. We cannot gloss it over. We should not attempt to re-write it in a kinder light.
I believe what matters is whether you live your life with your hands open and palms turned upwards - uplifting and helping those around you. Or if you use your hands as a clenched fist - as a gesture towards the “other”, as a threat or a tool to suppress or diminish another.
A community association to me has been place where democracy, equality and humanity can be practised at a grass roots level; a place where the organization has a quasi-legal status bestowed upon it by the government to ensure this is so.
This is where we, as a group, should perform at our best to ensure that the following invocations become our everyday reality:
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
We won’t often get the closure from another that we desire. This means that we must discover it on our own. Forgiveness is how we find peace, no matter if they want to give it to us or not.
Tenzin Gyatso, The 14th Dalia Lama
Between striving to change the way things are and forgiving the transgressions of the past, there is a path forward. n our journey we ought to also remember those other words from Dr. King’s speech:
"…In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.”