Passages: Welcome Home to Canada Page 5

  At that time I imagined we were going somewhere temptingly exotic, somewhere outside of any experience I had ever had. Having read Pippi Longstocking, I wondered if Canadians would walk backwards or, even better, walk on their hands. I was looking for adventure. The fact that the neighbouring kids didn’t know where Canada was made it even more exciting. “We’re moving to Canada,” I would say to the little girl down the street as she stood in her driveway surrounded by chickens. We were leaving grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins in New Jersey (where, at Thanksgiving dinners, we would all congregate, the men, unbuckled, watching football on TV, the women chattering away in the kitchen, the kids running haywire around my grandparents’ home). We were leaving people we loved, my career as Betsy Ross, my ballet class, the fields and woods around our house.

  The Vietnam War was over, Watergate was winding down. My parents had friends who had trained their one-year-old to stick out his tongue and blow noisily at Nixon whenever he was on TV.

  My parents had done this kind of mass moving before. My father’s Ph.D. is from Berkeley, California (my mother gave birth to my brother and me in a teaching hospital in San Francisco). He then received a Fulbright Scholarship and they shipped off (with two small children) to the U.K. to study in London. Before they had children, my parents taught in Sierra Leone for the Peace Corps. So this kind of relocating was old news for them. They’d packed up their houses and apartments many times to live in other countries, other places. They knew to come prepared: bags of games and toys for each day that we could open in the moving van or car; pop and chips in front of the TV in the motel at night. Start driving at 8 A.M., end at 4 P.M. and, most importantly, always find a motel with a pool. My brother and I were usually separated between the car and the van, each getting to spend time with one parent, each keeping one parent awake (this kept us from bickering with each other). My father taped all our records, and whoever was in the van got to listen to “Jelly on Your Belly” and The Lone Ranger over and over.

  The van was expansive. My feet didn’t touch the floor. My father was omnipotent. There he was controlling this huge beast. I stuck my hand out the window and shot things—a tree, a bird, the landscape of cars below us. I waved my hand in the wind, an early version of breakdancing. I sang “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” because my teenage cousin had taught me it earlier that year as she strummed her guitar.

  I remember the Badlands, or at least the photograph of me standing there. I can see the beige short set I was wearing, the scabs on my knees, the dust blowing. I remember the prairie dogs poking out of their holes, arms poised, begging.

  The scenery changed. Things became lush (although anything is lush after the dust bowls of the Prairies). The motels were nicer, the pools clean. There was something coming, bright, just around the corner. Anticipation was thick in the air. We were approaching Canada.

  We weren’t running from persecution, we weren’t leaving because we had to, we weren’t coming to Canada for good. We would return to the States, we reasoned, in a couple of years. We spoke the same language as Canadians. We had come from a democracy to a democracy. My father had a guaranteed job. He was an academic. I was blonde and blue-eyed. I’d memorized all the states and their capitals. I knew the U.S. presidents. We’d fit right in.

  The ferry docked July 1, 1975. If you know Vancouver Island, you’ll know that it was probably raining. My mother had clam chowder at a local pub in Sidney while the customs officers went over our moving van. She remembers that, what she ate. I don’t know what I ate or what I felt like or what I was thinking. I was tired. Two weeks on the road, no matter how many bags of toys you get or swimming pools you dive into, or sodas to drink, potato chips to eat, takes its toll on a seven-year-old. There was a need for home, for stability, for somewhere to put down those bags of toys.

  The first house we rented had a balcony attached to my second-floor room. I would stand on the balcony and look down at my brother as he and his new friends would ride in circles on their bikes, trying to make me dizzy. My father played the trumpet and the jazz sounds would echo around the walls.

  The summer we arrived, my brother and I on our bikes with a gang of kids from the neighbourhood, we weren’t different. Once I got here, everything around me said that things wouldn’t be different in Canada. I had new bell-bottom jeans like the kid down the street. I had long hair I wore in pigtails just like every other girl I saw. I went from riding bikes with banana seats and streamers in Virginia to riding bikes with banana seats and streamers in Victoria. Both places started with a V. All was the same.

