Am Going back to China

I've just been told to Go Back to China: the second time in five years. This is posing quite a conundrum for me because I don't come from China: I was born in Vancouver. And even at that, my family roots are in former Eurocolonies Hongkong and Macau (as opposed to Communist Red China). My Vietnamese GF similarly has a conundrum: she comes from Việt Nam, and going back to China is even more difficult for more reasons than I care to relate!

Now I can't really take a bunch of yahoo Nainaimo boys in a pickup truck all that seriously, but when will hurtling racial epitaths out a window at 50km/h stop being fun?

I was in this Saturday Night Live episode once...

Recently I felt like I was on the dying half hour of SNL. You know, this is the witching hour when the jokes are as good as growing genetalia from your forehead.

But instead it was a consultation exercise on Racism & Security issues. A former candidate for public office was there to enlighten us on such subject areas. This included inciteful comments as:

• the more educated people are generally the less racist they are
• more established groups are less prone to be targets of racism
• being tired of seeing foreign trained engineers, doctors, lawyers and sex trade workers unable to use their professional qualifications in the Canadian workforce
• the struggles Chinese, Japanese, First Nations and other immigrant groups have had to go through

No laughter followed: just the stunned silence you get on SNL before the second time the band-o'-the-night comes out to rock the crowd. . . .

Patullo versus the Chinese

I was amazed to read a front page story about the untold stories of Vancouver Chinatown heroes in World War II...

(From the Front Page of the Globe and Mail Aug 11)
"They were the worst of the bad: ruthless Chinese who went over to the side of Japan during the Sino-Japanese War that devastated China from 1937 to 1945. With their pistols, black suits, black hats and dark glasses, these turncoats were known as the "Chinese Gestapo," infamous for their brutality.

Late in the war, they arrested William Gun Chong. They beat him. He didn't talk. They beat him again. Finally, in his thick village dialect, the terrified prisoner told his Chinese interrogators he could not understand them, was hungry and needed to look for work. They let him go.

If only they had known: William Gun Chong, who had spent nearly all his life in the heart of Vancouver's Chinatown, was a British spy.

For 3½ frightening years during the Second World War, Mr. Chong, Agent 50, operated behind Japanese lines, rescuing downed Allied fliers, ferreting out vital intelligence and helping to organize a pipeline of life-saving medicine to prisoners of war in Hong Kong."

Read More about Chinese Canadian war vets
More about the Head Tax & Exclusion Act

Legendary White Spot

I have grown to know and love the White Spot Restaurants chain. You know: pirate packs, triple-o sauce, beef dips and all. When I was growing up, long it was rumoured that once upon a time, "white" in "white spot" mean caucasian, to the exclusion of all others. As I munched on my fries and gravy as a kid, I would react in horror to this concept. But it wasn't out of the realm of possibility: I've had enough oral history in my family about department stores in Vancouver that excluded non-whites.

Recently, I reviewed Nat Bailey's meteroric rise as a restauranteur to find that his explanation was that he named White Spot after a LA joint in 1928: "Why not call in White Spot like that fellow on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles?"

This opened up a fascinating world for me where apparently a nickname for Los Angeles was once "White Spot". This in fact was more insidious in nature given that one of the forefathers of L.A., Harrison Otis, kept coined the city as "White Spot" just like Seattle is "the Emerald City" and NYC "the Big Apple". According to researchers, it seems like Otis wanted to attract anglo settlers to the burgeoning city - particularly those of professional classes. Other academic writings on suburban white flight and development of neighbourhoods by race seem to also confirm the geographically focus of "white" in L.A. in its historical roots.

Could the Wilshire Boulveard "White Spot" be rooted in this somewhat racist concept of a geographical spot designated for certain types (à la "British" in "British Properties")? I'm afraid I am at my limit for web surfing research and will have to leave it to one of my UCLA-bound friends to take this up and find out more!