Editor's note: Denise Chong is a famous Canadian economist and writer. Her award-winning book, The Concubine's Children, is a memoir of her family and has been translated into several languages. The article reflects the author's opinions, and not necessarily the views of CGTN.
When I was a child, to me, China was what was left behind when the boat carrying my grandmother, pregnant with my mother, docked in Vancouver, Canada. China was the soil underfoot in the photograph of two sisters, who as I thought then, would never meet the third, my mother. China was where you'd find yourself if you dug a hole deep enough to come out the other side of the Earth.
Which was exactly where, decades later, I did find myself, in the house of my mother's relatives in China. There, I discovered a packet of yellowing letters sent from my grandfather when he was living a lonely life in Vancouver, to a wife he'd left behind in China. Like many men unable to earn a living in impoverished China, my grandfather was toiling at a menial job in Canada. "It's not easy to take what comes out of the white man's mouth," he wrote. He would soon take a teenage girl - my grandmother - to live with him in Canada as his second wife, his way to apply a salve to what was dubbed "Humiliation Day", marking when Canada, seeing the Chinese as a menace, enacted a law to slam the door on Chinese immigration and to deny rights to those already here. That day in 1923, fell on July 1, Canada's birthday.
As in every year when the calendar rolls around to that day, I'll go watch a dazzling display of fireworks. I'll be wearing red and white, the colors of Canada's flag with its signature maple leaf.
A Chinese exchange student recently asked me, with an air of reprisal, as if questioning my balance of allegiances: "Are you proud to be Chinese?"
My mother and father, both born in Canada, felt the sting of Canada's anti-Chinese act, which was not repealed until 1947. But they walked out from the shadow of that past. As did Canada. If my siblings and I bobbed in a sea of white faces, now cities like Toronto and Vancouver are richly multiracial and multicultural, a mirror of waves of immigration.
Neither of my grandparents lived to see their family, in their time cleaved in two between Canada and China, restored when my mother, by then almost sixty, and her eldest sister met for the first time. Each had thought the other lost to history. But that visit to China over, my mother returned home - to Canada.
What is my reply to the exchange student? "I'm Canadian."
I explain. My sense of belonging is to Canada. For sure, the past holds some moral authority. We look to it to decide what to preserve, what to create anew so that we might live better in the present. In that light, in deference to the student's question, I give a more fulsome answer: "I'm a Canadian of Chinese descent."
But "I'm Canadian" ought to suffice.
To hold Canadian citizenship is to recognize and to praise difference. It's what Canadians, born here or immigrated here, choose to have in common with each other. If the making of a society from such a tapestry seems complicated, it's not. After all, in each of our own origins, we each, born of two parents, bring at least two histories, as they did before us.
As on every July 1, I'll reflect on how by dint of chance, I had a stubborn grandmother, who, a month from giving birth, insisted on returning from China for Canada. On how my grandfather acquiesced, though he'd thought he was done with Canada that he had returned to "his own people" for good. My grandparents left behind their two daughters and never were they themselves able to return to China. But by way of that fateful journey, my grandparents traded, for future generations, a day in history once steeped in humiliation for a day to consider a complex fate: one of being Canadian. If as before, I'll feel a welling up of the life force across the generations, but will hold steady with my feet rooted in both an ancient and epic Chinese civilization and the ways of a young country called Canada.
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