  Then came Mrs. Harrington’s grade two class. Oaklands Elementary School. We were a pretty bright class. At least we liked being there in grade two: no one had dropped out yet and the kids weren’t smoking behind the school during recess. (Not in grade two. Grade four, maybe.) We had a nurturing older teacher. I listened to the class sing “O Canada” and say the Lord’s Prayer every morning. I kept waiting for the national anthem. When did we “pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America,” the flag I had so trickily sewn in that school play—red, white, blue? I would look around, waiting. What was going on?

  And then it dawned on me about a month into school that everyone around me knew things I didn’t know. The provinces. They knew what provinces were. They even knew the capital cities of the provinces and the lakes and the other big bodies of water. Sure, I was superior—there were many more states than their flimsy little province-count, and I knew them all—but I was suddenly not the same as everyone else and suddenly very far behind. And kids notice that kind of thing. They notice when you pronounce words differently. I remember sitting with a little girl in the school library on one of the first days and everyone laughing at me because I said “orange” differently; I said “R-ange.” I also said “toilit paper” and “maalk.” The little girl was so nervous that day that she threw up all over the library books spread out in front of us. I remember the smell. But no one noticed, because I was the novelty of the day.

  Years ago my mother was accused of having an Australian accent. Her New Jersey drawn-out a’s and r’s mellow with the length of time she spends in Victoria. When she goes home to visit her family, she comes back sounding like she never left the States. It takes a week or two to fade. I notice my slight accent (just on certain words) when I’m giving readings. The American twang to my speech seems to fit my writing, seems destined to be part of how I think.

  “Yankee,” the kids said on the second day. They must have gone home and told their parents about me. Tensions between Canada and the U.S. were relatively high at that point. Academics like my father were being written up in the newspapers as having taken jobs away from Canadians. The year before we came to Canada, there was an amendment to the immigration act which stated that if there was a qualified Canadian applicant to a post-secondary institution, he or she should be considered before a foreign applicant. Even with this amendment, there was still a strong fear that the universities would become Americanized. There was also ripe, fetid anger against Americans following the horrible truths about the Vietnam War. After all, the draft dodgers (mostly middle-class, educated, white young men, who assimilated quickly into Canadian culture) had fled here and were working and living in Canada. The facts of Vietnam were coming out.

  So we were the “Yanks.”

  This, of course, is the history I remember. This is something that has no corresponding photograph I can refer to.

  I remember rapidly learning the provinces, trying desperately to catch up to the rest of the class. By Christmas I was cast as Mary in the nativity play we were doing at school. There is a photograph of me, kneeling down in front of the cradle, my head swathed in a veil (a soft white towel, it looks like), wearing a blue dress. There are kids to the left of me, to the right of me, Joseph and the three wise men standing there looking lost, a choir singing. How did I earn the right to be in the centre of all of this? Between September and December had I started to pron
ounce words correctly? Had I stopped being a Yankee? Did the teachers feel sorry for me? Or maybe it was just one of those times where the new kid has to do the thing that no one else wants to do.

  I had friends. I had best friends. I rushed to school early every morning to play floor hockey. I hung around with the crowd who chased the boys, and I played a big part in getting them to kiss us. I joined a baseball team and did cartwheels out in centre field. In the beginning of grade three I remember Mrs. Harrington died. And that broke my heart. This elderly British woman had taken me in and made me feel as if I had arrived somewhere, as if I were finally home. She never once corrected my accent or made me feel different.

  By the end of grade three I was quickly forgetting the States. I forgot everything I had ever learned. My grandparents visited from New Jersey every year, and one year they brought me a Betsy Ross pincushion doll.

  “Who’s Betsy Ross?” I asked my mother as I flipped up the skirt to see what you poked pins into.

