I’ve got 50 first cousins. Yeah, you read that right. As part of the Ethnic Aisle’s Pride edition, here’s a Q&A with Clyde, the only one that’s openly gay.
Was there an actual day that you came out to your parents?
There was. I believe it was 1994, I was 21. I came home from classes on my birthday, which is October 11, which is also National Coming Out Day in the U.S. Oprah Winfrey was having a special where she talked to parents who were dealing with the issues raised by their GLBT kids. I watched the program with my mom. Afterward, I turned to her and said “And you know I’m gay, right?” She sort of sighed and said “are you sure it’s not a phase?” I said no, and she said ok. I kind of left her there with that.
Two days later, I was hanging around with my sister, Suzanne, and late brother, Andy, and mom came up to me. She gave me a hug and said “I don’t care, I love you anyway. I’m glad you came out of the cupboard.” This became a huge lost-in-translation joke.
10. It used to make me mental when my parents pronounced my name the Trini way, DEN-eeez. I would prissily inform them it was duh-NEECE. Now I wish they would pronounce it their way. I miss it. Also I wish I could properly pronounce it the French way.
9. My brothers’ middle names are Imran and Hakim. Mine is Camille.
8. My parents don’t speak French.
7. When I was in high school, my Chinese boss made my Chinese co-worker pick an English name to use at work. This, in a very Chinese neighbourhood. Someone needs to make a clever t-shirt slogan about keeping your internalized racism off of me, thanks.
6. I’m very interested to know which of the GTA’s current immigrant waves are and aren’t assimilating their names. I tried to write a story about this, but the province would only give me last name trends, or first name trends. First-and-last was an invasion of privacy. Fair enough, but I wish I could get at least anecdotal evidence among, say, Tamils, a group of relative newcomers who have seriously non-Anglo names. Thai people have crazy funky names, too, but there aren’t as many around here. Anyway, if you have ideas how I might write this, let me know. Also, if you have an unwieldy ethnic name, keep it. Or don’t.
5. Last year I worked at the Star and there were four – count ‘em, four – brown female reporters. And our names were mixed up on a semi-regular basis. Generally by men.
4. My dad’s mom apparently gave me a Hindi name when I was born, but no one remembers it. This makes me a little sad.
3. I love how names can tell you so much about where and when a person is from. I was recently talking with a pregnant friend of mine about trendy old-fashioned names, and we joked about some that would never come back, and what she might name her son. “Heathcliff Wong!” she laughed. “That’s a real estate agent in Vancouver.”
2. I’m not too fussed about mispronouncing people’s names once or twice, or having them mispronounce mine.
1. That said, why do white people always say “Balkinson”? Hooked on Phonics worked for me!
This post is part of the Ethnic Aisle blogging project. If you’re interested in race, ethnicity, diversity and the GTA, check it out.
I believe I’ve written about this before, but it’s a goodie: in sixth grade, a Chinese girl on my schoolbus jabbed my forehead with her thumb and cried “Paki dot!” So when I got to class, I did the same thing to a girl in my class…who was Pakistani. At this point, a popular white girl ripped me a new one, asking me what was so funny about making fun of somebody else’s ethnicity and p.s. did I know I was a huge loser. P.s. I did, because I had a home perm, ok?
Here’s the thing about this painfully hilarious scenario: I am brown. And I had literally no idea what a “Paki” or a “Paki dot” was. Why would I? No one said Paki in my house. I am the oldest kid, so I didn’t have any wiser siblings to school me in the language of ethnic disses. I was outside of Canada from ages four to eight. I truly had no clue, I thought I was doing something trendy that would make me seem cool. Sadly, I have never been good at that.
Anyway, that white girl is now one of my oldest and dearest friends and that incident makes me laugh a lot. The moral of this story is that sometimes, white people are anti-racist loudmouths their whole lives. So really it has a happy ending.
2.
In the eighth grade, I used to take the TTC home from school with a bunch of kids from my neighbourhood. There was me, two sets of boy-girl Chinese siblings, and our white/Macedonian friend. Most days, we would run into the same set of black kids in uniforms. For some reason, we all decided to hate each other and make really stupid comments about each others clothes, intellect, etc. I’m going to say what I honestly think here, which is: they started it.
So one day it got mean for some reason, and the oldest black kid, a boy, said something I didn’t hear. One of my Chinese friends got upset. I asked what the kid had said. My friend wouldn’t tell me. I kept bugging him, so finally he said, “he called you a Paki.”
I felt hot, as I usually do when I’m mad and ashamed at the same time. Then I said “well, if I’m a Paki, you’re a nigger.” To which he replied, proudly, “always have been, always will be.”
