The Strand Magazine: PATHS | Volume 60, Issue 5

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STRAND

FALL MAGAZINE | VOL. 60

What are you studying? What year are you in? Have you thought about grad school? What are your next steps? Where do you see yourself in five years?

Do those questions sound familiar? Do they enter your head before you go to sleep and come back first thing the next morning? Are they always present in your life as an overworked university student?

Recently, we’ve been thinking about how the structure of learning rarely offers an opportunity for stasis. We are constantly asked to think about what’s ahead, to push through any barriers at an incredible pace, and to perform our individuality as productively as possible. In this sense, we believe that an anxiety about the future is one of our foremost commonalities.

In this issue, we explore the implications of forging your own path. What does it mean to be free, to “choose your own adventure?” What kinds of privileges must we be afforded in order to follow a new path? What do we miss when we stray from the paths designed for us? Having a choice is a lucky position in itself. How much agency do we lose when we are not given a choice?

These questions were on our minds as we curated and coloured the pieces submitted to us. We often think of a path as a process; a means to an end. For example, at The Strand, we select each biannual mag theme through a vote open to each member of the masthead. The theme that receives the most votes is thus elevated from a simple word to an object, an entity. Once the end has been attained—the mag, in your hands—this process is as easy to overlook as it is important and laborious.

A path often requires a guide. When putting together this magazine, we searched for stories that would provide the comforting affirmation that no one is alone in this world. Loneliness is a feeling we all struggle with at some point, and one of the most valuable aspects of this publishing endeavour is ensuring a sense of community; a sense of multiplicity.

We sincerely hope that these works will make you feel, somehow, accompanied.

With love, Molly and Elena

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Dear reader,

THE STRAND

FALL MAGAZINE 2017

04-06. paving the wayted fraser 07. ivyksenia kolodka 08-10. negotiated spaceskathleen chen 11. rupture leaves rubblejulia dasilva 12-14. on stage, no one can touch carol zoccoliceleste yim 15. daedalus and icarusyilin zhu 16-17. six is the new fourshailee koranne TABLE OF CONTENTS

18-21. in conversation with american first-year studentsgeorgia lin 22-23. reimagining a different narrativecarol eugene park 24-25. l.a. internationalkayleigh birch 26-29. debunking the myth of the “model minority”rebecca gao 30-32. diverging from standard protocolsumeeta farrukh

EDITORS-IN-CHIEF Molly Kay Elena SenechalBecker CREATIVE DIRECTOR Amy Jiao SENIOR COPY EDITOR Tristan McGrathWaugh

DESIGN TEAM Amy Jiao Molly Kay Elena SenechalBecker

COPY TEAM Erin Calhoun Maddie Corradi Ainsley Doell Renna Keriazes Sabrina Papas Mariah Ricciuto Harrison Wade Julia Wyganowski

VISUAL TEAM Mia Carnevale Emily Fu Victoria Murray Hana Nikcevic Yilin Zhu

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COVER ILLUSTRATION Varvara Nedilska TITLE PHOTO Hana Nikcevic SPECIAL THANKS to our masthead for their support.

FALL MAGAZINE 2017

Paving the way

TED FRASER

Exploring the first steps and the lasting effects of pathmakers

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THE STRAND WORDS BY TED FRASER ART BY HANA NIKCEVIC

There are roughly 20 trails at Wentworth Valley, a picturesque ski-hill in the Nova Scotian hinterland: Feffie-Weffie, Chickadee, White Nitro, Rosebowl, The Garden Path— the trail names as diverse as the talent that trips, tears, and tumbles down them.

The clean, maintained trails usually open in December—late November if you’re lucky.

But the off-road “trail-runs” are where it’s at; straying from the main path, you can dive into the trees and carve through the rolling, sinusoidal bumps, pumping through heavy branch and skimpy snow.

Those shadowy early-season trail runs are some of the most terrifying things you’ll ever subject yourself to. The trails are wet, loose, and undefined. You get clipped, you trip, you fall.

But by late February, those off-road routes have been packed down. The snow’s tight and the grooves are well-defined. Other people have sailed through, risking life, limb, and dignity. The path gets safer, more reliable, more comfortable. Tangential trails pop up as more skiers knit and cut their way through the original trail, creating a network of interconnected paths.

Path-making is a collective effort, but it’s started by a single, daring individual and those first steps are crucial. Success is not guaranteed, but heartache and stress almost certainly are in any scenario.

Ernest Hemingway took a brave first step—a literary lunge into the unknown— on October 22nd, 1926. With the publication of The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway veered off the epoch’s well-trodden trail of lexiconic grandiosity. Instead he opted for clear, tight, and terse descriptions.

This novel, and all works thereafter, focused on dialogue and nouns, and avoided adjectives like the plague.

Authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edith Wharton were wildly popular in the years leading up to to the publication of The Sun Also Rises, and had advanced style that valued exquisite detail and flowery prose; a

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PATH-MAKING IS A COLLECTIVE EFFORT, BUT IT’S STARTED BY A SINGLE, DARING INDIVIDUAL AND THOSE FIRST STEPS ARE CRUCIAL.

doctrine diametrically opposed to Hemingway’s.

In this sense, publishing The Sun Also Rises was a leap of faith, a daring departure from the era’s long-winded and ink-loving icons.

Fitzgerald published his debut novel This Side of Paradise in 1920. It was billed as “the greatest American novel of late” by H.L. Mencken, and “a true work of genius,” by The Chicago Tribune. The protagonist, Amory Blaine, a bullish Princeton undergraduate, narrates the novel with dizzying detail: “We want to believe. […] Too many voices, too much scattered, illogical, ill-considered criticism. It’s worse in the case of newspapers. Any rich, unprogressive old party with that particularly grasping, acquisitive form of mentality known as financial genius can own a paper that is the intellectual meat and drink of thousands of tired, hurried men, men too involved in the business of modern living to swallow anything but predigested food.”

In 1921, Edith Wharton won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Age of Innocence.

Wading through the work, you can find dense, descriptive prose as early as chapter one: “In the middle distance symmetrical mounds of woolly green moss bounded by croquet hoops formed the base of shrubs shaped like orange-trees but studded with large pink and red roses.”

Adjectives pour out of the paragraph. It’s beautiful writing. But Hemingway could not stand it. In The Sun Also Rises, by comparison, nature sounds like: “After a while we came out of the mountains, and there were trees along both sides of the road and a stream and ripe fields of grain and the road went on, very white and straight ahead.”

After Scribner published The Sun Also Rises, the wait began: what would the reviewers think of it? Was it too sparse, too different, too provocative? It was all of that—but the reviewers loved it.

They called Hemingway’s prose “lean, hard, and athletic.” The Atlantic praised the book as featuring “the best dialogue being written today.” It was a full-blown stylistic overhaul—a paradigm shift. Hemingway had created a new path.

Since then, other writers have dipped in and out of the path, tracing Hemingway’s tracks. Victoria College alumnus, Kevin Hardcastle, now a prominent Canadian author, has been compared to Cormac McCarthy, but admits that at the beginning of his writing career “he was just copying Hemingway—which was a good place to start.”

TED FRASER

FALL MAGAZINE 2017

Mordecai Richler, another Canadian author, has said that early on “he just wanted to write like Hemingway.” Hunter S. Thompson rewrote, word for word, The Sun Also Rises before he wrote his book The Rum Diary, because he wanted to “feel what it was like to write a masterpiece.”

Short story writer Raymond Carver, the winner of the Ambassador Book Award—received by the likes of Tom Wolfe, Gore Vidal, and Phillip Roth—has a thrifty style that is eerily reminiscent of Hemingway’s.

The Sun Also Rises was a bold trip into uncharted territory. With each marooned noun and omitted adjective, the path became smoother and safer for writers and readers to slide down, honouring Hemingway in the process.

Around the same time as that minimalist, anti-adjective revolution, a monumental political revolution was coming into sharper societal focus. As Hemingway forged his path, Alice Paul was in Washington, taking the first steps on a path that would, in time, lead to the beginning of a revolution.