  We never moved away from Victoria, but we travelled quite a few summers to the States—California and Washington, D.C.—for my father’s research for the books he was writing. We went to New Jersey for Christmas one year and were spoiled rotten by my grandparents because we were suddenly distinct, different from our cousins. Or maybe it was just because we lived so far away and they missed us. We were spoiled with Haddenfield cream doughnuts, a delicacy that, in memory, still causes my mouth to water and makes me remember my grandparents. (A little aside: When visiting my grandparents on my own when I was in university, I froze a Haddenfield cream doughnut and mailed it to my brother, who was living in Vancouver. Just one little doughnut. He said it arrived all mushy, probably stale, but he ate it anyway. He knew the importance of the gesture. He knew that something small like that still carried so much weight.)

  My parents became Canadian citizens in 1988 and 1989, and my brother and I followed some years later. My brother was actually registered for the draft in the U.S. from age eighteen to twenty-six. The Selective Service System had tracked him down, just in case. They thanked him when he turned twenty-six and let him go with a letter that said his “registration was an important part of America’s peacetime military preparedness [and] played a part in maintaining peace and protecting the citizens of our Nation and their freedom.”

  I asked my father recently if he felt he was Canadian and he immediately answered yes. I wonder about this myself. What would I say if my daughters asked me if I felt Canadian?

  As a writer in Canada, or anywhere else probably, your work gets labelled—mystery writer, science fiction writer, literary writer, gay writer, etc. And then there are the books that branch out and try on new labels—literary thriller, science fiction romance, etc. Living in Toronto now, I’m automatically a “Toronto writer.” I’ve even received reviews condemning me for where I live. Once you start selling to the United States and other countries, you are also a “Canadian writer,” even if you’re originally from India or Africa or Australia and are writing about that country. If you’ve immigrated to Canada, if you hold citizenship or landed immigrant status and live here, you are Canadian. I am a Canadian writer.

  This is a strange way of belonging to a country. As an immigrant to this country I am alive to the differences that surround me, the differences that are a part of me. I don’t know anything about hockey, really, I can’t get my head around it. Nor do I understand curling. I played baseball as a kid and was pretty good at it.

  There are ironies in the Canadian personality which I find fascinating and my neighbours seem not even to notice. Cultured and polite Canadians, sophisticated Canadians, turn into maniacs during the Stanley Cup playoffs. Canadians who claim not to be patriotic will preach the merits of Canadian beer, heaping derision on the American product. But then, on Oscar night, Canadians will gather around television sets, desperate to know who has won this American gold statue. And in the arts it is a well-known fact that you haven’t really “made it” until you make it in the States. In fact, the Canadian personalities who go South end up being literally sucked, like a dip in quick-sand, into their new country. And then what happens? Years later, when we are reminded that this Super-Famous-So-and-So is Canadian it amazes us. “Really? No way!” Don’t think I haven’t noticed.

  These perspectives can be seen as American. But am I really American either? When I go to the United States now, what I notice are the little things—the little things those kids at Oaklands Elementary School noticed in me. The food portions are always bigger in the States. Everything is bigger actually, television ads seem bigger and brighter. If I were really an American, these things wouldn’t seem bigger; they would seem just right.

  The point here is that I am a combination of both nationalities. But, even more importantly, I am also neither. I occupy a space outside both countries that lends me a perspective that I think has facilitated my career as a writer. I can be a stranger in my own country. I can watch both Canada and the United States with fascination and curiosity. I can step back and watch. Not quite fitting in gives me the advantage of being able to undertake a kind of scientific examination of culture and people in an artistic way. I have the lucky position of an observer; I don’t really have to work on it. And as a writer is naturally an observer, the path I’ve chosen to walk down is nicely maintained. Paved, even.

  It’s a constant blending. Memory and identity. It’s interesting that my mother, my father, my brother and I all decided to remain dual citizens. My brother teaches now in Barbados and he tells his students that he’s 100 percent Canadian. And 100 percent American. But if he is totally both, then, if you really think about it, he is neither.

