DURING her recent promotional tour Jan Wong, the former Maoist and Globe and Mail China correspondent, told the story of growing up in Montreal in the fifties and sixties. Her father owned a Chinese restaurant, and she was one of two Oriental students at school. She was often questioned by Customs on trips to and from the States, felt her own differentness from her peers, and thought of herself as more Chinese than Canadian. She believed she knew the Chinese cuisine, the Chinese culture, and the Chinese way of life. That belief in small part sent her packing to China to participate in the Maoist revolution.
Arriving in China she realized she was more Canadian than Chinese. She didn't know the food, for example. Her father's meals had been Canadianized; there were no chicken heads floating in his soup. She didn't know the culture or the way of life. She felt her own differentness from her ethnic culture. This realization in small part sent her back to Canada.
Wong learned what most immigrants learn, that they are neither of Here nor of Away. They are suspended between two homes, two lives. They are never fully welcome in either, having abandoned one and wished themselves upon the other. They no longer fit anywhere and have to make a choice: accept or deny, blame or acquiesce, hide in plain sight or crawl under a rock.
One thing the immigrant never gains, despite the wisest and most careful of choices, is full acceptance. He loses his voice twice: once in the new country where the language and culture are foreign to his own experiences and knowledge, and again in the old world which continues to evolve without him. My own family in Canada, faced with the never-ending challenges of assimilation, dreams of the carefree Pakistan left behind two or three decades ago. But while visiting Pakistan, breathing the heat and the decay, we prattle on endlessly about the freedoms laid bare for us in Canada. Like Trishanku, a king in Hindu myth, suspended between two worlds, we make a world of our own.
We make for ourselves a heaven or a hell. The choice is ours; and our stories are always about that choice. We curse it or praise it; we curse the world that forced us to make it; we curse the world that won't let us make it.
These two anthologies illustrate that choice; occasionally well, often poorly. They have little in common, aside from the obvious distinction of collecting works by people who are hung between two thoughts. One anthology declares itself as multicultural, which is problematic. The other is by writers of South Asian descent, which is curious. Both anthologists are very keen to prove in their introductions how even-handed they have been in their selections. Mr. Sugunasiri writes, "If there are only three women writers here.it may not be insignificant.that the characters in nearly half the stories are female." Ms. Kamboureli states, "Each of the seventy-one contributors speaks in her or his particular accent."
This is very telling of a current discourse. Multiculturalism is above all a statistic: we have so many of these different things. It is also a theory of utopian statesmanship and a hope for racial harmony. It is generally considered a declaration of sensitivity. Towards what is uncertain-perhaps towards the statistics. Kamboureli's anthology certainly is sensitive to the fact that it has seventy-one authors speaking in their own voices. If any of those voices are racist or denigrating towards a seventy-second voice, that is hardly an issue.
In her introduction Kamboureli writes, "All the contributors, by virtue of their race and ethnicity, belong to the manifold `margins' that the Canadian dominant society has historically devised."
In Andrew Suknaski's "West to Tolstoi, Manitoba (circa 1900)", a "young ukrainian immigrant/ [is] imprisoned in his language and ghetto". He travels far until he meets other Ukrainians and says, "please take me with you/ i never want to speak/ to another englishman/ for the rest of my life."
Marlene Nourbese Philip: "the only crosses that burn/ are those upon our souls/ and the lynch mobs meet/ at Winstons."
Arnold Itwaru describes the rape of a Guyanese girl by a British man: "His powerful hands drove up her skirt, her panties, her tender personal flesh, pinned her on the ground in colonising force and violation.." Her person against his colonising power! Later on he rapes another girl, "in his empire urgency." It reads like an undergraduate essay, more diatribe than story, a pointed finger quivering with indignation. (Italics mine.)
The scent of this political sentiment is diffused through huge chunks of this anthology. It is Us vs. Them (the Them all white Upper Canadians, of course). It disturbs the flow of story-telling, and quickly becomes tiresome; but worse, makes for bad writing by essentially lazy writers. But it is not surprising.
Multiculturalism may have begun as a warm embrace by the historically dominant society of its margins, but it quickly became an excuse with which the marginals could attack their imperializing hosts. We have lived this for two decades; sadly, it has sunk into our literature.
But, to Kamboureli's credit, this anthology is just too big to be burdened by any one direction. In its zest for statistical width, it manages some emotional depth. The book is multicultural in a less obvious sense: Kamboureli does expose the myriad attitudinal waves towards the Other's status in Canada. In fact Making a Difference is an anthropological site.
