May 2010 Archives

I still remember the bright yellow menus, the ubiquitous TV screens and the lingering smell of chicken wings in my hair. As an undergrad, I spent many nights serving tables and scouring my apron for extra packets of dill sauce.

A sports bar may seem like a strange entry point for a reflection on race, so I should mention that my ethnicity came up all the time. My customers asked "where are you from" about as often as they asked about the actual hotness of the hot wings. When they tried to guess, they would point to all kinds of obscure indicators, like my ethnic-looking earrings or my vague resemblance to a friend of theirs from Peru, India or Lebanon. I was the kind of server who wore a smile as if it were part of the uniform, entertaining customer curiosity without question.

The first time I played this guessing game at the restaurant, I was serving a table of four men.

"How are you guys doing over here?" I asked in my patented chirp. We engaged in light banter as I collected their empty pints and ravaged nacho trays.

"Just curious," said one man.

"We've been wondering--where are you from?"

Although there was no game on that night, these men still seemed like they had their wagers set. I scanned the restaurant, which wasn't too busy, and stood there holding a non-committal grin.

They placed their bets: Persian? Brazilian? Filipino? Portuguese?

"I speak Spanish," I hinted.

"And I was born in a small country in Central America."

One man responded with a tentative, "mmm-Mexico?"

"El Salvador," I finally said.

"I was born there and moved to Toronto when I was two-years-old."


This brief explanation felt worn-in like a well-read novel. I had shared it for as long as I could remember, and I didn't feel much of anything when I repeated it.

Over the years I had somehow internalized that this was a geography game, not a history lesson, and that talk of the civil war and my fleeing family wasn't good repartee. Particularly when on the job, I'd never say "Canada," "Toronto," or some other version of "here." I'd let customers indulge in distancing my Canadian-ness: I would be agreeable and they would be satisfied. I admit, by temperament, habit, and job-description, I wanted to people-please. And I usually didn't mind playing along if the customers seemed well intentioned. In fact, if they asked about my last name, I'd even mention my far-flung Italian roots.

I was loath to think this laid-back attitude was anything less than a personal choice. No big deal, right?

But deep inside, I knew it could be. Some people were not "just curious."

During one quiet lunch shift, a man came in with his preteen son. I approached them with my usual affability and was surprised when the man gave me a hard glare. His son stared at his menu as if there were something unspoken between them.

Grumpy customers are nothing new, but there was something different about this one--he wasn't just having a bad day. Every time I visited the table, I silently guessed at a different explanation: Did he want me to be servile, not chatty? Maybe he was rude to service workers generally. What if he was condescending towards women?

"Let me ask you something," he suddenly said to me,

"Where are you from?"

His tone of voice jump-started my adrenaline.

My face flushed, and I stammered, "El Salvador."

"Oh," he said. "You're not native?"

"Daaad," said the boy, almost inaudibly. His dad dropped the subject and ordered dessert--politely this time.

In the span of two minutes and without using any vulgarities, the man had left me badly shaken. I thought about the banality of prejudice, and how it could present itself so unexpectedly. I wondered if avoiding confrontation was, in this instance, making allowances for bigotry. I considered the First Nations people and the legacy of oppression still palpable today. As my breathing quickened, I tried to decide whether I was feeling guilt or anger or disgust--perhaps it was a potent blend. After all, I had wanted to believe that I could be assertive when someone was making me uncomfortable, or at least push back with a "why do you ask?" or "what's that supposed to mean?"

"He didn't even guess right," said a fellow waitress, dismissively, when I told her what had happened. But it didn't matter that he had misidentified me; I felt the burn of racism on my skin. My mind began to fill with other anecdotes--everything from a man who had asked me if I "even spoke English" when I'd prepared his hamburger incorrectly, to an airport worker who had told me that I could be deported to El Salvador because my passport had expired--there were many times that I knew something wrong was happening, and I'd stayed quiet.

Then an early memory emerged. I was seven-years-old and sitting with my friend Jennifer, laughing and swinging our feet above the ground. Our legs froze when we saw the bully's scuffed sneakers walking toward us.

"I'm going to punch one of you in the stomach," he said, examining our widening eyes. We didn't run. We didn't speak. We probably didn't even breathe. He started to play a counting game.

"Eeny, meeny, mini," he said mechanically, pointing at me, then her, then me, then, "moe!"

