I'm yellow!

and I like yellow butterflies

I have neglected this blog. I suffer from on average month-long writer’s block and this recent one has lasted longer than usual. Perhaps I’ve been distracted by more immediate things—work, house-buying ambivalence, obsessive knitting and hemming my ten gazillion skirts that are too long and hit me at the unflattering mid-calf length. Garbage in garbage out, so I suppose I can complain about nonprofit bureaucracy or ramble at length about the lengths of my dresses, but I won’t put you through that torture. That’s reserved for my husband (who is quite wonderful in case you were wondering).

Today I stumbled upon the Circle Ventures (somehow related to Circle of Hope church) blog post on white guilt concerning this history of the United States with regards to African Americans. It reminded me of how foreign America’s history is to me—the American Revolution, the westward expansion, the Civil War, the Great Depression, WWII, the Vietnam war – all this could be the history of another country. The history of my “nation” is a jumble of Communist and Cultural Revolution stories, the fall of the Berlin wall via our TV set in British Columbia (mildly upsetting because I wasn’t allowed to watch cartoons), Quebec separatism and a president south of the border notable for his extracurricular engagements. When I watch British or American period movies, I might as well be watching a movie about Sri Lanka, or Chile or Malawi.

My ethnicity, my family culture, whatever convenient label you might want to use, pops up in surprising but subtle ways. My husband and I have a now-resolved dispute about the “magic realism” in Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (one of my favourite books by the way…), most notably the yellow butterflies that follow around a character in the novel. These yellow butterflies offend my husband’s rational, INTJ sensibilities! For him, they are excessive ornamental flourishes because insufficient information is given to determine what they might mean or symbolize. And I know of a few others who feel the same way. But for me, it completely makes sense that this magic is embedded in the way of narrating a story or of seeing reality and no explanation is needed. While my family did not subscribe to Chinese folk stories, my mother practiced Chinese medicine. In the world where I grew up, sticking needles in a person’s face can relieve paralysis, too much “yang” in my system caused my colds and feeling one’s pulse could discern temperaments and long-term illnesses. And for the most part, I hold that all of this is true. Not true in the Western, rational, scientific sense, but true in another sense. We believe in truths in different ways. And so the fact that the yellow butterflies in the Marquez’s novel didn’t mean anything per se, never bothered me, because it corresponded with my cultural hybrid way of seeing (I can’t believe I just used the word hybrid...).

It’s funny how I’ve come to embrace my Chinese-ness recently, as I generally dislike acknowledging my ethnic background. I’ll smile if someone asks me about China, but the moment someone says something along the lines of: “Maybe you do that because you’re Chinese”, the smile becomes forced and my irritation becomes palpable. I will stiffen even more if someone says something like “You need to understand how being Chinese impacts who you are.”

This annoyance may stem from reading far too many “What’s my identity” “I’m a hybrid” minority novels in college (some of which were actually excellent), but it is primarily a strong reaction against the expectation that I must understand who I am in the context of my ethnicity. White people are not confined to conceive of their identities in terms of their ethnicity, then why must ethnicity be my starting point? What if my race is not the defining characteristic of who I am? Why must we limit the driving factors of our formation to race, gender and class when there may be influences that matter far more?

But I’m lucky. Because though I might occasionally receive awkward comments and rude questions, I have not been significantly marginalized because of my ethnicity. Fortunately for me, the privileges of education and wealth were also handed down to me along with my skin colour at birth. And so I am here and not elsewhere. And this is who I am, not someone else. Mostly Canadian-American well-educated wealthy Christian but with bits of Chinese weaved into the holes.

~

There I did it! My crowning contribution to minority literature. New genre: Chinese Canadian American. CCA literature. Memoirs of my childhood amongst huckleberry bushes, chopsticks, francophones, and ice rinks. Maybe they will even have a CCA studies department!