Since the 1848 Seneca Falls Conference, activists had rallied for the voting rights of women, largely in vain. Even fifty years later, at the turn of the nineteenth century, countries like the U.S., Britain, France, and Russia were ignoring the suffragists’ calls for equality.

Despite well-organized marches, picketing, and the establishment of the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance in 1904, no major country had introduced women’s suffrage by the time World War I rolled around.

There were a few anachronistic outliers.

New Zealand, in an awe-inspiring fit of progressivism, granted women the right to vote as early as 1893. Tracing their neighbour’s steps, Australia gave women the right to vote in the spring of 1902. As well, Denmark, Norway, and Finland all established suffrage before 1908.

Then the movement kicked into high gear.

The American suffragists, led by Alice Paul, adopted a new strategy. The National Women’s Party, an organization co-founded by Paul, highlighted the hypocrisy of the “freedom-loving” President Woodrow Wilson, contrasting his support of democracy and self-determination across the pond and his contradicting, oppressive politics at home. One protestor’s sign read, “Kaiser Wilson, have you forgotten your sympathy with the poor Germans because they were not self-governed? 20,000,000 American women are not self-governed. Take the beam

out of your own eye.”

The National Women’s Party picketed the White House in 1917, and over two-hundred women were promptly imprisoned for “obstructing sidewalk traffic.” At the prison facility, dozens were abused and threatened.

Paul went on a hunger strike in protest. As punishment, she was handcuffed to the ceiling of her cell and forced to hang there.

This “Night of Terror,” as it was labelled, was picked up by the press and sparked outrage; the National Women’s Party grew and popular opinion shifted, so finally Kaiser Wilson caved. American women were granted federal voting rights in 1920. Then, the revolution spread and the path widened.

In 1921, a select subset of Canadian women were granted the right to vote federally. This was the tipping point of the women’s suffrage movement. From 1848 to 1920, only a handful of countries had legalized women’s suffrage. But between 1930 and 1950, forty-eight countries ushered in women’s suffrage. The path was getting smoother, safer, and busier.

PATHS ARE A COMMUNAL EFFORT, THE RESULT OF CONTINUAL AND REPETITIVE TREADING. Like Hardcastle, Richler, Thompson, and Carver benefitting from Hemingway’s trail-blazing, scores of women were now benefitting from the courage of Alice Paul.

Once again, the brave first steps of one led to the empowerment of others—although the path to women’s liberation was far from being finished.

Paths are a communal effort, the result of continual and repetitive treading. As more people walk over the path, the loose gravel is packed tight, the sharp pebbles are kicked away, and the divots filled in. Gliding over these trails, it’s easy to forget about the people who took the very first step. They’re the pioneers who confronted the uncertainty and stress, even danger, of forging a new path.

Skiing, book reading, ballot-casting; if you distill it down, life’s a series of paths.

They’re not always as smooth as Feffie-Weffie or White Nitro, but they are spectacular, crisscrossing manifestations of courage, kindness, and human connection.

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Ivy WORDS AND ART BY KSENIA KOLODKA

PATHS

Every day I walk home from campus alongside an ivy path. I started this piece with a different idea in mind, but when I flipped the fabric over I saw the labyrinthine path of thread on the back.

It’s easy, yet dangerous, to fall into habit. It’s important to take your eyes off the path once in a while and admire what lies above, or in this case, behind it.

FALL MAGAZINE 2017

Negotiated spaces Navigating privilege and identity in the diaspora

KATHLEEN CHEN

WORDS AND PHOTOS BY KATHLEEN CHEN

I’m looking through postcards in a souvenir shop in Qingdao when the shopkeeper comes over and asks me: “Where are you from?” This is a question that I’m used to hearing. Sometimes it comes from a place of ignorance, and sometimes it comes from a place of genuine interest, but it’s always loaded and complicated.

I reply vaguely that my family is from the South. The uncle then asks me if I’m from Fujian.

It was probably just a lucky guess on his part, but I entertain the idea that my heritage has left a legible mark. Could it be possible that some things persist? That, though my family left China generations ago, I still carry some trace of our province, of this country, with me?

Being Han Chinese in China carries a great deal of privilege. Being the ethnic majority means that the system is built with you in mind. Your belonging in the system is not up for debate, and you have the privilege of not having to think about it at all.

When I visited China this summer, looking Chinese gave me the privilege of blending in. In contrast, my white friends always complained that people would stare at them and take pictures, sometimes without asking. While being photographed without your consent is no doubt an uncomfortable experience, underlying my friends’ “complaints” was their fascination with being treated like celebrities purely because of their whiteness. Despite China’s attempts to be seen as a major player in world politics facing off against the West, white privilege is built into its system and culture.

Privilege is something that the system decides for you, but how to respond to it is up to you. When you have privilege, it is unacceptable to bask in it without thinking carefully. An American I met in Beijing told me that he found it “adorable” that children wanted to take pictures with him and get his autograph, but he had accomplished nothing to warrant this level of attention other

than being born white. Part of the problem is systemic and cultural, but his obliviousness to his privilege makes him complicit in the maintenance of the unequal status quo, because accepting attention simply for being white upholds the idea that “West is Best”.

In the same vein, it is imperative for me to examine my own privilege. In China, many people assumed that I was a local, or a tourist visiting from a different part of China. A lot of the time, I didn’t correct their assumptions. This was partially because I wanted to avoid being perceived as a tourist, and because I was unwilling to reveal too much about myself to strangers, but I also wanted to see what it was like to have this degree of privilege and how others would treat me. However, this linguistic and cultural immersion felt voyeuristic at times.

Though others defined this role for me, was I performing an identity? Was it problematic for me to play such a part if I know so little about where my family comes from?

AM I ALLOWED TO CALL MYSELF CHINESE WHEN I HAVE THE PRIVILEGE TO SHRUG OFF THAT IDENTITY WHEN IT IS INCONVENIENT TO BE SEEN AS CHINESE? More fundamentally, am I even allowed to call myself Chinese?

It’s only when I start to really answer the question of where I’m from that people get confused. Do I qualify as being Chinese if I am practically illiterate in Mandarin, if I forget the dates of Chinese holidays, and if what I know about Fujian consists of brief and hazy stories about communists taking away the house of my ancestors?

When I attended a language-exchange event at a university in Beijing, I introduced myself as having grown up in Canada, and told the group that I had decided to spend some time in China that summer with the

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The West is scared of a “Chinese invasion”— scared of Chinese people taking up spots in top universities, of Chinese people buying up real estate. Our accomplishments are cheapened; if we do well in school, it’s not because we’re hardworking or talented.

Instead, it’s because we have “tiger moms” who force us to go to extra tutoring.

This racism and xenophobia played out recently at UofT, when The Varsity launched a Chinese translation of the paper after being approached by “a club run by Chinese international students for Chinese international students—with an ambitious proposal for a new way of engaging international Chinese students in campus media.” I was excited for this major step towards explicit inclusion of the Chinese student population at UofT, but a quick look at online comments demonstrated to me that acceptance and inclusion are still a long way away. One Facebook comment reads: “This is not multiculturalism/diversity. This is culture imperialism/invasion.”

This was also happening on Reddit: “This is so fucking shameful. What’s the purpose of TOEFL? What’s the reason why they come to UofT, knowing it’s an anglo school?

Is it because [they] think this is a pathway to citizenship? That you can buy your citizenship through this institution just like you can buy your essays, assignments and extra tutoring to get the degree you are also paying for? A one-stop shop?”

The fact that anti-Chinese racist senti-

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intention of improving my Mandarin. In response to my self-introduction, somebody I’ll call Mansplaining Chinese Guy told me, “Though you may not identify with being Chinese, we still consider you to be Chinese.

Isn’t it ironic that you’re coming to China to learn Chinese, while the majority of Chinese people want to go abroad to learn English?”

He then proceeded to ask me where I had travelled in China, only to tell me that, in his opinion, the places I had chosen were not worth visiting, and that he “always recommends to foreigners” to visit such and such other place.

