Points of View
Read what those involved with current issues across Canada have to say about cultural diversity and multiculturalism.
British Columbia
Roy Miki
Roy Miki is a professor in the English Department at Simon Fraser University. He is the author of Redress: Inside the Japanese Canadian Call for Justice. (Raincoast 2004). His latest publication is a book of poems, There (New Star 2006).
Asian Canadians On View
Roy Miki, professor in the English Department at Simon Fraser University, writes about the need to develop critical approaches for studying the representation of Asian Canadian histories and identity formations.
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Background
The portrayal or the representation of “Asians” in Canada, that is, of “Asian Canadians,”1 has a long and troubled history. More often than not, Asian Canadians were depicted, in government reports and in the popular media, as the alien “others.” In British Columbia, where the largest percentage of pioneer immigrants from China, India and Japan settled, their rights were severely restricted. For instance, B.C.’s Provincial Election Act prevented them from placing their names on the voters’ list, a restriction that worked to disenfranchise them. Chinese Canadians faced the notorious head tax, as high as $500 per person, and in 1923 the Chinese Immigration Act, or the “exclusion act,” because it banned immigration from China until 1947. Unable to vote, Asian Canadians were excluded from various professions, such as law, teaching and pharmacy. Chinese Canadians and Indo Canadians had to wait until 1947, and Japanese Canadians until 1949, to receive voting rights.
In the post-World War II history of Asian Canadians, 1967 remains a pivotal year. That year Canada’s immigration policy was revised to eliminate racial categories as a means of selecting immigrants, and the point system was instituted. As well, a new multicultural policy in 1971 changed the social climate for Asian Canadians. Once they were able to immigrate more freely, their population increased quickly, especially so for Chinese Canadians who arrived in large numbers from China, Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Fewer immigrants came from Japan, but a social climate that recognized ethnic differences influenced Japanese Canadians. Their lives had been completely altered by the wartime trauma of mass uprooting, dispossession and internment. In rebuilding their shattered lives, they had been reluctant to voice the sense of betrayal they carried in being unjustly branded “enemy alien” by their own government. In the 1970s, they began to tell their own stories of internment. Enemy Alien, the 1975 NFB film, reflects a renewed public interest in Japanese Canadian history by highlighting the racism that led to their being labelled “enemy alien” and that resulted in the gross violation of their citizenship rights. Japanese Canadians are represented as a small group who struggled to overcome their alienation to belong to the country as “true” Canadians. Reflecting the nationalism of the time, the film places more emphasis on citizenship than on the cultural origins of Japanese Canadians.
Citizenship and nationalism remain important in The Third Heaven (1998), but the emphasis shifts to cultural conflict, as the Lam family addresses the differences between their lives as Canadians and their historical ties to Hong Kong, Michael Lam’s birthplace, and China, his cultural origin. This transnational framework reflects the impact of cultural globalization that emerged in the 1990s. Whereas Japanese Canadians are portrayed as aspiring to be more Canadian than Japanese (Canada’s wartime enemy), Chinese Canadians, such as the Lam family, are portrayed as having to deal with a crisis of cultural identity. For the Lams, this crisis is tied to the 1997 transfer of Hong Kong from Britain to China, the event that is central to the film.
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1 Both “Asian” and “Asian Canadian” are abstract terms that have been used in Canada to identify people from a variety of countries, and in many cases countries that have had bitter historical relationships with each other, such as China and Japan. “Asian” has also had negative connotations in associated terms such as “Asiatic” and “Oriental.” It can even provoke negative reactions in groups that have been identified as “Asian Canadian,” especially for new immigrants who insist on maintaining direct ties with their country of origin. Nonetheless, “Asian Canadian” acknowledges the Canadian contexts that have shaped the boundaries of Canadians with Asian backgrounds. These contexts are constantly shifting in relation to the changing conditions of both the Canadian nation and the global processes in which it currently functions.
2. To study the differences between outsider and insider representations, we could compare these two films to those made by filmmakers who identify themselves as speaking out of specific Asian Canadian communities. Alongside Enemy Alien, then, we could view The Displaced View (1988) by Midi Onodera and Obaachan’s Garden by Linda Ohama (NFB, 2001). Alongside The Third Heaven we could view Moving the Mountain: An Untold Chinese Journey by William Dere (Productions Multi-Monde, 1993) and Letters from Home by Colleen Leung (NFB, 2002).
3. Since The Third Heaven was initially produced in French, the translation process is complex for this film and deserves more attention than I can give it here. Although I am aware that responses to the film in French may differ in significant ways, I have based my commentary on the English version.
