Chapter 8 - by Lina Grajales

Neither Chinese nor Canadian

The confrontation between old ways and new ways continues. It happens even at the simplest levels, like those recounted by Sek-Lung, Third Brother, the youngest of the family.

Little Sek himself is reached by this confrontation. Probably, the easiest thing was his name being changed at school, to get one more Canadian: Sekky.

Still, he wishes he would be expelled to live somewhere else. He is trapped between knowing just enough English and Chinese language to speak to people, but not to grasp the finer details. On top of that, he can’t understand the complexities of the relationships among the members of his own family. Poor boy! Those rankings for acquaintances and relatives were already complex enough.

Moreover, his mind wandered… Am I Chinese or Canadian? Chinese, it was the response he always got from his Grandmother, Poh –Poh. However, the discussion about his having been born-in-Canada children, with no old china history in his brain, born without understanding the boundaries between both worlds, was permanent in the family.

Furthermore, his mother expected a girlhood friend of hers to come to Canada one day, to teach Sek the right way to be Chinese. It prompted him to want to conquer his Second Language, English. If he wasn’t Chinese good enough, he would excel at being Canadian, at least through the mastering of language.

So, he wasn’t Chinese good enough. Neither was he Canadian. He couldn’t understand the perplexities of his own Chinese family relationships. But he was smart enough to understand that under the surface things were everything but simple. Despite Father insisted in keeping things simple.

He understood that he was a Canadian-born-child of unwanted immigrants. He understood the meaning of the words RESIDENT ALIEN, stamped in his birth certificate.