This guy that I had just met defined my identity for me with so much confidence and certainty. He seemed to believe that he had pinned it down, before he too became confused about whether to see me as Chinese or foreign.

I can understand where Mansplaining Chinese Guy is coming from, though his comment is pointing to my immense political and economic privilege to be able to go between China and the West. And it is more than just geographical mobility; at times, I also have the privilege of distancing myself from being Chinese.

It was relatively easy to identify as being Chinese while in China, because it was to my advantage to do so. Coming back to Canada, however, forced me to think more carefully about the implications of identifying as Chinese, because being Chinese is not something the West sees as desirable.

KATHLEEN CHEN

FALL MAGAZINE 2017

These comments are not directed at me.

I have the privilege of feeling angry, and not attacked or fearful.

Though people sometimes talk to me in Mandarin, most of the time, I am perceived as being Chinese-Canadian. Because of my upbringing, I have not had to experience many of the struggles that Chinese students put up with, which is why I feel uncomfortable occupying some of the spaces that Chinese students set aside for themselves and wonder whether the linguistic space of identifying as Chinese counts as one such space.

There have certainly been instances when I have made the choice to distance myself from my ethnicity. In addition to the reality that my identification with being Chinese is tenuous and up for debate, I have not always been proud of being Chinese, and it is often easier to erase and neutralize my racialized experiences.

But on the other hand, am I really that privileged if I’m asking myself these questions? The Western system sees me as a Chinese stereotype, but I also have a superficial understanding of the nuances of what it means to be Chinese. Perhaps, rather than ranking levels of oppression, it is more productive to say that, compared to my Chinese peers who moved here more recently, I experience oppression differently. Though I may be able to choose how I self-identify, ultimately, I don’t get to choose how the system perceives me. The system is unaware and indifferent to the complications of my identity.

Going to China this summer certainly complicated my view of the country and my understanding of my own identity. But on that trip, I also learned a word that provides a working solution to my issue of identification: hua yi, a term which refers to a person of Chinese origin living overseas. It’s a powerful word. It provides an opening into my experiences living outside of China, without discounting the validity of my ethnicity. It’s a space that I feel comfortable occupying; a space made for me, that accepts all the variations and nuances that come with living in the diaspora.

And when people ask me where I’m from, replying that I’m hua yi allows me to summarize my experiences, dilemmas, and doubts about being Chinese, but not quite Chinese, without simplifying my story.

ments are held by our peers is disappointing, but not at all surprising. The first commenter sees Chinese students as “other,” and views their participation in campus media as an external takeover of student spaces; this person does not consider Chinese students to be UofT students who are worthy of representation in student media, and who deserve to play an active role in shaping campus narratives.

The second comment makes assumptions about people’s intentions, and stems from the stereotype that Chinese people are obsessed with grades and are willing to do anything to do well academically. It also dismisses the effort and hard work of Chinese students, claiming that just because they are Chinese, their achievements must have been bought.

But most of all, these commentators are scared of the fundamental idea of translation. This is one of the most common taunts directed towards minorities: “Learn English.” The sentiment that we shouldn’t make integration any easier for these students is absurd, arrogant, and mean-spirited.

Moreover, the assumption that Chinese students don’t speak English well, or that they are not making enough effort to learn English, is racist. The assumption that students who communicate amongst themselves in Chinese must speak English poorly is unfair and illogical. Having a Chinese accent means that you have to work harder to demonstrate “proficiency” because the accent itself—not actual linguistic execution—is seen as incorrect.

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Rupture leaves rubble

an ignoble death not like that of those who took more than a building

The night I ate bannock for the first time, Strawberry juice meant

crushed more than bricks on the other side of the sea) But still the ships sailed, while here The night I ate bannock for the first time

To wash it down instead ruptured Pictures of imagined ancestors Like blood bursting the rivets From the sides of

A series of moons sailed Over a poisoned pond— Hold it, you say, our ships did not poison, They were drowned by bigger ones— Maybe this is true,

Sailing ships You would have said, the paths of our ships Have by greater ships been erased, That our history was lost with the world The colonial maps replaced, That a rupture should open

But here, the moons sail over a stage That is not for me or for you; It’s for the girl reading her poem While we share bannock in her home, And slowly the rupture comes, tearing Conqueror’s rivalries to shreds, And I wish I could know about the uncle Dead in the rubble

For the western coast of Iberia.

And yes, ruptures Pried open with radical love Can reveal a lot

of hope to build anew— But that ship, Like the others, Has sailed.

(perhaps even a rebel back home, a bomb in a building of which we do not speak— 11

PATHS

WORDS BY JULIA DASILVA PHOTO BY VICTORIA MURRAY

FALL MAGAZINE 2017

On stage, no one can touch Carol Zoccoli An ESL comedian’s lessons about power and perfectionism WORDS BY CELESTE YIM PHOTO BY ELENA SENECHAL-BECKER

CELESTE YIM

In a creative field, there are at once many and no requirements for success. No one knows the secret to becoming a famous comedian, but it certainly might help to be funny, be brave, and speak English. For Carol Zoccoli, a comedian from Brazil, learning all three was the first step she took to becoming a Canadian resident; being one of the country’s best comedians came second. For young comedians like me, having role models like Carol to aspire to is invaluable. Anyone who knows her professionally can attest to how her great talent matches her hard work. If you’re lucky enough to be her friend, she is a joy to be around and makes you laugh to the point of pain. She was wearing a leather print baseball cap when I met her at a coffee shop to talk about having power over hecklers, squashing jealousy and perfectionism, and comedy as a second language.

I really relate to what you’re saying, though.

That first leg of stand up is so confusing, you’re like, “What the fuck?” When I started I was the only full Asian female comic in the city for a long time. Now there are a bunch of us but for a good year and a half, almost two years, I was the only full Asian woman with an Asian last name and I was jarred by how comfortably people heckled me about race. I was like, are you serious? What year is this?

Celeste Yim: What was doing comedy like in Brazil?

Carol Zoccoli: So sexist. I was like, if I stop doing comedy, there will be no women doing comedy—and I was good at it. If a woman goes on stage, the guys will heckle, “Get the fuck out of here! You’re boring!” I got this!

I’m like, “Hello guys!” And [a heckler’s] like, “Boring!” But then I would go up and crush it. After a year, I was really good. I was writing so much, I had jokes. And then I learned how to humiliate those guys. I destroyed some men’s lives. I learned to get all the anger out of my heart and just put it up to their asses.

It’s hard, it is hard. When—especially women or people of colour—come to me, I just say, don’t think about it. If you want to do it, do it! It’s not illegal. No one can take you out of the room. It is a hard business; telling jokes is fun. But there are a lot of other things about it that are very hard.

You put your anger in men’s asses?

The jokes are such a small part of it. I felt like I was still doing shows and getting better but getting your voice out and saying what you want to say is only 10 percent of it.

Yes. Once there was this drunk guy in the audience who was heckling everybody, and I was headlining the show. I started to shit on him so much and he got so mad because I was a woman. He stands up and says, “Fuck it! I’m going to beat up everybody here!” I was like, “Oh my god you’re so mad at me but you can’t beat me up because I’m a woman! Oh no! Go fuck yourself!” A fight broke out, it was a mess. I watched the security guard take him out and I was like, “Sorry pal I’m just here on stage.”

It is a very, very hard path.

What were the paths you had to take to be a working comedian in Toronto?

I learned English not long ago, when I moved here to do comedy. But I didn’t really speak English. I could read, I could understand sixty-five, maybe seventy percent. But Oh my god, you were just MC-ing a brawl? You speaking... I started speaking English here. had the perspective of God! It’s so different. Understanding and speaking are two completely different things. So at Yes. the beginning, I didn’t even know if it would 12

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be possible! The week I moved here I started taking classes at Second City. I thought, if a year from now it turns out that I do have to go back, at least I learned something that we don’t have in Brazil: improv and sketch. And I studied at Second City, which to me is like where all of these great people came from.