The first story lays out the basic themes that recur throughout. In "The First Day of an Immigrant", by Frederick Philip Grove, Niels has just arrived from Sweden, and feels his way into a job. He buys clothes: "[The hardware dealer] had shown him the way to a store where he had acquired what he needed, till he thought that now he looked exactly like a Canadian.. He has heard, of course, of the fabulous wages paid to the workingman in America.. The size of the field about him dazes him.. Will a field one tenth, one fiftieth of the size of this one some day be within his own reach, he wonders?"
There are present in Niels the hunger for a new life, the hope for a prosperous future, the desire for acknowledgement. So are fear and anxiety. "He wonders as he looks about while the horses trot briskly over the stubble whether in a few years' time this country will seem like home to him.. That is his vision: the vision that has brought him into these broad plains. And that vision is destined to shape his whole life in the future."
The vision to make a home of Canada-that sounds quaint today. And yet it is probably more true today than ever. That vision is the heart of the immigrant's story. And from it comes the strength to suffer the personal indignity: the loss of voice, of language, of certainty, of culture and structure. From that simple vision comes the strength to create a new language, without forsaking the old, and to create a new culture and a fresh voice.
Grove's story is from 1925. Nice Rodriguez's "Big Nipple of the North" brings us to 1993:
"The seer said the Other Big Nipple of the North was a place called the United States.
" `But don't go there,' he stressed, `for it is infected with a malignant tumour..'
"Thus enlightened, she went to the Canadian embassy..
"When the freak girl of Munoz arrived in Mississauga, she had fear in her heart, but a vision overcame her when she saw the bi-coloured Canadian flag at the airport.
"As the bright and blinding northern sun shone...[s]he sang and danced towards Church Street, Toronto's gay capital. And lived happily on welfare."
Quite a difference seven decades make, or maybe not. The fabulous wages paid to a workingman in Niels's day are replaced by the fabulous subsidies paid by the state. The lure is still money, there is still the fear, and the excitement. Though multiplicity of culture did exist in Grove's day (obviously), it did not have the name "multiculturalism", and certainly lacked either a White Paper (1971) or an Act of Parliament (1987).
This anthology is a pop history of Canada. Most of the stories were published in the past thirty years, and the loss of older (more stabilizing) voices with their balanced impressions is felt. As is the loss of multiculturally challenged writers: Kamboureli makes a point of noting she chose to ignore Anglo-Celt (her phrase) authors, presumably since they are not part of the multi- in our culture. Hence two of Canada's finest novels, Away and The Luck of Ginger Coffey, are not represented. There are other notable exclusions; they include Cecil Foster, Bharati Mukherjee, Nino Ricci, Mordecai Richler, Katherine Vlassie, W. D. Valgar-dson, and Guy Vanderhaeghe. Also missing are playwrights. André Alexis, Andrew Moodie, and, of course, Tomson Highway, would belong here, as would many others. In short, this anthology could easily be twice the size and even more multicultural than it is.
Still, there are deep haunting echoes through some of these stories. Memory and hope are the twin engines that drive the disenfranchised forward into a new life. There are glimpses here of personal struggles and the trying pressures of learning Canadian life. In Vera Lysenko's "The Fairy Tale Spinners", a little girl learns of her Ukrainian heritage by listening to her grandmother's stories. "Distilled through the primitive mind of Granny it opened the door for the girl to the magic of poesy and legend."
That little girl might well grow up to be the heroine in Helen Weinzweig's "L'envoi". In a strange and oddly affecting story, the narrator tells two tales. One is of a young girl in the twenties, sent away from her village of Radom to the town of Lublin by her parents. This immigration of sorts illustrates the narrator's state of mind as she witnesses the disintegration of her own marriage. "Something should have been said-the truth, a lie, an approximation even-for in the absence of words a presence slips in to fill the emptiness and haunts forever."
That same girl could be Sandra Birdsell's protagonist in "Flowers for Weddings and Funerals", who forsakes her grandmother for a Canadian boy. "I envy the easy way they can laugh at everything." He laughs easily at the very things her grandmother holds precious: tomatoes, family. The girl moves to embrace his Canada, leaving behind her grandmother's Russia; even though "when [the grandmother] speaks her own language, her voice rises and falls like a butterfly on the wind...."
Or that girl could be Joy Kogawa's narrator in Obasan, sifting through old letters trying to recreate the horror that befell her family in 1942. The Japanese are viciously rounded up, victims of stupid hysteria. "RCMP came in person to order Kunio off to camp." Still, they do not lose their zest, they continue to fight for their dignity, and for their family. "Yesterday I worked so hard-tied, labelled, ran to Commission, ran to bank, to Crone movers, to CPR, washed and cooked and scrubbed. Dad is saying good-bye to the kids right now." The novel is simultaneously a damnation and a celebration. It is powerful and it casts a long shadow over the rest of the anthology.
