Passages: Welcome Home to Canada Read online

  MICHELLE BERRY • YING CHEN

  BRIAN D. JOHNSON • DANY LAFERRIÈRE

  ALBERTO MANGUEL • ANNA PORTER

  NINO RICCI • SHYAM SELVADURAI

  M.G. VASSANJI • KEN WIWA

  MOSES ZNAIMER

  THIS COLLECTION COPYRIGHT © Westwood Creative Artists 2002

  Michelle Berry, “Between Two Thanksgivings” © 2002 Michelle Berry Ying Chen, “On the Verge of Disappearance” © 2002 Ying Chen Brian D. Johnson, “From the Lighthouse” © 2002 Brian D. Johnson Dany Laferrière, “One-way Ticket” © 2002 Dany Laferrière Alberto Manguel, “Destination Ithaca” © 2002 Alberto Manguel Anna Porter, “A Canadian Education” © 2002 Anna Porter Nino Ricci, “A Passage to Canada” © 2002 Nino Ricci Shyam Selvadurai, “Conversations With My Mother” © 2002 Shyam Selvadurai M.G. Vassanji, “Canada and Me: Finding Ourselves” © 2002 M.G. Vassanji Ken Wiwa, “An Inventory of Belonging” © 2002 Ken Wiwa Moses Znaimer, “D.P. with a Future” © 2002 Moses Znaimer

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Doubleday Canada and colophon are trademarks.

  National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Main entry under title:

  Passages : welcome home to Canada.

  eISBN: 978-0-385-67482-9

  1. Authors, Canadian—20th century—Biography. 2. Immigrants—Canada—Biography.

  PS8081.P39 2002 CD810.9 0054 C2002-903146-X

  PR9186.2.P39 2002

  The contributions of Michelle Berry, Ying Chen, Alberto Manguel, Dany Laferrière, and Shyam Selvadurai first appeared, in somewhat different form, in The Globe and Mail.

  Published in Canada by

  Doubleday Canada, a division of

  Random House of Canada Limited

  Visit Random House of Canada Limited’s website: www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Preface

  RUDYARD GRIFFITHS

  Introduction

  MICHAEL IGNATIEFF

  Canada and Me: Finding Ourselves

  M.G. VASSANJI

  Destination Ithaca

  ALBERTO MANGUEL

  Between Two Thanksgivings

  MICHELLE BERRY

  Conversations With My Mother

  SHYAM SELVADURAI

  A Canadian Education

  ANNA PORTER

  An Inventory of Belonging

  KEN WIWA

  From the Lighthouse

  BRIAN D. JOHNSON

  On the Verge of Disappearance (End of the Chinese Letters)

  YING CHEN

  D.P. with a Future

  MOSES ZNAIMER

  One-way Ticket

  DANY LAFERRIÈRE

  A Passage to Canada

  NINO RICCI

  Acknowledgements

  Notes on Contributors

  Rudyard Griffiths

  PREFACE

  IMMIGRATION IS THE GREAT Canadian constant. From the first European settlements along the banks of the St. Lawrence, successive waves of immigration have shaped the fabric of Canada. Our political institutions and the importance we put on the values of community and order flow largely from the arrival of the country’s first political refugees, the United Empire Loyalists. Canadians’ sensitivity to minority rights is an extension of the compromises and complexities of balancing—for the better part of 250 years—the competing interests of French and English, Catholic and Protestant immigrants. In the twentieth century, the movement to create our much-valued social programs such as medicare and social assistance grew out of a Prairie culture shaped in part by Canadians of Eastern European descent.

  The interconnections between immigration and the history of Canada are obvious. The fundamental challenge for Canada and Canadians is to see how immigration is shaping our society and values today, and in the future.

  We are a country on the verge of transformation, a watershed of not just demographics but of how we think and feel Canadian. In the coming decade, the majority of Canadian citizens will be first- and second-generation immigrants. This majority will consist not of a single mono-cultural group as did, say, the earlier waves of Anglo-European immigration, but of people who have come to Canada from the world over. They will leave jobs, loved ones, and entire cultural frameworks to journey to this county. In Canada, their languages, traditions and values will mix with each other. The only common thread binding these disparate cultures and individuals together will be the experience of being immigrants. At the most basic level, what it means to be Canadian will be an extension of what it means to be an immigrant.

  Passages to Canada provides a much-needed window on the contours of this new, radically immigrant identity that is reshaping Canada. While the authors who contributed to this volume come from diverse backgrounds, are at different points in their lives, and express a range of feelings about life in Canada, they share a common mindset. Each has made an epic mental journey. Their respective passages to Canada have made deep impressions on how they think about identity.

  As is to be expected, all of the contributors to Passages to Canada write powerfully about living with the memories of a lost homeland. Their present-day identities are haunted by the sights and smells of city streets a world away, the caress of a grandfather long dead or the desolation and boredom of a refugee camp. This collection also brings to the fore a sense of the difficulty of integrating into Canadian society. All the contributors feel, at some point in their passage to Canada, the alienation of being an immigrant. Inclement weather, taciturn customs agents or some jarring cultural oddity of Canadian society combine to press on them the identity of an outsider.