So I started taking improv lessons everywhere. Improv helped me a lot with English, which was hard of course.

Yeah, well it’s interesting because you’re great at improv. It does feel like you had the option to do improv if you wanted. Why did you choose the stand-up path?

I just think I’ve never connected to the improv classes. It was hard. You have to remember, too, I just got here. I didn’t understand the dynamics. I felt like a fish out of water, people would be joking and I didn’t understand. I was like, “Oh.” I can’t believe you didn’t have a speaking proficiency in English while you were doing these things… That is unbelievable. To me, it doesn’t seem like a barrier for you.

Well, are your parents immigrants?

Yeah? That’s why! People who have immigrants in the family or who have a lot of contact with immigrants are way more understanding. There’s people who come from small towns who have never seen an immigrant before. Sometimes they get very uncomfortable when you start sharing your stories, or your jokes even.

You’re doing your show Comedy As A Second Language now, where the comedians who perform are immigrants.

What do you think is the value of those kinds of spaces?

When I got here, I took some ESL classes.

There’s ESL plus classes for immigrants who just got here, so that’s where the fees are paid. (Laughs) In those classes they have all kinds of immigrants—people who just got here, people who have been here for years, and just need to develop. There are all kinds of levels and people in those classes and I realized that those people don’t participate in the culture of the city. I started doing comedy when I got here so I pretty much feel part of the culture of the city. I feel part of it. Those people, maybe they go to a restaurant, they go to the mall, they go home! They probably watch their own TV shows from their countries. If you’re not part of a culture of a city, you’re not part of

That’s so interesting because the value of that space expands to a whole community and to arts in general. Do you think it’s important for comics who are not part of the dominant scene to expand their audiences like that? Or is it more about making sure that we’re creating specific spaces for specific people?

Both. Because everything is niche now.

Which is great because if you have comedians who are immigrants and audiences who are immigrants, I can do jokes that I could never do elsewhere; either because they don’t get it or they’re afraid to laugh. We laugh at our disgraces and it’s so good!

People keep telling me, “Market this show to white people! Put it up at Comedy Bar!” But I want to create a new audience that we don’t have yet. Today they can watch “Comedy as a Second Language” and tomorrow they can come to a show that has Canadians [in it], everybody! Because now they’re part of the culture.

PATHS

Yeah.

the city. There’s a lot of funny shit that happens when you move to another country. In my head, I was always like: “I’d love to do a show for these people.” I was like, “Man, I’m going to do this show.” I started doing it in January. I’m happy because we ask, like: “Who is ESL here? Who is an immigrant?”

Most of the audience put their hands up— boom. I’m very happy about that.

FALL MAGAZINE 2017

I’m always so amazed by your material. It’s never alienating, I really feel like you can do any audience and I’m jarred by that.

That’s hard to do for a white guy who grew up here! It’s very political for us. You don’t want to be pigeonholed, you don’t want to do accents and you have to be able to do a show in Nowhere, Ontario.

So funny. What is something you think has been integral to the path that you’ve chosen and to your identity as a comedian?

Badass-ism. You have to be a fucking badass to do this.

Did you learn that word in ESL class?

That’s what they taught you? That’s some highbrow shit.

It’s also a challenge, a good one, for me to make a Barrie audience laugh. It feels very good when I’m able to do that because this is communication. There’s a responsibility because, for some people, it’s the first time they’re seeing an immigrant on stage—I have this on my shoulders.

(Laughs) Yes exactly. I swear to god, I just found out that I was a perfectionist.

You’re coming out?

I just came out a couple of months ago.

I was reading this article talking about perfectionists and I was like [to my husband], “Claudio! I might be a perfectionist!” And he was like, “Um, yeah, a hundred percent.”

There’s a difference between dedication and perfectionism; you can be dedicated to something and put love into. Perfectionism is more to do with what other people think.

CELESTE YIM

Do you think there are wrong paths to take as a comedian? Something that people do that they shouldn’t?

I think so. This business is very competitive. There’s like a thousand people and three jobs. (Laughs) Sometimes people get too… jealous. Too jealous of each other.

I’m friends with a lot of people and I don’t even want to know the gossip. That turns you bitter. I was talking to a friend today, she’s kind of new, she’s been doing it for a year and a half. I was like, “Stop hanging out and going to parties with those people.”

Have somewhere to go because, otherwise, that’s your whole world. Then you start to compete with each other and feel that people get things you deserve when they don’t deserve it. You start to hold grudges. Don’t even start it! When you start feeling jealous of other people, just breathe. Because if you go there, baby, you’re screwed.

It’s not really a measure of what you’re doing.

Exactly. I realized this and it was so liberating. I let go of it—you can be dedicated and love what you do.

You have to not care. You have to care so much and not at all. It can’t be about anything except what you want and like.

You’re not going to be thinking of what anyone else thinks! The thing is, no one cares.

No one cares if you succeed, no one cares if you fail!

There are so many methods of survival.

It’s so dog-eat-dog. Dude, I think it’s so funny when immigrants say idioms wrong.

Yesterday I was like, “I’m going to throw my hat on the ring!” I knew it was wrong immediately.

Yeah! We have to remember.

We have to be selfish in a good way. We should hang out more.

(Laughs) I said once, “Bitch resting face.”

Yes, please.

(Laughs) Just a mean girl relaxing!

Hanging out!

Carol’s show Comedy As A Second Language is on monthly at 120 Diner, featuring immigrant comedians performing in English (their second or even third language!).

You can follow her on Twitter at @CarolZoccoli.

This interview has been edited for length, style, and clarity.

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Daedalus and Icarus A visual translation WORDS BY OVID, FROM METAMORPHOSES “VIII. 183-189” (8 AD) ART BY YILIN ZHU

PATHS

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FALL MAGAZINE 2017

Six is the new four The four-year timeline is an unrealistic and unfair expectation of students

SHAILEE KORANNE

WORDS BY SHAILEE KORANNE PHOTO BY HANA NIKCEVIC

bear. It all culminated in me being called into a meeting with the registrar to discuss my academic standing and, after I finished bawling my eyes out in front of a woman I had never met before, I realized just how hard the year had been for me. I used all of my late withdrawal allowance in third year, dropping all but three classes—one of which I ended up failing, and two of which I passed with meagre Cs. I got 1.0 credit in all of third year, and it felt horrible.

I realized, having taken only 4.0 credits in first and second year, that at the end of three years at UofT, when most of my peers had 15 credits, I only had 9. Graduating at the same time as the people I started frosh week with was not going to be possible. However, it shouldn’t have taken until I reached this point to realize that taking four years to complete undergrad is unrealistic—not just for me, but generally.

By the time I reached grade 12, I was only taking classes I liked and knew I was good at. This meant that I hardly had to put in any effort to pull in a low-90s average. Having been raised in a family that values success in education, I have always been a good student. Even though university proved to be much more difficult than high school, I coasted through first and second year with a high 60s/low 70s average, more or less content with those grades. And then I hit rock bottom.

Rock bottom is a bad place—there’s no question about it. Mental illness was something I had struggled with for years, but it had never quite consumed me until I was in my third year at Victoria College.

Third year was my personal hell. Outside of taking the prescribed five classes per semester, I was interning at a major media outlet, editing a section of The Strand, and doing communications for VUSAC. All of these things were supposed to be fun; yet almost every day, it took me an hour to get out of bed. I slept for most of the day, skipped almost every single lecture, unless there was an assignment due, and was late for my job almost daily.

My grandmother had a stroke, and in the absence of my mother, who went to India for a few weeks to care for her own mother, I was doing more work at home. I was stretched so thin I was starting to fall apart, but I felt as though I had to keep going. It didn’t help that everyone I knew was also incredibly involved in extracurriculars and didn’t seem to be struggling. I felt like I had no excuse.

