Before I Was a Critic I Was a Human Being by Amy Fung

Author:Amy Fung
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BookThug
Published: 2019-04-30T00:33:43+00:00

I hear all sides of the housing crisis, and how it relates to foreign investment. I hear it almost always anecdotally. Intergenerational guilt and shame co-mingling with continual invisible entitlement rendering an impotent desire to right to white all that has been passed.

The task of holding class-based differences across race seemed impossible for the right and left to hold.

In a city littered with draconian bylaws, the artist-run speakeasy was something, anything, to do at night. Long serious conversations took place in such cafés or studios-turned-bars. Over bitters-infused cocktails and fresh-squeezed orange juice, skinny bodies pressed closer together to talk at length about neo-liberalism. On the rare occasion a dance party started, groups of sullen faces could still be seen huddled in dark corners, sharing lucid critiques of late capitalism, negativity, and revolution. These conversations carried over into dinner parties, birthday parties, and outdoor gatherings, where I always felt pulled into performing rather than relaxing. One evening, after another failed dance party at the Astoria, a small group of acquaintances—mostly academic poets and myself—ended up in the backyard of a young self-identified socialist. The conversation was already circular, posturing with no power, before the host started making a show for the small, drunken crowd by reading aloud the youthful poetry of Mao Zedong. I put my drink down and turned to the host. What do you think you’re doing? I asked this pale, skinny boy. Do you know what kind of man he was? I sneered the words, unable to hide anything. Do you know who you’re actually reading? The socialist boy with brown hair and brown eyes kept reading Mao’s poems aloud. He continued steadily even after I erupted into a What kind of fucking ignorant idiot would even read this shit? monologue. One of the senior poets laughed at my profanity from either nerves or ennui. Another boy, who was studying at Simon Fraser University, made an intellectual observation about Orientalism, and everyone slowly went inside.

A few weeks later, at a panel on decolonization, the skinny boy with the serious expression comes up to me sheepishly to say he was just joking around about Mao. I don’t respond and start to actively freeze him out of conversations. Mutual friends notice my animosity toward him, and when they hear what happened, they enthusiastically tell me how he is actually really nice, how he was raised by a single mom and fights for affordable housing. Exasperation lingers in their voices when they defend him, or those like him, who are nice and actively erase me.

“We are not yet strong enough to assimilate races so alien from us in their habits. We are afraid that they would swamp our civilization such as it is.”

—Editorial, Nanaimo Free Press, May 29, 1914

“Perhaps we should seriously consider whether we can continue to admit so many immigrants…maybe we should make it less desirable for people to migrate to Vancouver from other areas of Canada by making it more attractive for them to remain where they are.”

—Former

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