March 22, 2021
Here in Canada, we often like to think of ourselves in terms of how different we are from our southern neighbours. But when you look at the two countries’ histories, it’s impossible not to notice the same forces and patterns that have shaped them both, often with strikingly similar timelines. Through colonialism, white supremacy, wars, resistance, migration, civil rights and solidarity movements – all of it.
In the present moment, too. Some of the most haunting and enraging news headlines of this past year, out of Minneapolis, Louisville, D.C., Atlanta, might have come from across a physical border. But we’d be in complete denial if we pretended that systemic injustices and racial hate stopped at the border.
This week, I find myself re-reading Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning.
“I began this book as a dare to myself. I still clung to a prejudice that writing about my racial identity was minor and non-urgent, a defense that I had to pry open to see what throbbed beneath it,” she writes.
“This was harder than I thought, like butterflying my brain out onto a dissection table to tweeze the nerves that are my inhibitions. Moreover, I had to contend with this we. […] I feared the weight of my experiences—as East Asian, professional class, cis female, atheist, contrarian—tipped the scales of a racial group that remains so nonspecific that I wondered if there was any shared language between us. And so, like a snail’s antenna that’s been touched, I retracted the first person plural.”
Perhaps I’m revisiting her essays in search of a vocabulary. I think about Hong’s recount of Yuri Kochiyama’s entry into activism upon returning from internment during World War II:
“When Kochiyama found a waitressing job in New York, her black coworkers were the first to educate her about America’s racist history. Finally, Kochiyama had a vocabulary, a historical context. What had happened to her wasn’t a nightmarish aberration but the norm.”
At a time that calls for amplifying AAPI voices,
here are some of my treasured reads by AAPI and Asian Canadian authors.
As a reader, I’m grateful for the beautiful stories that keep me company on the long nights, in public transit, at cafes on rainy days.
As a writer, I am grateful to have these authors to look to.
Even as a little girl, I liked to write and to come up with stories. Probably because I liked to read Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, and A Little Princess, the characters in my stories had deep green eyes and lived in some remote town where you might find Heidi next door.
It wasn’t until much later that I learned what makes fiction worth the emotional investment is the authentic voice and lived experiences melted into imaginary characters. I don’t believe I would have ever known how, without reading such beautiful words by Kim Thuy (Ru, Vi, Man), Min Jin Lee (Free Food for Millionaires, Pachinko), and others.
“It was a really bad day for him and this is what he did.” should make you scream in rage.
But also, have the vocabulary and the history. So once you’re done screaming, you have the words to speak for the community that’s hurting.