Instead of cutting down on my extracurriculars or choosing to slow down in any way, I continued to push myself because I felt the pressure to stay “on track.” I found myself feeling awful because, try as I might, I couldn’t get out of bed or get excited about anything, and I woke up and went to sleep with a weight on my chest that I couldn’t

I WAS STRETCHED SO THIN I WAS STARTING TO FALL APART, BUT I FELT AS THOUGH I HAD TO KEEP GOING. The four-year plan may have worked a couple of decades ago for more people than it does now because the livable wage corresponded better to the price of education.

However, in the past few years, education has become disproportionately expensive— putting most students from even the socioeconomic brackets that are accustomed to financial security in the position of having to work during the year.

This plan is founded on the assumption that everyone has the reliability of the physical and mental ability to be able to take five courses a semester. It assumes that people can afford to spend upwards of $8000 annually on tuition—not including the additional costs of textbooks, class materials, computers, transit, and housing—and the assumption that the only thing students do all day 16

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still seen as the exception to the norm.

The pressure that is placed on students to complete school in accordance with the fouryear model is an institutional and societal pressure that is completely unreasonable.

No one can predict the kinds of things that come up in life that may require us to take a break from our educations, or make them a lesser priority. For the most part, the fouryear model is one that only allows a “timely” graduation for students who are able-bodied and financially secure, among other privileges.

As a society, we should be taking steps to make post-secondary education more accessible to marginalized groups, as well as actually accounting for them once they enter university or college programs. We should stop lauding the idea of working ourselves to the bone, and recognize that being busy all the time is not good for us. We should be less harsh on ourselves and on each other, while making an effort not to think of finishing our programs in four years—or however many years are prescribed to us—as “normal.”

A degree is a degree, regardless of whether you take four years or eight years to obtain it, and regardless of whether you get it right after high school or in your forties. So you might as well take care of yourself in the process.

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is go to class and do homework.

The four-year plan does not account for students with disabilities, students who cannot afford tuition and must find employment, students who are raising children or taking care of family members, and all sorts of factors that, when pooled together, would show us that a huge majority of students do not graduate in four years. Almost everyone I know has a part-time job, and I also know many people who are completing their degrees part-time over much more than four years.

So why do we still expect them, and ourselves, to do so?

When I tell people that I’m doing my degree over five years, they say, “Oh!” and raise their eyebrows like they cannot fathom how someone may need more than four years to finish their degree. In the same vein, you might be thinking: “Okay, if a student wants to take more than four years, let them! Why is it a big deal?”

It’s a big deal because the social expectation we place on university and college students is still very much the same, regardless of how many students are taking more than four years’ time. Even though more and more students are starting to finish their degrees over five, six, or even more than seven years—a concept which may seem completely foreign to some—the onus of responsibility is placed on those students, and they are

FALL MAGAZINE 2017

In conversation with American firstyear students WORDS BY GEORGIA LIN PHOTOS BY HANA NIKCEVIC

GEORGIA LIN

In the wake of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, there has been talk of influxes of American students who wished to flee to Canada in the hopes of getting away from irreparable identity politics and dangerous far-right ideologies. Having immigrated to the United States and subsequently to Canada, I’ve felt deep distress and anxiety about Donald Trump and the GOP’s discriminatory policies since the election. In “Trump’s America,” minorities and immigrants live in fear: white supremacy and xenophobia are no longer ostracized beliefs. I was curious whether Trump’s presidency impacted the post-secondary directions of American students.

I spoke to three first-year students from different regions across the United States about their choice to attend UofT, what it means to be an American living in Canada, and their thoughts on U.S. politics today.

Gil Hamel

Toronto was appealing to me. UofT could be a city of its own, compared to where I’m from. Canada has a reputation of being a nice place to live, but most of what brought me here was less “Canada” and more “Toronto.”

Which state are you from? Did you have any connections with Canada before coming to UofT?

I’m from New Hampshire. My dad is Canadian; he’s from Montréal. I’ve visited Toronto a couple times a year since I was born, but I’ve never lived here before.

Do you think coming from a small town has influenced your perspective on Canada?

Why did you choose to come to UofT instead of a post-secondary institution in the U.S.?

I think it’s coloured my perspective in that I’m so appreciative of being in a diverse place like Toronto. It’s cool to

I grew up in a pretty small town, so going to a huge school in a big city like 18

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see the city as a nexus of people from all over the world—I find that fascinating. I think I would have had a hard time finding a school in the U.S. that is a mixture of anything like UofT. The concept of being bilingual is also not as prevalent in the U.S. There’s an old joke: “What do you call someone that speaks three languages?

They’re trilingual. What do you call someone that speaks two languages? They’re bilingual. What do you call someone that speaks one language? They’re an American.”

It’s the idea that the U.S. is one of the few countries where you can be totally fine being monolingual. But I think that’s changing.

lives, and I would never discount that. I was fortunate enough to not be one of those people.

How do you see your academic and professional paths going forward as a young American student currently studying in Canada?

Did the instability of the United States’ current administration affect your decision to come to Canada?

Frankly, no. I’ve been planning on coming to Canada for years. The current administration isn’t necessarily something I like, but I didn’t feel terribly unstable where I lived. I think there are people for whom the unstable administration is a threat to how they currently live their

Vibhuti Kacholia

Which state are you from? Did you have any connections with Canada before coming to UofT?

Why did you choose to come to UofT instead of a post-secondary institution in the U.S.?

I’m from a suburb outside of Seattle, Washington called Bellevue and I was born in Vancouver.

UofT being a prominent research institution is awesome, and there’s lots of research going on that I want to get in19

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I honestly don’t know. I plan on going to grad school, most likely in Canada. I want to go into translation studies; it’s not a common program that’s offered by schools in the U.S., but it’s much more prevalent in Canada as an officially bilingual country. Another option I’m also considering is a U.S. government program called the Peace Corps. I tell people that my intended major is Spanish, but I’m not sure if that’s going to stick around.

Foreign language, generally, is my area of study, as I’d like to be an interpreter.

There are three main branches of interpretation: medical, legal, and conference interpreting, like working the United Nations. You cannot understate the value of interpreting for people who need their stories told through translation.

FALL MAGAZINE 2017

volved in. Also, getting to live in a very urban area with a lot of resources and things going on is really cool. There’s an overwhelming sense of welcome that exists in Canada that many parts of the U.S. just don’t have. The city of Toronto is very diverse, and it lives up to its reputation.

GEORGIA LIN

Did the instability of the United States’ current administration affect your decision to come to Canada?

It definitely was not the deciding factor for me. I had my sights set on Toronto and Canada in general before Donald Trump was elected, but I feel a little guilty. It feels like I’m running away from something instead of staying there and fighting the cause. When I’m at home, I’m obsessively checking the news to see what’s happening, but being in Canada feels like I’m in a bubble. I’m almost shielded away from the politics, but also understanding that these policies will affect me when I’m back in the U.S. It’s odd because I’ve never felt more American than since I got here.

When I’m in America, I’m “the Canadian” even though that only means I have Canadian citizenship. Being in Canada has made me very aware of how American I am.

Do you think that as a woman of colour you would have been affected by Trump’s politics had you gone to a school in the U.S. instead of UofT?

Liam Austin

Most definitely. People of colour in America do not feel safe. With my privilege of financial stability, it’s something that I don’t think about every day, but it is scary. There is a lot of anti-Brown prejudice where I come from. Microsoft and Amazon are based out of Washington and they have a significant amount of Asian and Indian people earning high incomes, which then causes a sentiment of anti-immigration. I do, however, want to go back to the U.S. for medical school to study to be an OB-GYN. How do you see your academic and professional paths going forward as a young American student currently studying in Canada?

I think I’ll definitely come up with a different perspective versus my American counterparts because interacting with Canadians who have varying mindsets is very different from interacting with Americans. It’s interesting to live with people who are so culturally similar but so different otherwise. I intend to major in Human Biology: Global Health with minors in Women and Gender Studies and Psychology because I have a strong love for reproductive health and a passion for sexual education. I want to able to take my love for science and apply it in a way that helps people who don’t receive enough resources.

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Which state are you from? Did you have any connections with Canada before coming to UofT?

to move out of the U.S. because things were politically unstable.

