October 1970

Turn on the TV and it snows.
In 1970 it is cold everywhere. I am a beetle in a short black plastic coat over bare legs; I shudder and freeze. I have no idea of winter, how cold it can be, how long it lasts. What snow tastes like.
On TV, the news is on. A man gets out of a car, he is someone important. Journalists surround him, question him about police and guns. He smiles; turn off the sound if you don't want unpleasantness.
In 1970 my mother falls through ice. Not thick ice, not through icy water crossing a lake. She falls on a road, on a small slick of mainstreet downtown.
We are only just arrived, and I am here in this country reluctantly. Just like the year before when we left Trinidad for Miami. In Trinidad, we move three times as far as I recall: from Woodbrook, to Cascade, to St. Anns. Before that, we call Guyana, formerly British Guiana, home. (They had met in Georgetown — my mother's hometown — after my father returned from England, where he'd spent the War and the Depression. He had come back, he would later explain, to bury his first wife—a picture bride of sorts — who developed cancer not long after the birth of their only child.)
They are nomads, my parents. They are driven by fear and mistrust and the promise of riches. The story is they are moving to make a better life for me and my sisters. They are business people; it is only prudent in the circumstances.
My parents are unmistakeably Chinese but neither of them speaks the language. The way they explain it, my father’s mother was too busy single-handedly raising a large family in the bush in British Guiana to have time for language lessons. My mother’s relations are more complicated; with them Chinese seems the least of the family mysteries.
Lacking the language, we are creole Chinese. "Pure" Chinese, yet since we don't belong to the Chinese Association, we are not Chinese enough. In Trinidad in the late sixties, our peculiarity — we are visibly not mixed or creole — is provocation enough. At least, according to my parents. We are used to taunts and jeers of “chinky, chinky, chinee.” What else is new? But to my family, worse is to come. Insults, threats, beatings, attacks and rapes; these are just around the corner. To not see the writing on the wall is to recklessly tempt fate, to invite disaster. Why stay where we can never really belong? America beckons from Florida. America where everyone is safe and free and fortunes can be spun overnight. In Miami we can escape obeah, backoos and all the rest of the Black Power baccanal.
But Miami has other ideas. Havanna is rising in America, Castro be damned. Black people, then as now, occupy the outskirts, white Americans and Cuban emigrés vie for main street. My parents set up shop in Liberty City in northwest Miami. They regularly receive clothes for cleaning from locals entrusting their better laundry to the strange new Orientals behind the counter.
My little sister and I go to Catholic schools. In Trinidad, public schools are Catholic or Protestant, but in Miami these schools are private and charge fees to attend. At my high school I am the freak with the lunches of dark yellow curry, and the accent begging for a bruising. I am also younger than the other girls — there are only girls — in my class (in my school) who are shaving their legs and preening for boys. I become a target of their softball practice, I stumble over the pledge of allegiance, I cannot be more awkwardly ungaingly unlikely to succeed if I try.
So I turn to the women’s movement. I read Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. (Not in the original, in Newsweek.) I listen to Glen Campbell and Dionne Warwick. I read Emily Brontë and Dostoyevsky and Joseph Conrad. (Not the Coles notes.)
My mother never lets us forget we are worth only half, that it takes two TT dollars to make one Yankee greenback, that everything costs double. Race riots break out in Liberty City and a torch lands on the roof of their premises. They scraped and saved and sold everything for a dream of safety and prosperity gone crazy. On TV, Neil Armstrong walks and bounces on the moon’s powdery surface. We watch coverage of the Liberty City riots from a safe distance, in black and white. There is no mention of a Chinese-run business being attacked. Already superstitious, my mother needs no additional signs to read her future.
That summer we arrive in Canada to a heatwave. Being north of the United States, we assume the whole country is cooler year round. Perhaps we are in shock. We left Trinidad to avoid violence, for “a better life,” and in Miami somehow ran right toward it. But Canada is different, it has to be, it’s a different country. If Miami was a mistake, Canada — Toronto in particular — is known for calm. There are people we know who moved from the West Indies to Canada first; my mother has relatives in Scarborough. If they were brave enough to face the cold and snow before us, then so can we.
We go to the Canadian National Exhibition and my sister and I ride the Wildmouse, the compact roller coaster that scared and thrilled us only three years earlier at Expo in Montréal. Then we were tourists like the rest of the world seeing the Fair. We hardly dreamed of leaving Trinidad and moving to Canada. Yet here we are now settling into a different city in Canada where everyone speaks English like us, where there are real seasons, not just hot and cold or wet and dry.
Who said anything about separatists?
French. Québec. FLQ. It is all new to me. I am a foreigner twice removed, living in a Dostoyevsky novel. My world is all pimples and small breasts and boys fawning over my perfect blonde classmate in her perfect angora sweater pirouetting perfectly on ice.