  My brother reminds me of the one year we celebrated two Thanksgivings. He says we ate turkey leftovers, stuffing, turkey sandwiches, cranberry sauce, for months. I think we had something else for Christmas dinner, maybe a ham. And I remember the time I was shopping with my mom in the grocery store in October and she looked up and noticed the Thanksgiving decorations hanging from the ceiling and rushed to buy a turkey. The two dates—October or November?—played havoc with our holidays for years. My brother also remembers being mixed up about the songs at school “My country ’tis of thee … God save the Queen.”

  It all has to do, really, with when I came to Canada. I came when I was seven years old. One of my daughters is five now, and I ask myself, if in two years we moved away from Canada, would she know anything about Canadian politics or history, about the cultural mosaic or Canadian immigration policies? No. She would know what I knew: the small differences, the minute things that made me stand apart and still make me feel individual. Home for me is exactly the spot where my family is right now.

  I think this Canadian/American thing, this blending, has made my family closer than we might have been had we stayed put in Virginia. My mother and father left their own families to move to Canada, and so our tight-knit family became everything we knew. Holiday dinners were only the four of us. We were different from those other families in Canada with their big get-togethers, and we slowly became different from those other families in the United States, different from the relatives we had left behind. So we had to stay together. We are some strange new breed—neither a part of where we came from nor a part of where we are now.

  I’ve been playing dominoes here with my memory. I’ve knocked one over, and a whole row has gathered speed and fallen over all around me.

  There’s a photo of me on the ferry, arms open wide. I’m wearing flowered pants, a long jacket. My brother is smiling. His face is happy and content. But where’s my face? My hair is in my face. Long hair blowing around my head, covering my eyes, my mouth. You have to look twice to see which direction I’m facing. You have to notice the little knee bumps and the way my hands turn. You have to look closely to see the bit of forehead peeking out of the wind-whipped hair. I’m sailing forward but looking back. Caught in a moment between two countries. Not knowing the differences that lie ahead but obviously enjo
ying that in-between stage that I seem to have stayed in my entire life.

  Shyam Selvadurai

  CONVERSATIONS WITH MY MOTHER

  IN 1975, MY PARENTS made a significant trip to America. My father was taking my mother so that she could decide if she would like to live there. He was a tennis coach and, for the past few years, had been teaching at a prestigious Massachusetts country club. They were now offering him full-time work. My mother was a doctor. By sitting for a simple exam (simple for her, anyway, as she had a real knack for exams) she could re-qualify as a doctor. The lifestyle they were contemplating was definitely an upper-middle-class one, with very few of the stresses and strains most immigrants face upon arrival in a new country. The decision was entirely up to my mother. Whatever she wanted, my father would abide by it.

  She said no.

  I telephone my mother to ask her why she said no all those years ago. Her answer is only one word: “lifestyle.” Her voice lingers over the l, drawing it out in a quiet sigh. Immediately an image rises in my mind.

  We are at the swimming club, clouds like gauze scarves fluttering in the blue sky. My mother slowly descends the steps into the water. “Ma-Ma-Mummy!” We children make a furious dash across the pool towards her, each determined to get there first. She raises her hand, palm outwards. A nervous swimmer, she does not like being splashed. I am the best non-splasher. As my mother glides out and down the pool, her head above the water, I stay as close to her as I can. I love the feel of her legs kicking the water behind us, the smell of her perfume mingled with the chlorine on her skin. To me there is no one more beautiful than my mother in her purple one-piece bathing suit.

  Later, when the sun is too fierce for swimming, we will return home. Sunday lunch is always special. Even while paddling in the water, I can almost taste the explosion of flavours in my mouth—the buttery yellow rice scattered with sultanas and cashews, nutty eggplant moju, succulent chicken curry, devil shrimp, dal, fish cutlets, and chocolate biscuit pudding for dessert. We come running into the house ahead of my mother, go to wash our hands, take our places at the table. We bow our head for grace. My father thanks God for our meal, for the fact that we have food. It never crosses his mind, or indeed strikes any of us, to offer up thanks to the maid who laid the table, to the cook who made this lunch.