Do you think your education would have been affected studying in the U.S,? Do you believe you have an element of privilege that protects you?

I’m from a pretty small town close to Orlando, Florida. I visited a couple times a year before I came to UofT, since all of my family is Canadian and I have dual citizenship.

I do think I have enough privilege that I would’ve been exempt from the way I saw my peers being affected by the election. It’s hard to say whether or not it would’ve been different, because I don’t know what it’s like to go to school in the United States.

Why did you choose to come to UofT instead of a post-secondary institution in the U.S.?

Part of it was being able to move and explore a new place that I’ve never lived in before, and it was also hard to find schools in the U.S. that matched exactly what UofT had to offer. It was a good personal fit for me. The international outlook and prestige of UofT was difficult to beat, at least compared to the schools in the area where I’m from.

How do you see your academic and professional paths going forward as a young American student currently studying in Canada?

Did the instability of the United States’ current administration affect your decision to come to Canada?

Yes, it did. It wasn’t the driving factor, but it definitely did play into my decision to only apply to Canadian schools. Not only UofT specifically, but knowing that I wanted

Family, privilege, and ambitions intersected in their choices to pursue an education in Canada versus the United States, and I was surprised at the minimal connection to U.S. politics in their responses. The interviewees’ reflections on renewed Canadian-American dynamics underscore the need for awareness about the ongoing political shift in the United States. Knowledge and advocacy are crucial to resisting the fear-mongering enacted by Donald Trump’s administration. The paths young American students are taking in Canada affirms our country’s identity as a place of refuge, but we cannot afford to disengage from global affairs.

These interviews have been edited for length, style, and clarity.

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I’m planning to study economics, and I plan on staying in Canada after I graduate which is part of the reason why I chose UofT. Going to school in Canada gives you an edge to get hired in Canada, as opposed to being from the U.S. I’m also interested in working with NGOs in the future to build economic infrastructures in underdeveloped areas.

FALL MAGAZINE 2017

Reimagining a different narrative

CAROL EUGENE PARK

How I’m learning to feel comfortable in my own skin

WORDS BY CAROL EUGENE PARK PHOTO BY HANA NIKCEVIC

reimagine your own narrative, incorporating events from the fiction you wrote. It’s easy to blur the lines and to lose sight of Content warning: discussions of body what is real. shaming, disordered eating, and misogyBeing “woman” enough ny.

As many teenagers do, I struggled with body image during my adolescence.

I was an aspiring writer, so I sought out a place of belonging in the stories I created when I felt isolated from my peers and loved ones. I wrote about girls feeling lost and depressed and developing eating disorders. I romanticized eating disorders so intensely that I began to write myself into the protagonists of my short stories.

Eventually, I could no longer differentiate my fictional life from my reality.

When your craft continuously romanticizes stigmatized social taboos, you can fall in love with them and subconsciously

My upbringing was traditionally conservative, meaning that gender norms were heavily enforced. I was told that being a size 00 was what a woman should strive for. It was constantly reinforced that if a woman was taller than five feet, eight inches, she wasn’t desirable or feminine enough. These comments planted within me the seed of internalized misogyny at a very young age. “Real women” are petite, skinny, pretty, and have long hair—general stereotypes that the media perpetuates.

It is one thing for the media to tell you your body is undesirable or unwomanly, but it is another to have loved ones crit-

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icize and shame your body: Carol, do some ab exercises so that you can lose those awful love handles.

Sweetie, drink more water and cut down on dairy. Acne is the ultimate ruin on a woman’s face. Who would want her if she doesn’t even look like a woman?

Why don’t we skip dessert since it appears you’ve put on a couple pounds?

I was never woman-enough for my family. I was too bulky or too vocal about my opinions, or my walk didn’t have a feminine sashay to entice passersby. One day, my aunt called and scolded me for speaking in a lower voice register: “What kind of a girl has such a low voice? Speak like a woman.”

After being told that you are unworthy for a while, you begin to believe all of the negative comments. It becomes difficult to find your own voice when you are forced to believe in all the negativity.

A fear of mirrors When I was 16, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in a shop window near my house. I panicked at the sight of what appeared to be an extremely overweight version of my size 6 body. I felt the beginning of an anxiety attack and had to wait for my mother to find me in an alleyway.

Episodes like this became a theme for most of high school; I would see my reflection and be consumed by anxiety.

I took down the mirrors in my bedroom and turned off the lights when I used the washroom, because I was too afraid to look at my body.

I hated seeing my reflection so much that I removed myself from social gatherings in high school. I made excuses to avoid hanging out with friends or going to parties, to reduce the likelihood of experiencing more public anxiety attacks.

The healing process My mother had had enough of my anxiety attacks and since I wouldn’t talk to her about it, she advised, or rather insisted, I see a therapist. I felt apprehensive about going to therapy but I knew my mother was right, so I agreed.

I found myself waiting for my therapist 23

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on a Monday morning, while nervously trying to reassure myself that my experiences were valid—that I was valid.

The first session was unsuccessful. I barely said a word while my therapist patiently passed me Kleenex after Kleenex.

Her silence was unnerving, yet comforting. The second session was no different; an hour of loud sobs filled the office.

It took a few more sessions until I was confident enough to confide in her. I showed her the jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces that was my teenage life. I quickly realized that she didn’t have all the answers; fancy degree and all, she only had methods to allow for healing.

“Write me a short story and a poem about how you want to feel,” she said, insistent on finding a medium that inspired me.

A week later, I walked into her office with my Moleskine notebook in hand, unable to give it to her. I wasn’t ready to expose myself to more vulnerability as a patient and writer. I was worried that she wouldn’t like my writing.

She didn’t comment on either short story or poem. Instead, she continued to assign me the same task week after week.

Our sessions were transformed into weekly discussions exploring themes of belonging, forgiveness, and identity.

A few months ago, I revisited the creative pieces I had written for her in chronological order. I don’t know why or how her methodology worked, but it did.

A subtle shift in tone, perspective, and narrative exists as the dates of the stories draw nearer to the last few visits with my therapist. There’s less anger in my writing; I wonder if the reason I allowed myself to heal was because I was tired of feeling angry.

It’s been two years since my last therapy session and three since high school.

I still struggle to look at my reflection when I walk by glass windows. I may never be completely “healed”—whatever that means—and truthfully, I don’t care.

Reaching a particular point in self-growth is unimportant to me. I’m focusing on the healing process itself, rather than the outcome. And for now, that’s enough for me.

KAYLEIGH BIRCH

FALL MAGAZINE 2017

Los Angeles international A geography of love WORDS BY KAYLEIGH BIRCH ART BY EMILY FU

The corner of Cypress and Imperial, second checkers table from the West, is where we watch the planes take off over the ocean.

My seat is the one that faces the green lights of the airplane runway; his seat is the one where you can see the planes disappear into the sunset if you watch them long enough.

We were sixteen when we discovered the spot, tucked away from LAX on the highest hill of El Segundo, California.

Nockett’s earth science classroom: even in the midst of our youthful awkwardness, there was a certain fluidity in our inflections, laughter, and a love for The Beatles that made me feel like a part of my humanity must have been made of the same fabric as his.

I first fell in love with David on a school bus home from a marching band competi-

tion during my junior year of high school.

We listened to “The Boxer” by Simon and Garfunkel and the lights on the 405 looked like stars that were exploding too quickly to remember. We always curved past LAX and he always reminded me through whispers to “wake up, we’re home now.”

Through the streets of El Segundo, during those midnight walks home, we would stand under the gazebo of Library Park and notice how low the stars hung above us and how high the streetlamps stood (as if they were respecting our distance) in the Southern California nighttime. We let ourselves actualize how terrifying and beautiful a road I had not known existed could be.

The second time I fell in love with David is not as easy to pinpoint, for it occurred over a period of a year and a half. Our love turned into the sounds of running down small town streets at two in the morning, from Palm to Virginia Street, when the air was thick. It

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love of my life on my front porch.

