Wednesday, July 14, 2004

Failed goal for summer

Rant - written April 22, 2004

My quest for the summer is to read and paw through the books currently in the ricepaper collection. Obviously, they are all about being asian canadian in some way or another. First up is Strike the Wok, the new collection just published since I came to know personally the people working here at ricepaper.

I want to see what asian canadian writing will become, not just rehashes of the same century old grudges and mistaken identities. The meaning of the compound formed from the two words asian and canadian is so amorphous, with no one daring to define it in sharp strokes. Asia is metropolitan. It is populous, sweaty, dirty; it sustains the daily pounding of the footsteps of billions of people. Canada is cold, and slow to warm up. The people are very welcoming, but it takes effort and decades of time to get anything meaningful going. It is surprising how fast asia moves, and how glacially slow canada changes. Asian Canadian literature is trapped at the confluence of these two forces. At once, it is edgy, skipping along the margins and always threatening to break out into territory unknown in Canada. We are admired and feared for having such energy and such willingness to protect and define our identities. Yet from the asian point of view, oppression and missing identities are nothing new. Assimilation, violence, and racism defined the history of the continent, and we are no exceptions.

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