On my way to work today, I was standing in a subway alcove, in a nearly deserted car. The scattered patrons were a motley crew of essential workers, some masked, some open faced. I don’t wear a mask while on transit (this was written before wearing masks was clearly good policy) – I am well, and have faith, perhaps misguided, in my 65 year old immune system. After all, it has survived polio, measles, mumps, rubella, pertussis, and chickenpox in the pre-vaccination age. Since 2000, it has helped me to work through SARS, H1N1 influenza, West Nile, Dengue, Zika and probably countless others.
In my peripheral vision, I notice a white lady staring at me from a distance of about 5 metres. Staring. I look at her, and avert my eyes. I have had this feeling before. All Asians know “the look.” “The look” is quite distinct from “the look” that my wife Denise faces, when she enters an all-white space as a tall, strong and beautiful African woman. “The look” in the Asian context has always been dismissive, disrespectful and hateful. Today, in the setting of COVID-19, “the look” has an added element of fear and revulsion. As this lady left the train, she passed by me, demonstrably pulling her collar over her face, but not before giving me a truly, horrible grimace, similar to what I have seen in people in the throes of nausea.
Navigating COVID-19 while Asian requires a heavy dose of emotional suppression. Abusive incidents are mounting, ranging from Asians being pushed out of Skytrains, seniors being accosted and abused, an Asian nurse being bludgeoned by an umbrella. New incidents almost daily. There are undoubtedly more than are being reported – it’s not our style to make a noise. The bald, incendiary anti-Asian racism that COVID-19 has provoked, takes many of us back to lifetimes of micro and macro aggressions committed against us by the Canadian state and White Supremacy.
My ancestors were interned during WW2 for four years, as Japanese Canadian “enemy aliens.” The dispossession of all their properties was used to pay for their incarceration. As the community was being rounded up, many Chinese merchants in Vancouver displayed signs in their windows proclaiming “Chinese, not Japanese.” Who could blame them? Who was to say they wouldn’t be the next victims? Many were descendants of the Head Tax Chinese immigrants. Many remembered incidents like the Snake River Massacre of 1887 (the murder of 34 Chinese miners in East Oregon). This was a ploy direct from the “divide and conquer” playbook of Capitalism. When the internment camps were liberated, Japanese Canadians were forbidden to return to their homes, by a racist British Columbia government. The subsequent atomization of Japanese Canadians resulted in loss of language, community, and an intermarriage rate of over 95 percent in the third generation.
The smoke of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the ruins of Imperial Japan still lingered, when Mom and Dad moved from Winnipeg to Toronto. I grew up in a loving family, amidst an environment of ridicule and stereotype – “Japanese are cheap, made in Japan” and “of course you’re good at math.” At age three I was kidnapped, tortured and lynched by a KKK gang in Don Mills. Miraculously, I survived.
I struggled through childhood and adolescence ashamed of my “Asian-ness.” As a Philosophy and English undergraduate at the University of Toronto, my sincere interest in the arts was questioned by many professors – “surely you’re not REALLY interested in Shakespeare …”
Playing hockey was a solace, for most of my life, but when I joined a Toronto Men’s League in 1988 as its first non-white player, I vividly remember walking into my first dressing room. The raucous jocularity of the locker room ceased, as if a giant hand had girdled the collective throats of the players. An unearthly silence ensued. Finally one player stated, without eye contact, “you don”t belong here.”
We belong here. Where would Canada be without Asians? Would the railway have been built? Would the minerals have been mined? The trees felled? The fruits picked? The beets harvested? Would countless menial tasks, considered beneath “White” Canadians, have been performed? In modern times, we fill almost every possible niche in society. We have been comrades in many struggles. But we are invisible to most “White” Canadians, at least, until COVID-19 arrived. An invisible threat has surfaced, and must be given visibility. And here we are, the innocent, unwitting face of a pandemic. Identify an enemy, and oppress it. Most of us remember this only too well.
Asian Canadians, however, have much more in common with the people currently hating them, than with the Corporate masters who control the markets, and governments, and perpetuate a world of spiralling inequality. Racism is a critical tool of Capitalism. Racists are pawns in the war that powerful oligarchs wage against the working class and planet – have been and will always be. They unquestioningly perform the dirty work, from which their masters distance themselves. When they are of no further use, they will be ground up and dispersed, victims of their homogeneity and ignorance.
Western control and respect around the world is in shambles. China, home to the most billionaires per capita, a workers’ dystopia, a flagrant abuser of Human Rights, is rising to fill the void, in the death throes of US exceptionalism. Does anyone expect it to be a benign colonial force in the world? In Canada, we observe the children of Chinese billionaires, with their conspicuous consumption and disdain for workers and the poor. A narcissistic buffoon distracts his citizens from the stark reality that the American Empire is history, and points fingers at China. And lest we forget, Climate Change, a global consequence of Capitalism, has our collective necks in a very real noose. The results are sadly predictable. A world dominated and governed by greed, individualism, profit and fear, needs its scapegoats, and right now, we are the chosen ones. Brace up for a challenging time, Asian Sisters and Brothers, but don’t expect the racism that we are currently experiencing to remit when COVID-19 frees us from its grasp. This is our new and old reality.
One certain truth, however, is that Asian-Canadians will endure and survive, as we have always done, and continue to be “model citizens.” We, and many non-Asian allies, will continue to resist, and seek an end to racism and the system that creates it.