Although we knew it would be excruciating, nothing could have prepared me for the pain of being away from my family, my friends, and David. My mother described my reaction as that of someone grieving an immense loss: I couldn’t hear songs on the radio in stores without bursting into uncontrollable tears. I couldn’t look at the ring David had given me the night before I left without sobbing profusely. I could not eat, sleep, or walk. I experienced, in my first two weeks in Toronto, a heartache that broke down every mental fortress I had spent seven years constructing. A long-distance relationship, for me, was not surprise visits and constant letters in the mail—it was crying in front of a computer and cursing our independence, our distance, and the fork in the road that placed us other over three-thousand kilometres apart.

OUR EXISTENCES ARE NOT DEFINED BY EACH OTHER AND, IN MY OPINION, THE BEAUTY OF OUR LOVE STEMS FROM OUR AUTONOMY. Although we may be far apart, David and I are both growing into who and what we want for ourselves as individuals. If love is love, it will be there tomorrow. Our existences are not defined by each other and, in my opinion, the beauty of our love stems from our autonomy: we are two coincidences, crossing over in a rare and ethereal existence. Just as I carry on loving, the skies in California carry on with their iridescent lightshow of pinks and blues, preparing for our arrival. The coastal highway will still withstand our speed, the beaches will host our fumbling dancing, and the peppermint mochas will still keep our hands warm in the middle of December.

Now, I’m falling in love with David for the third time. This process is continuous, and it has been some sort of combination of gut-wrenching and everything I have ever wanted.

In December, when David’s plane lands, my seat will still be the one that faces the green lights of the airplane runway. I will be there, at Tom Bradley Terminal, like we always talk about during our late-night phone calls: loving, living, and materializing again.

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grew into the taste of peppermint mochas during the holidays, strolling through our small town’s “Candy Cane Lane.” Our love song, in its grandeur, turned into the carousel at Disneyland, watching the world spin in a technicolour dream, the light in his eyes flickering to the rhythm of the fireworks.

Dancing across the shore of the Pacific Ocean at sunset on Vista del Mar, wondering which paths and life choices had brought us together, I discovered what it felt like to be young and in love. Eternally, uncertainly, and unapologetically, falling in love was like speeding down the Pacific Coast Highway with my head out of the window, watching the sunlight creep behind the ocean while blasting Bruce Springsteen. I would smile from the passenger seat and tell him, “I’m never going to forget this.”

In May 2017, we both committed to the universities of our dreams, independently.

I was going to my top choice, the University of Toronto; I was moving back to my birthplace to pursue my big-city dreams and study English and Cinema. David chose to join me in Canada for his Archaeology degree at the University of Calgary. We knew the separation would be brutal, but no pain could compare to the feeling of being reunited. Our relationship was never in question: we both believe that a part of love is putting individual aspirations first.

In June, we graduated high school. We spent our summer nights speeding through the city, driving from Blue Butterfly Coffee on Main Street to the very top of the Griffith Observatory, where the sky was pink and blue like all those years before. I used the pauses between our laughter and ramblings about traveling to Paris and the planetarium scene in Manhattan to remind myself that I, in all of my teenage glory, was so lucky to have met someone like David at such a young age.

By the last week of August, we had planned our last adventure together until we would be reunited again. We walked back to the coffee shop on Sepulveda, where all those years ago, we sat and he listened to me read W.H. Auden while we drank lattes.

We sat in the same spot on his living room floor as we did when we were first falling in love to The Catcher in the Rye, listening to Simon and Garfunkel albums after school.

Things were simpler when I was not booking flights, finishing barista jobs, or leaving the

FALL MAGAZINE 2017

Debunking the myth of the “model minority”

REBECCA GAO

What it means to be a successful immigrant

WORDS BY REBECCA GAO PHOTOS BY HANA NIKCEVIC

We landed in Canada in April of 1999. I was 14 months old and my mother was in her mid-thirties. This was before the birth of my younger sister and much before the arrival of my father. For the first three years of our life in Canada, it was just my mother and me. Despite being a part of

the growing middle class in Guangzhou, where my parents were born and raised, they were still worried about how much they’d be able to give me.

So, they decided to emigrate.

For the first six months that we lived in Toronto, we lived with my mother’s best friend from elementary school in a cramped one-bedroom apartment behind Chinatown Centre on Spadina, just south of Dundas. My mother likes to remind me

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of the hours that she stayed up, rocking me to sleep, because I was unaccustomed to the sounds of traffic below. My mother spent those six months trying to find a job and a home for us. But no one wanted to hire someone who wasn’t a citizen or a permanent resident yet and no one wanted to lease an apartment to a mother with a troublesome infant who couldn’t sleep through the night.

After six months of no luck, she knew that we had overstayed our welcome.

Our host, who continues to be one of my mother’s closest friends and the godmother of my younger sister, suggested that we look elsewhere.

We moved east into the basement of a small house a few blocks east of East Chinatown. We spent a year there. My mom took the Dundas streetcar into Chinatown every day to find a job. Again, nobody took her seriously when they saw that she was a recently landed immigrant with a two-year-old daughter who needed constant attention.

THOUGH IT’S TRUE THAT MANY CHINESE IMMIGRANTS COME FROM ENORMOUS WEALTH, IT ISN’T TRUE OF EVERYONE. Finally, we moved to Scarborough, where my parents still live. My mother found a job at the dim sum restaurant down the street, was able to sponsor my father’s immigration to Canada, and had a second child. Somehow, despite all she overcame and all she accomplished in her first five years in Canada, she was not seen as a success.

Stereotypically, Chinese immigrants living in North America are often thought of as rich and entitled. Though it’s true that many Chinese immigrants come from enormous wealth, it isn’t true of everyone. One of the most harmful things about this line of thought is that it erases the struggles of a lot of Chinese immigrants. For every international student you see rolling around campus in a Bentley, there are many more who are like my 27

PATHS

mother and me.

Chinese immigrants are often perceived as “successful”—more “successful” than our Brown or Black counterparts.

And though I recognize the systems of racism and oppression that are at play here, as well as the privilege that I have as a light-skinned person, it’s also important to question why it is that Chinese immigrants are so often regarded as “successful.”

All my life, my parents have worked modest jobs, often keeping two or more side gigs going on in order to support our family. My mother has alternated between being a hostess at a dim sum restaurant, to being a hairdresser, to being a cook, and to being a small business owner. The most traceable aspect of my life, and what I use sometimes to distinguish between eras of my life, is what my mom was doing at the time.

Between my mother’s odd jobs and my father’s relatively stable career doing maintenance for an office building, they were able to build a life for our family.

My sister and I weren’t denied much in our childhood; we had swimming lessons, countless art classes, and piano/flute/ violin/guitar lessons (depending on our mood that month). Though there were times in my childhood where we were stretched for money, we never struggled immensely.

I recently attended a family wedding where I talked to aunties and uncles that I haven’t seen since our days in East Chinatown. Regardless of the fact that I was able to carry on most of my conversations in Cantonese, I found that my aunties and uncles often turned the conversations into English. When I asked my mom about this, she said that it was because success for her generation of immigrants was often defined by how well they could fit into Canadian society. For them, speaking in their native language was something that marked them as different and therefore unsuccessful in this new land that they were trying to make a home in.

I noticed this trend throughout the night. My parents’ friends complimented my perfect English and asked questions about my schooling. When they realized that I had achieved a sort of success they

REBECCA GAO

FALL MAGAZINE 2017

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them, success was being homogeneous and fitting in with the Canadian (read: white) identity. Considering my perfect English, education, group of friends, and general interests—all things that people my parents’ age associate with being “Canadian”—they see me as the more successful version of my parents; what they could’ve been if they adapted better and fit in more.

I don’t want to preach about whether or not this line of thinking is problematic or not. Of course, it’s somewhat problematic that some people can only view success in terms of whether or not one can fit into Canadian culture. It’s absurd. But it’s also how they’ve been conditioned to see the world.

