Return by Kamal Al-Solaylee

Return by Kamal Al-Solaylee

Author:Kamal Al-Solaylee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2021-07-30T00:00:00+00:00


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Rats the size of cats.

Whenever Jay’s father reminisced about his childhood in Taiwan of the 1950s, which wasn’t too often, he’d mention the well-fed beasts that traumatized him. Growing up in the 1980s in Scarborough, on the east end of Toronto, Jay didn’t know what to make of his father’s musophobia—or his entire Taiwanese heritage. The signals he received were faint and mixed. His mother’s relatives, who came from mainland China, had lived in Canada for three generations and were assimilated to the point where she and her brothers (Jay’s uncles) spoke hardly any Mandarin. The father, who studied in California and then immigrated to Canada with his parents and siblings in the early 1970s, “carried the culture,” the introspective and soft-spoken Jay told me.

We had just returned from Laomei Village and settled down for late-afternoon tea in Taipei. For privacy reasons, I couldn’t observe his teaching, but I caught a short performance in which he and the students swayed to a Drake song and used drumsticks, wood boxes and rubber balls to make percussive sounds. The scene could have played out in Scarborough as easily as it had in Laomei, with the possible exception that the teenagers described as “at risk” in this instance merely spent too much time playing video games. (Hsiao-Wei rewarded their performance with a few minutes of computer time at the end of the workshop.)

At their age, Jay and his younger brother Adam—who, for the record, is a former graduate student of mine—lived in an exceedingly multicultural Scarborough, where hip-hop and urban music were the lingua franca. The Chinese community in the Greater Toronto Area in the late 1990s and early 2000s consisted of mainland families with different immigration histories, a smattering of Taiwanese and a steady stream of new arrivals from Hong Kong. Fleeing the handover of their island to the Chinese in 1997 and seeking a new home in Toronto, Hong Kongers became an easy target for teasing as FOBs, for “fresh off the boat.” To stand out and ingratiate himself with the more established Chinese and street youth, Jay began to identify as Taiwanese for the first time in his life. “You look for something that makes you different when you’re a teenager,” he tells me. “I feel bad because I joined in on the teasing of the FOBs. I was such an ass.”

If you add pretending to be sick to avoid the weekend Mandarin classes his father enrolled him in when he was around seven, his embarrassment at bringing aromatic Chinese food to school in his early teens and a brief and uneventful dalliance with Asian gangs in his late teens, you have all the tropes of a classically non-white upbringing in suburban Toronto. After he graduated with a degree in kinesiology from the University of Waterloo in 2008, Jay planned to return to the city and share a downtown apartment with his then-girlfriend. The idea of going to his father’s birthplace, even for a short visit, never crossed his mind.



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