He lunged forward and punched Jennifer, full force, in the stomach. Jennifer let out a chocked whimper and crumbled forward, crossing her arms. The bully turned to look at me. Then, as casually as he'd approached, he walked away. He had come for my neighbour, and I had done nothing.

Years later, as I stared at the crude man's paid bill and empty chair, I once again felt like a quiet little girl. I was still playing nice and hoping the ugly things would go away. The line between being cordial and being complicit had definitely blurred.

In the years since this incident, I have come a long way. As quaint as it sounds, I now know it's possible to be a friendly person without allowing just anyone to take shots at my values. I can diplomatically address injustice without undergoing a hulk-like transformation into something I'm not.

I'm no longer a waitress at a sports bar, but there are some games I know will always be a part of my life. And when the rules are unfair, I will no longer be a "good sport."

Richard Fung is a Toronto-based, Trinidadian-raised video artist and educator, whose work has already earned him the Bell Canada Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2001. From his earliest piece, Orientations: Lesbian and Gay Asians (1986), to his Reel Asian feature project Rex vs. Singh (2008), Fung's work on place and history, sexuality and pop culture, family and diasporas, is pioneering. He is widely lauded as a master of his chosen medium, and even canonized as an essayist and public intellectual.

Fung describes his work as explorations, some of which involve re-venturing into the past and posing questions that were left unanswered, or unasked. Such is the endeavour in Rex vs. Singh, a collaboration between Fung and two other directors, in which they approach a Canadian court case accusing Indian mine workers of sodomy just a year after the famous Komogata Maru Incident.

I was honoured to have the opportunity of interviewing Fung, to learn of his inspirations, past work and present occupations.

You are of Chinese heritage, were born in Trinidad, went to school in Ireland, and are now based in Canada. How have the themes of your work been shaped by place and ethnicity?

I recently realized that space/place is the uniting theme in all my video work. I guess I am interested in how people relate or not to their surroundings, and how environments shape people and limit or open up possibilities. My very first independent video, Orientations: Lesbian and Gay Asians (1984), looks at sexual identities in the context of diaspora. The self-image and the feelings of exclusion or belonging experienced by the documentary's subjects arise from their living in Toronto, not in the Asian countries they or their ancestors come from.

In My Mother's Place (1990), I consider my mother's sense of self as Chinese and as a woman, and her feelings about one's social "place" is shaped by her life experience as a third generation Trinidadian [who] moved to Canada, and as someone who grew up poor but worked her way into the middle class. In Uncomfortable: The Art of Christopher Cozier (2005), the artist has a successful international career, but it is a struggle for him to continue to live in Trinidad, even though this is where his inspiration lies. This is due to the lack of funding, exhibition and work opportunities, the political and artistic environment and the fact that it is often difficult to physically travel from such geopolitically marginalized spaces. He describes how hard it is to get to his exhibition in Denmark when the nearest consulate to obtain a visa is in New York.

More recently, in the video installation Jehad in Motion (2007), I explore how a Palestinian-Canadian man responds to the extremely different physical and psychic spaces of the two cities he calls home: Toronto and Hebron. For example, while he has many Jewish friends in Toronto's West Bank, the only Jews he comes across are the Israeli settlers and soldiers ho occupy his ancestral land. Modifying all the talk of Diasporas, which is about tracing connections and commonalities among people with similar roots but living in different locations, I notice that my relatives in the U.S. think like Americans, those in Britain have British values, and those of us in Canada use Canadian lenses to view the world. Place and location are incredibly important and interesting.

Memories influence the art we create, and art keeps memories alive. You draw on your mother's oral history in My Mother's Place (1990), your uncle's stories of playing a Japanese soldier as a Chinese extra in Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison's blurred Asian identity in Islands (2002), and your loved ones' struggles with illness in Sea in the Blood (2000). Could you comment on the importance of de/re-constructing private and public histories through your medium

The more recent family tapes, Sea in the Blood and Islands, really come from particular circumstances, in the former case realizing that unlike most of my friends I've always lived close to illness, and in the latter thinking that my uncle's experience as an ethnically transvestite extra said a lot about my relationship to cinema as a viewer. But I think more deeply this ongoing interest comes from my formation in the Caribbean.

In Trinidad, I grew up with the terms inside and outside children, meaning those born within and outside a marriage. Many men have one or more families and these two groups usually know of, if not direction know, each other. It was and is a society with many open secrets, one in which private and public information blur in different ways than in Canada. I think it is the experience of migration, the move from one context to another, that put the conventions of both into relief. I think this is how I came to make these tapes which critics have called autoethnographic.