  Yet it is in this very feeling of otherness that each of the authors finds his or her connection to Canada. By virtue of being an immigrant, they discover in Canada creative freedom and individual autonomy. The broad cultural or deeply personal confines of the identity they left behind in their country of origin have the power of memories only. In Canada they have the ability to construct a sense of self that acknowledges the past but is also open to a present where multiple identities are at play. Being free from a single dominant cultural identity allows them, as writers, to explore and dissect the cultures of their homelands and their adopted country in new and unexpected ways.

  Canadian society as a whole needs to be attuned to the question of how to construct, on the model of its recent immigrants, a strong civic identity in a world of rapid change. In the coming decades many of the hallmarks of our identity—medicare, an independent military and even a common border with the United States—will be radically re-worked or abolished. Drawing on the example of recent immigrants, Canadians need to learn to thrive collectively in the absence of a dominant identity based on shared cultural institutions and ethnic memory. And indeed, thanks to how immigrants think and live their multiple identities, Canada shows every indication of sustaining an open, vital and questioning civic culture in an era of intense globalization and value change.

  Passages to Canada is much more than a book about immigration. The stories that make up this collection are about universal human truths: the different ways we search for belonging and how we ultimately become reconciled to the lives we create. In final analysis, Passages to Canada provides a dose of wisdom that helps
us make sense of where we’ve come from and what we want to accomplish, both as individuals and Canadians.

  Michael Ignatieff

  INTRODUCTION

  WE TEND TO THINK of immigration to Canada as a story of flight from persecution followed by the laying to rest of ancient hatreds. In this scenario, the new land becomes a haven in a heartless world, offering victims escape from mortal danger. There was ethnic strife, prejudice and open warfare. Here is acceptance. There history was a nightmare. Here history is a dream of civility. There victims endure their history. Here victims awaken and begin their history anew. This myth implies that the new land suffers from a deficiency of exciting history. But what native Canadians may live as dullness, our newcomers experience as a welcome deliverance.

  This myth of escape has been a pleasant tale to tell, since it presents our country as an island of reason in a sea of fanaticism. This myth also flatters the newcomers, enabling them to present expatriation as an awakening from murderous irrationality.

  But was this story ever quite true? Were we ever as welcoming as it makes us out to be? Now that old-world terror has struck at the very heart of the new world, are we quite sure that newcomers are leaving their hatreds behind?

  Myths never take hold of the collective imagination if they are pure fantasy. This myth of welcome, together with the myth of hatreds left behind, has just enough truth to be believable. But the writers who’ve written up their passage to Canada both confirm and challenge these myths. In her account of emigrating from China, Ying Chen tells us that she did indeed find sanctuary here; but she would have us think hard about why Canada, the country of Bethune, should employ officials at its borders who could so frighten and intimidate one of its own citizens. Moses Znaimer, now an irrepressible leader in Canadian broadcasting, escaped the hatreds of his native Europe, but his memoir suggests that no one ever survives hatred unscathed; some people get to safety too late ever to feel quite safe again. He remembers the joylessness and caution of his parents, in their new home in Montreal, and now regards these features as the scars of survival.

  The newcomers who here recount their stories are discreet and uncomplaining about the difficulties of becoming a Canadian, but they do suggest that we—Canadians already here—might pay more attention to our myths of welcome. What actually happens in those holding pens in our airports as we sail through the lines reserved for citizens? As a grandson of immigrants myself, I often wonder whether my own people would be able to secure admittance to their grandson’s country. In my mind’s eye, I see the moment when their miserable sheaf of papers, presented to the government official, comes up short. We have a lot invested in our complacent myths of welcome. Perhaps we should care a little about whether they are still true, or ever were.

  Shyam Selvadurai’s memoir, with its evocation of the murderous attacks on Tamils in the Sri Lanka of the 1980s, brings into focus the issue of hatred. What happens to inherited hatreds when you pass into exile and emigration? Do they, as our myths would have us believe, wither away in the fresh northern air? There is no hatred in Shyam’s memoir—indeed the opposite—but the fact is, there is surpassing hatred in some sections of the Tamil community in Canada.

  I remember mourning, in 1999, the passing of Neelan Tiruchelvan, a moderate Tamil friend, who was blown to pieces by a car bomb in Colombo by an extremist Tamil group. His offence? Seeking a peaceful solution to the Sri Lankan catastrophe through negotiations with the Singhala government. After I went to Colombo to mourn his passing and to denounce the act of terror that had claimed his life, I began receiving literature justifying his murder. Well-produced, articulate monthly magazines argued that anyone from the Tamil community who sought non-violent solutions to political problems was either a stooge or a fool, or a little of both. The rhetoric employed was a version of what the French call la politique du pire: endorsing strategies to make things worse so that they cannot possibly get better. These Tamil magazines did not actively endorse my friend’s death—he was dead already—but they were astonishingly indifferent to it, as if the undoubted sufferings of the Tamil people justified the abrogation of the simplest expressions of human pity. His body, after all, had been cut to pieces, and his life, a monument to political reason, had been cut short. I left off reading these documents with the sense that I had nothing to say to the people who had written them. The point of this story is that these magazines had been sent to me from a Canadian city. They had actually been printed and published on my native soil.

