Amy Fung - Before I Was a Critic I Was a Human Being

I was last notably called a chink in 2011 while living in Scotland, that land and people who still fancied calling Indian restaurants pakis and Chinese restaurants chinkies. I was cutting through a schoolyard when a young boy called over in my direction about what a chink I was. His mom stood nearby, waiting to pick him up and watching in silence. I was stunned, but not because a small Scottish child was throwing slurs at me or that his parental figure did nothing. I was shocked and confused because I spoke better English than he did, and that in my mind made me better than he would ever be.

Born in Hong Kong and raised in Canada, my mind has been a deeply colonized place.

While this lad showed me the prejudice in his heart, I wasnt exactly injured by his words. Neither he nor anyone in that town held any power over me. I was a visitor, parachuted in for a six-month arts writing residency under the guise of a diversity fellowship. I was an imported foreign good, put on display in the local museum during weekday hours as the visiting writer. I fielded frequent questions about whether I was actually Korean or Japanese. When I simply replied I was Canadian, no one ever followed up about where within Canada I had come from. They just politely smiled as if they already knew it was a place where I couldnt belong.

Perhaps in the context of a small town in the North East of Scotland, it was unbelievable to see a person of colour, at least one who wasnt working at one of two ethnic restaurants. I was being paid to review the goings-on of the town from my foreign perspective, complete with critiques, which has on more than one occasion led to the notion that I must be an ungrateful bitch. Because how dare I try and critique the status quo, when I should just be thankful for being here.

The role of playing the foreigner, the Other, amongst a sea of Scottish people, was neither pleasant nor anything new to me. The main difference was that there was no myth of multiculturalism in Scotland, and when racism reared its egregious head, it never appeared in sheeps clothing.

I share this story as a way to demonstrate my thinking about language and power. I also understood Canada a lot better after living in Scotland. One of the central themes in this collection of stories is the violence of whiteness that is both around me and inside of me. Words alone can lift you up and throw you down, but I am more interested in thinking through who gets to speak and to whom are they speaking.

As another entry point, during a 2017 welcoming ceremony for Syrian refugees in Toronto, the officials gave a land acknowledgement and informed them that they were now settlers on this land. I would be later told how the translator could not find an appropriate Syrian word for settler, as the closest translation would be Israeli, who for generations have settled and occupied unceded Palestinian land.

I cant begin to assume the mental and emotional reception of those Syrian families and individuals who were told they have now become the Israelis of Canada. I can only point to the double-speak of the Canadian governments language. There is at once an admission that this land is inhabited by Indigenous Nations and, at the same time, still no official regard for Indigenous sovereignty on the land that so many of us have come to call home. It is akin to welcoming strangers in need into your neighbours house, which you have pilfered and taken by force.

A core theme I revisit throughout this collection is how racialized immigration is perpetuating colonialism into the twenty-first century. I know the nation-state wants and depends on this continuation of internalized colonial entitlement, but what about the agency of new immigrant settlers? When I became a Canadian citizen in 1992, there was no land acknowledgement offered. Only in my thirties am I becoming aware of just some of the names of the hundreds of nations who live across these lands. I have mostly learned these names through the voices of Indigenous leaders and thinkers, scholars and activists, artists and writers, and more recently by settler politicians and bureaucrats. There is a lot of listening and unlearning that most settlers, newly immigrated or not, have to do in this generation and the ones still yet to come, and asking from a logistical point of view, how do we support Indigenous rights in this country without it being controlled and commodified by empire? I am aware I am writing in English and this is being read in English, that the production and research of this text was paid for by the Canada Council for the Arts, and that I hold citizenship to the nation of Canada. I am thankful for these opportunities, even if I am repeatedly told and shown how I dont really belong.