This story still kind of bugs me. I mean, I’m mostly over it. But I’m still mad at myself for stooping to his level and for being racist and I’m really mad at him for being racist and I’m also jealous of him for having a pride in the face of racism that I didn’t.
3.
This one is hardest to write, ‘cause it’s about now: sometimes, Chinese senior citizens make me feel crazy. I’ve read Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, and quite frankly, I don’t like the idea that older Chinese peeps might consider me a a non-person (since I’m not Chinese). I certainly get that feeling from them when I’m being pushed around at the grocery store by someone half my size. I’m also kinda grossed out by their incessant chain-smoking of Marlboros.
I am also sometimes annoyed by the pupusa ladies in Kensington, who serve all the Latinos first before deigning to look at me. So I guess I’d like to think that my racism is spurred by others’ racism, but that can’t always be true. And besides, being tolerant of intolerance is the only way to fight the battle, or so I’d like to think. Maybe bumping up against others’ irrational dislike forces me to acknowledge my own irrational dislike—as I get older, I sometimes do think that xenophobia is “natural” (as in innate, or so ancient it may as well be innate), and that finding a way to be a truly interdependent and multicultural city is a brand new, modern battle that Toronto should accept it’s fighting in order to succeed at.
Anyway, I truly also think that old Chinese ladies are pretty frigging awesome—seriously, are there any other old ladies that get out as much as the Chinese? Whether it’s 7 a.m. or 3 a.m., they are out on the street, doing their shopping, going to restaurants, having a chat at 85 decibels, wearing leopard-spotted fun fur. They don’t let age keep them back. So really, they can smoke as many Marlboros as they like. When I’m 70, I plan on pushing young chicks around to get at the gai lan, too.
This post is part of the Ethnic Aisle blogging project. If you’re interested in race, ethnicity, diversity and the GTA, check it out.
This is probably the most interesting, exciting story I’ve ever worked on. In Toronto Life, the story of Byron Sonne, a computer security consultant who became obsessed with testing the security apparatus at last year’s G20–and who’s spent almost a year in jail because of it.
In response to a Facebook thread requesting de-amalgamation, on the page of a person I like:
I’m not really trying to start a political argument at 8:30 am, but…these kind of comments are exactly why the whole country hates Toronto. Bridge building doesn’t mean “hey, you, come over here.” I’m as downtown as they come, and what I see (and have seen, and tried to draw attention to, for years) is an outer 416 full of people that are more poor, more coloured and more disenfranchised than allllll my downtown friends. These kind of comments only serve to prove that downtown is a homogeneous place full of people who never cared about the rest of the city all along.
Suburbanites didn’t want amalgamation either, and their feelings of neglect since 1998 are somewhat legitimate. Did anyone here go to debates in the burbs? Do you know what those people want, and need? I did. Smitherman got up and left halfway through the black caucus debate and Pantalone never even showed up. Meanwhile, Rob Ford could tell real stories of the immigrants that he’s employed and helped move up the salary ladder. All of the mayoral candidates sucked: please consider that many suburbanites could have held their noses when they voted for Ford, just like many downtowners held their noses when they voted Smitherman.
I am not defending our new mayor. In fact, what I’m saying is that if you resort to despair couched in hipster irony, you’re succumbing to his bully pulpit. A hockey broadcaster tries to pick a fight with you, and so you give him what he wants? Quit the bougie design war, ok? Use your voice for something more than cute buttons. I say this as a non-car owning, rabidly pro-bike cyclist with a year-round rider (and graphic designer) for a partner: your cute pink cycling badge is meaningless to a hotel cleaner who lives at Markham and Sheppard because “It takes me 2 hours to get to my minimum-wage shift job” doesn’t fit on a button.
What I’m asking is, how involved was everyone here every day of the last four years? This is a chance to exercise real democracy, calling and emailing your slate of elected representatives every chance you have, showing up at the Dec 16 debate about Transit City, participating in forcing him to compromise. Identify your possible 2014 mayoral candidate now, and actively support them. McGuinty is looking at a real fight next fall – he wants to keep Toronto Liberal, so tell him what it would take to get your vote.
Also: let’s all learn to communicate better. If Miller and Giambrone didn’t clearly convince or convey the Transit City plan to suburbanites, that is their fault, not the fault of the people who didn’t understand. If you want to save it, consider getting out there, knocking on some doors, and explaining it. You’re all taxpayers, after all. Ford said he’s going to listen to you, so say something worth listening to. At the same time, it’s also time to listen more closely to people who have different needs, values and ideas than you do. That’s the definition of politics.
Sorry for the rant, but the downtown snobbery is getting me down almost as much as the thought of four years of Ford.