  The episode made me rethink our myth about the passage to Canada as being from hatred to civility. Was it true now? Was it ever true? As I recalled my Canadian history, I began to question this myth that the passage to Canada was a gentle forgetting of inherited political anger. The Irish carried their hatreds among their meagre belongings on the emigrant ships of the 1840s, and the visceral dislike of Orangeman for Fenian was a defining feature of Ontario politics from then until the 1890s. The vast Slavic and southern European migrations of Laurier’s Canada also transported their political grievances here. Emigrants from the Balkans did not forget or forgive the oppression that had caused them to flee. Did Canadian Serbs rejoice at the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914? It’s hard to imagine that most did not, since this act of terror was held to herald the liberation of Bosnia from Austro-Hungarian rule. Yet Serbs and non-Serbs alike quickly learned that terror can have consequences as catastrophic as they are unforeseen—in this case, a world war that would last four years and claim some 20 million lives.

  In the next great wave of Canadian immigration, beginning after World War II, migrants from Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Baltic States and other territories under Soviet tyranny came to this country with all their hatreds intact. Let us not suppose that hatred is necessarily a bad thing: sometimes it is good to hate oppression, and the Canadians who, whenever the Bolshoi Ballet toured Canada, held up signs outside the theatre protesting Soviet tyranny now seem more prescient and morally aware than those, and they included myself, who thought it was time to acquiesce to the facts of life, i.e. the permanent Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe. In particular, the Baltic families who maintained their opposition to Soviet tyranny while in Canada throughout the long Cold War then lived to see their sons and daughters return, after 1991, to a free Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Here, political hatred—or at least loathing of despotism—was sustained, not forgotten, in the passage to Canada, and since in this case hatred did not also incubate or support acts of terror, it seems to have been a positive thing. It is not always right for exile and emigration to be accompanied by political forgetting. Remembering a conquered or oppressed home is one of the duties of those who escape to a better life.

  The problem is that exile can freeze memory and conviction at the moment of departure. Once abroad, groups often fail to evolve or change their thinking. And when they return, once their country is free, they speak and behave as if it were still 1945. A case in point would be Croatian exiles who fled to Canada in the 1940s to escape Tito’s imposition of Communist rule over Yugoslavia. In exile, they remained more nationalistic than would have been allowed in Tito’s postwar Croatia. Preserving a nation’s pride is one thing; allowing it to congeal in forgetful myth is another. It is difficult enough for any people to face the historical truth about their country, and this becomes almost impossible when they also lose that country. Such might have been the dilemma for young Canadian Croatians who went into exile after 1945. Having lost their country, how could they bear to admit that Ante Pavelic’s wartime regime had been responsible for atrocities against Jews, Serbs, Roma and other minorities? Facing up to the reality of Pavelic’s regime could not have been easy in Zagreb. It turned out to be just as difficult in Toronto. Indeed, it was often said in Zagreb that the chief support for the most intransigent and aggressive nationalism in Croatia after independence in 1991 was to be found not in Zagreb, but in Toronto.

  Canadians born here tend to be indifferent to or ign
orant of the dual political allegiances of many of their fellow citizens from diasporic communities. Yet these diasporas may be loyal to Canadian institutions and at the same time be in violent opposition to the political system they have left behind. These dual allegiances are complex: a recently minted citizen who would not think of assassinating a fellow Canadian from some oppressor group does not hesitate to fund assassinations of the same group in another country. Sometimes emigration is accompanied by guilt, and this can make diasporic groups more violent and extreme than those who live in the country where the oppression is taking place. The difficult truth—which makes diasporic nationalism a dangerous phenomenon—is that it is easier to hate from a distance. You don’t have to live with the consequences—or the reprisals.

  Canadians, new and old, need to think about what role their diasporas play in fanning and financing the violent hatreds of the outside world. Our comfortable myth is that our country serves as a refuge for people seeking to escape hatred. The more disturbing reality is that some of our diasporas actively support and encourage violence. Are we so sure that acts of terror in Kashmir do not originate in apparently innocent donations to charitable and philanthropic appeals in Canadian cities? Are we certain that the financing of a car bomb in Jerusalem did not begin in a Canadian community? Do we know that when people die in Colombo—or for that matter in Jaffna—there is not a Canadian connection?

  I do not have answers to these questions, and it would be fatuous, not to mention inflammatory, to point fingers without evidence. My point is not to make allegations but to ask us to rethink our myths of immigration, particularly that innocent one that portrays us as a haven from a heartless world, a refuge from hatred. It is clear to me that this was never entirely true: many of the immigrant groups who have made their lives here began not by extinguishing but by fanning the hatreds they brought with them. If it has always been true that most immigrant groups arrive in this country with some considered detestation of the oppressors who drove them out of their homeland in the first place, it would be invidious and inconsistent to single out any particular group arriving now for particular condemnation or investigation.