I am in no position to judge their values or what they see as “successful.” Rather, I want to highlight the stories of people who have found success after immigrating, but are not seen as such. People like my parents, who’ve built lives for themselves and their families but don’t speak a lick of English or have professional jobs, and because of that, will never “belong” in the mosaic of Canadian multiculturalism.

Let’s celebrate them and their paths.

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PATHS

think is unachievable for them, they began to see me as somewhat other. For my parents and their friends, I was both Chinese enough and white enough. My upbringing, something that was typical of many Chinese immigrant families, was ignored in favour of my newfound and whiter identity. They congratulated my parents on raising such a good girl, such a gwai loi.

This threw me for a bit of a loop. My parents had always worked to make sure that my education was well-rounded.

This included forcing me into Chinese language classes and to learn about our culture through lengthy phone calls with relatives from back home. They taught me the importance of remembering and celebrating our culture, lest I be absorbed into the general Canadian “mosaic of multiculturalism.”

But at that wedding, I saw that some people have absolutely no desire for the balance that my parents worked so hard for. When they saw me, they saw someone who was more Canadian than Chinese and because of that, they saw a “successful” immigrant. They saw me as someone who fit into this mosaic—where they themselves would never truly belong. To

FALL MAGAZINE 2017

Diverging from standard protocol Forging my own path through the university algorithm

SUMEETA FARRUKH

WORDS BY SUMEETA FARRUKH ILLUSTRATION BY MIA CARNEVALE

What does it mean for a program to be efficient? How do you design an algorithm that produces the correct result in the least amount of time while using the fewest computational resources? In Computer Science, we spend an awful lot of time studying this question of efficiency.

In any algorithm, we generally want to minimize two things: the runtimes and the required memory. We want less time and less required space.

We use data structures to store information, and we find the fastest ways to traverse these structures. A graph is one such structure: it’s a bunch of points connected by edges, and we’re interested in finding the shortest path between two points. A tree is a special kind of graph where two points can be connected by exactly one path—like a binary tree, where the root node has at most two children, who in turn have at most two children, and so on. At any point, you can only go left or right, and your destination has only one route. We like binary search trees because they allow us to find specific values more quickly. In all of our programs, we streamline, we eliminate the dead code, and we find ways to optimize the algorithms to improve them from quadratic complexity: to exponential, to linear, to logarithmic, to constant.

You would think that, as someone who has spent a long time learning about this, I would have been able to apply these methods to my own path. But here I am, entering the sixth year of my undergrad, unsure of what my next steps are.

I feel like the longer I’ve been here, the harder and more exhausting it is—it’s like I’m dragging myself on my elbows, just trying to get to the finish line.

When people see me around campus, they often ask: “I thought you graduated?”

“Why didn’t you graduate?” “Oh, are you doing your Master’s?” Embarrassed, I try to laugh it off as I rush through my standard stream of words to most quickly dispel any sentiments of pity: “No, I haven’t. Still doing my undergrad, but I’ll be done soon. I only have two courses left. I’ll be graduating in June,” etc.

When people ask why I’m doing a sixth year, I tell them I took reduced course loads and worked jobs here and there. I tend to brush over the reality of my situation, which has looked something like: yearly quarter-life crises; mental breakdowns; calls to the Registrar; visits to the Dean’s Office; consultations with Accessibility Services; dropped courses; late withdrawals; late late withdrawals; almost-fails; and almost-drop-outs.

When people ask me what I’m studying, I tell them I’m double-majoring in Computer Science and Linguistics. A lot of times they’ll tell me how smart I must be, which is nice, but also a little misguided.

I’ve had a lot of difficulty in my program; it can take a long time to understand basic things. I have spent too much time re-evaluating whether this field was right for me.

HERE I AM, ENTERING THE SIXTH YEAR OF MY UNDERGRAD, UNSURE OF WHAT MY NEXT STEPS ARE. I know I’m smart, but maybe not in the way that people imagine me to be. Sometimes they tell me that they wouldn’t have guessed I’m a Computer Science student.

This either means they didn’t expect me to be capable of it, or that I don’t fit into the stereotype.

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PATHS

None of those things, however, are necessarily correlated, and none of them are mutually exclusive. I am more than my chosen path and the stereotypes associated with my majors.

Starting university was weird for me because I felt boxed into an identity based on my field of study. I loved poetry, but I was too afraid to submit anything to Acta Victoriana because I didn’t think I was a real writer like all of those students who studied English Lit. I had always loved drama, but I was too afraid to audition for plays for a lot of the same reasons.

Whatever it was that I was interest-

ed in, I told myself I wasn’t one of those people. I couldn’t write an essay because I wasn’t a humanities student. I couldn’t be creative and artistic because I was in such a logical, mathematical discipline.

This imaginary box was largely a self-imposed restriction, but it felt like everyone, at least initially, enforced it and played along. I was at the beginning of my binary tree, my first major fork in the road. I went one way thinking I had to choose.

I have a distinct memory from one morning in first year, sitting in what used to be Wymilwood Café (in the ancient times when Goldring was being renovat31

SUMEETA FARRUKH

FALL MAGAZINE 2017

ed) and seeing a poster for The Bob, Victoria College’s sketch comedy show. I was interested but immediately considered it impossible. I figured that everyone involved knew each other, that they’d been doing it forever, and that they were all more talented than I was. I had no idea how people got comfortable or confident enough to make it to anything at that level.

I started getting more involved at Vic slowly, taking baby steps. I began first as a Frosh Leader, which I loved, but which lasted only one week out of the year. One of my friends encouraged me to apply for the position of Communications Coordinator on VUSAC, because she knew it’d be a great way for me to combine my computer skills with my creative passions.

From there, things sort of snowballed; each opportunity led to another. My time as Communications Coordinator led me to run for Arts & Culture Commissioner, which involved me producing The Bob. Producing The Bob led to my successful audition the following year, four years after seeing that poster and thinking it could never happen. My love for Frosh Week led to me eventually becoming an Orientation Exec, which led to me becoming a Don. In the midst of my social success, however, I continued struggling in school.

I frequently had to drop courses, which caused me to be a semester behind, and then another semester, and then another semester, and so on.

My parents worried that I was getting too involved in things that didn’t involve my studies, attributing my extracurricular involvement to my levels of stress. Everyone has a little trouble balancing everything, and I was no different—but I don’t think that was the issue. I wasn’t involved in anything in first year, and was only very minimally involved in things second year. Yet, I still struggled in school then, I felt stupid, and my mental health still suffered. Only, before my involvement in student groups, I had the added bonus of feeling lonely, and I believe focusing solely on school wouldn’t have helped. My extracurriculars therefore became an escape

from what would otherwise be a dull life of studying; they were vital to my growth.

It took me a while to accept that maybe the university path isn’t meant to be linear. Maybe it’s not even a tree, with binary choices and forks in the road. I like to think that it looks more like a graph—in particular, a weighted graph. A weighted graph is one that associates each edge to a certain number, or weight. A common procedure is to find the minimum spanning tree, the set of edges that connects all the points while minimizing the weight. Perhaps I didn’t want the minimum spanning tree experience in university, but rather the maximum spanning tree experience.

EVERY TIME I DIVERT FROM THAT SHORT, EFFICIENT AND CONVENIENT PATH, I THINK OF ALL THE PEOPLE I PICKED UP ALONG THE WAY. I started at one point and wanted to take the long way around, to take the path that let me experience every aspect of university life to the fullest that I could— the path with the most weight. It hasn’t been easy, and it hasn’t been short. But, it’s been rewarding and has massively impacted who I am today.

Every time I divert from that short, efficient and convenient path, I think of all the people I picked up along the way, my families growing with each step. I started on the Main Floor of Annesley Hall with my Mainsley family. I then met my fellow frosh leaders. I had my VUSAC family, my Orientation Exec family, then my Bob family, and my Don family. Even the students on my floor became a part of my family, too.

The reality is that I learned far more by becoming involved at Victoria College than I would have had I focused solely on academics and, to this day, I’m still learning.

Maybe I didn’t take the fastest route, but I sure as hell took the scenic route.

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