I believe the will to reconstruct family histories is amplified with a condition of diaspora. Wondering about one's ancestors comes about precisely because one is cut off from that knowledge. I know that my maternal great grandparents came to Trinidad in the 1860s from Fujian in Eastern China, but I have no clue beyond that. My father came from China in the 1920s, but I only visited China once, in the 1980s after his death, and I am cut off by language from my relatives in Hong Kong and China. In this absence of history there is speculation, conjecture and a reliance on memory. This is the case with all groups in Trinidad, those of Indian and African heritage included. I would say only the French creole elite can more easily trace their aristocratic lineage using conventional methods.

Your past video projects have dealt with areas where homophobia and racism overlap or intersect. Is your Reel Asian feature project Rex vs. Singh along similar lines?

Rex vs. Singh is a speculative history using the court documents from a sodomy case involving two Sikh men in 1915 Vancouver. This was the year after the notorious Komogata Maru incident, in which over 300 would-be immigrants from India were turned away from Vancouver's harbour after a lengthy stand-off. Their treatment laid bare the racist underpinnings of Canada's immigration regulations, but this was also a period of organizing within the South Asian communities and a period of particular harassment against them. It is interesting to look at the court records from that time and see the number of sodomy cases all referred to as Rex vs. Singh, in reference to King Geoge V and to the common Sikh surname.

Rex vs. Singh came about because filmmaker John Greyson was commissioned by Out on Screen, the gay and lesbian film festival in Vancouver, to make a film on queer history. He wanted to work with the cases of Sikh men charged with sodomy in early twentieth century Vancouver, and he invited filmmaker Ali Kazimi and myself to collaborate. In 2004, Ali directed Continuous Journey, the definitive feature documentary on the Komogata Maru Incident. For my part, I made a video called Dirty Laundry (1996), which looks at the erasure of outlaw sexuality from official retellings of Chinese Canadian history of the nineteenth century, the fact that many of the first Chinese women to come to Canada were prostitutes and that Chinese men, living in the almost all-male "bachelor" communities, were thought of as sodomites.

Rex vs. Singh is divided into four discrete sections. In the first, we three collaborated on a dramatic recreation taking all dialogue from the court transcripts. This was shot at Toronto's Old City Hall, now a court house, in period costume and using fiction film conventions. Next, Ali created a documentary exploration of the actual history surrounding the case featuring an interview with Gordon Brent Ingram, on whose research the film is based. In the third section, John created a postmodern musical mash-up that brought out some underlying notions, and finally, I produced a suggestive video meditation on history and cinema.

Given how challenging it is as a concept and as an experimental film, Rex vs. Singh has been surprisingly successful, and won the Silver Lion at the Sikh Film Festival in Toronto. It has also screened at several festivals in Europe and North America as well as at the Mumbai International Film Festival in India.

Beauty

Beauty
Is colourful
No racial prejudice
Just riot of colours
White, black, blue, yellow
Even bleached, blanched ...
Simply colourful,
Like the peacock's wings
Its plume of feathers in colour driven fantasy...

But is it coloured?
black, white, brown?
Does it impede your
Ways to enter paths roads, temples, churches and mosques?
Or anywhere?
Where?

"I love the human face
But I fear the human race. ''

Colourless

Fabrics, like humans, can be racist.
It chooses the best colour to go with its,
like God commanding grass should be
green, seas must be blue and stars must shine.

Yet, stars twinkle in a slivery glossiness,
that is (almost) white,
a colour that we see on runways,
in limelight, at all times.
Even all brands have their receipts in white.
Such a stubborn tint,
so obdurate yet pithy,
like spring fungus commingled
on sodden wallpapers.

Colours could be changed today.
Names and origins stay:
a Chen, a Chaniya, a Mookjai, a Momoko, a Nisba, a Najaat,
from China, from Kenya, from Japan, from Jakarta.
You're still what you're.
Lanky legs or slender waist,
your fate lies beyond your shape.
You'll always dodder in designer gowns.
You'll always be waylaid.
So don't worry about your diets,
just admit you're not born with the pompous white.

The idea of fabrics is not the same as fabrics.
Think of it; it can't be unthought.
It has its own power,
own speech and
own ego.
It selects what to see
and what not,
what we should see
and cannot.
It draws a steely line between
the colour and
colourless.