The first time I see Les Ordres is at least four years later. I am at university, one of the Curtis lecture halls at York U. is screening a new movie, a new kind of documentary. My-friend-the-separatist is having a screening of his short film, and he has heard a lot about the director of Les Ordres. He makes us all go. Or else we will miss not just this movie, this history too.
Crossing Bloor Street in sandals, heels and straps in December, my mother does not see the shiny slick of ice underfoot. She is busy looking ahead, trying to make out how to get by in this cold country. She is bracing herself for what’s coming at her, day in day out. She is not looking down. So when her knee gives out, she lands hard, bawling like an infant its head suddenly tender. Has she taken Bloor for Frederick Street, Toronto in winter for Trinidad in the dry season, ice for banana peel?
Front. I still don’t understand how it happened, how Canada almost went to war with itself, how my mother fell exactly. I wasn’t born here, I remind myself. This isn’t my grudge, my country, my burden to solve. And yet ... My-friend-the-separatist likes to put me on the spot. Why not? To him I am just another anglophone, no one special. He is the one with the accented English, not me. My accent is long gone. Why do I feel so deferential around him? Does he know more than me about his own history? Is he right to be angry about it? I want to shrug like the rockstar politician with the sideburns I remember seeing on TV; forget landed immigrant, I’m an alien, they're more honest in the States.
My friend enjoys my discomfort. He says I am too self-conscious. When he grows up he’s going to have lots of kids and make lots of movies. With him there is no fear of the culture shrivelling into nothingness; it will multiply and thrive in its own, his own image.
Liberation. I picture my mother in a dark, wood-panelled room in a floral nightie against white hospital sheets. Outside the window, white flurries fall and pile up on still more white: dirty beige, soft gray, white white. So many colours of white here in Canada. I learn what my mother never does, to cover my legs in trousers like a man, to protect myself, even in the heat, even back in Trinidad. My mother cannot. She can never violate the law her Popo laid down forbidding pants on girls and women, no exceptions, no excuses, no shifting ground; here be terra firma in perpetuity.
I hardly know my mother without pain; it is the one constant in our lives growing up, even now. Whatever upheaval, whatever vicissitudes, there is always my mother’s pain to rely on. Like an old boyfriend, my mother’s pain refuses to go, against her most strenuous efforts, treatment after endless treatment. As a teenager, I know better than the adults around me. I know my parents have made a horrible mistake dragging the family up to the tundra where the first thing my mother does is land in hospital. What have they done but increase the pain?
I like to think it is events in Québec, the FLQ crisis of the time, that chases my family out of Canada. There we are: refugees of our own making, fleeing crisis upon crisis; in transit, victims of circumstance, of our own design, invisible all the same.
When I watch Brault’s film— then as now —I read the subtitles. In French I pick out individual words, on rare occasions whole phrases without the mediation of translation. Those instances occur less and less. The extent of my second language acquisition remains arrested at about grade 2. While she lives in Montréal and I in Toronto, I visit my sister regularly by train. After years of dedicated study, and living in a bilingual city, my sister is fluent in french. Determined to master the language, she does: writing and defending her masters thesis in french. Where I shadow the culture through food and films, my sister takes on philosophers like Blaise Pascal. I learn to cook the french way, from Julia Child and Time-Life’s provincial and classic french cookbooks. She goes to the Sorbonne, picks up a third language, ancient greek, along the way. At university, Jean Genet glowers disdainfully from an oversize black and white poster on my residence wall, daring visitors to identify him as a writer of anything less than criminal proportions. Provocation, intellect, chic. All these are french to me. Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg in Breathless, what else could they be but French? I have yet to encounter Michel Tremblay, to grasp that french in this country is french-Canadian, that patois here is joual, that poutine rules over paté, that stop signs say arrêt, that people swear on the catholic church.
I wonder if I’ll ever bump into my old friend-the-separatist, in his old uniform: black t-shirt, beard, red lumberjack shirt. Will we recognize each other, what language will we speak — our own or each other’s? Do I feel compelled to talk about language, about Québec, about what I know now, how ignorant I was then, am still. Or do we chat about our children, spouses, work, the weather, old student days, the chances of running into each other by chance? Do we laugh, share a meal together, shuffle uncomfortably, have to go someplace else, shake hands, embrace, return each other’s glance, connect at all? Or pass each other by unobserved, spared by complicit anonymity?
It is May before my mother emerges from the Lockwood Clinic. She has spent all winter — four months — confined in a small tudor-style building of dark wood near the intersection of Bloor and Sherbourne. We visit her regularly, but scarcely, not enough. While she is gone, we gain gloves and scarves, sweaters, tights, ice skates and the knowledge of how to use them. We grow, if not to like winter, at least to live with it.
Mon pays, ce n’est pas mon pays, c’est l’hiver ...
Like my family, I am a nomad. I continue our habit of settling elsewhere, many times over. Unlike my mother, I scratch and dig for the place called home. Unlike her, I live in post-colonial intrasigence, in that treacherous whorl of displaced identities and hybridized reality, where rootlessness is, if not embraced, at least named.
Just watch me, he said.
I change channels.