These stories bear the weight of choice. They are compassionate in understanding the forces that pull at each individual. Life is tough enough, the end of a marriage is always messy, teenage existence is anguishing. Add to that the calls and hopes of old voices, dreams of lost civilizations; there is an endless cavern of emotion and experience that screams to be heard. It is up to finely-tuned authors to hear the cries of discordant voices.
Josef Skvorecky's hilarious excerpt from The Republic of Whores about an army creativity contest is a lesson to those still obsessed with the fascism of political correctness. And there is Rienzi Crusz's poem "From Shovel to Self-propelled Snow Blower: The Immigrant's Progress". The title says it all: the old world illustrates the new world, and yet the new world remains a mystery. There is a skeptical relationship between the immigrant and the adopted country. They circle each other warily, step in to hug, and then step out to reassess. Austin Clarke's "Doing Right" explores that in part. Such stories educate in the best sense; they let us experience the lives of others.
One of Roy Kiyooka's poems opens, ".accustom'd as i am to central heating-/ its a real drag to be numb with cold." He is in Japan, writing back home to his girl in Canada. In J. J. Steinfeld's "Ida Solomon's Play", a woman roams the rough bars of her town dressed as her mother. In the faces of lost Canadians she hopes to find a little of herself, of her past.
There is an excerpt from Laura Goodman Salverson's The Viking Heart, a grand history of the 1876 Icelandic migration to Canada. It recounts the birth of the first Canadian son; and in its nearly clinical description of the pain of childbirth it is a tight metaphor for the creation of a new life, from the belly of the old.
These are amongst the best of the stories in this anthology. They bring fresh air to an otherwise heavy collection. Though Making a Difference is the largest anthology of its kind, it is no different in intent from several others over the past decade. The titles state the themes: Other Solitudes: Canadian Multicultural Fictions; Breaking Through: A Canadian Literary Mosaic; Home and Homeland: The Canadian Immigrant Experience. These anthologies have been relegated to the slush pile of high school texts. They are educational in the worst sense. They preach multiculturalism without joy, mechanically. They are sincere without being wise.
Mr. Sugunasiri's The Whistling Thorn is an example of how to do things right. He lets stories reign, pulling in the politics. The only blip is a contribution by Arnold Itwaru, in which we are presented another helpless hapless victim blaming her mother, her father, her husband, her country, and her God for her lousy life. The rest of the collection sings.
It blazes open with "Dublin Divertimento", by Hubert de Santana, set in a boarding-house room in Dublin. The landlords are Irish Catholic, and the residents are Canadian, African, West Indian. De Santana bores into the prejudices prevalent in Dublin's ghettos. He takes a bawdy pleasure in the robust goings-on in the house. (After 500 pages of Kamboureli's anthology, it was a delight to learn again that ethnics could take pleasure in some dirty sex and the odd pint. It was a rush back to humanity.)
Lakshmi Gill's "Carian Wine" is a simple tale of a girl trying to get her drunken father to bed. It is a small gem that floats in the mind for days. Uma Parameswaran's "The Door I Shut Behind Me" is a quietly powerful work. Parameswaran slowly explores the layers of self-doubt and anxiety that exist in the immigrant. Chander arrives from India in Montreal. He worries if he is abandoning India when She needs him most, if he is contributing to Her brain drain. He comes to the conclusion, "This is the age of individualism, and not of abstract ideologies of patriotism and nation-building." He feels a pull towards Canada.
Near the end of the story a character declares, "When we leave our country we shut many doors behind us though we are not aware of it at the time."
To this Chander responds, "There are many doors ahead of us."
This story was written in 1967; it hints at some of the same thoughts expressed by Grove in 1925. I'm not sure it would be written today. It would be tough to find a character in today's literature who thinks of Canada as an open door to the future. The rise of a certain politics in the last twenty years has put an end to restless hopefulness. Uma Parameswaran reminded me of my own father and his generation of Pakistanis who came here thirty years ago, just like Chander, confused, worried, eager.
"A Tin of Cookies", by M. G. Vassanji, called to mind my mother and my aunts. "Calabogie", by Cyril Dabydeen, was too much a mirror of myself. Both stories are haunting. Vassanji cuts to the heart of the matter; no second-generation son or daughter will be able to read this story without shedding a guilt-tinged tear and making a phone call. Dabydeen, one of the finest little-known writers in Canada, paints a stark ghost story. Rohinton Mistry's "Lend Me Your Light" feels like a very early thematic precursor to A Delicate Balance.
The exciting thing about Sugunasiri's collection is that the characters are allowed their own lives. They are not judged in relation to their chosen countries, nor do they judge that country. What is explored is the static between countries and characters. This sounds simple and obvious, yet it is rare to find, especially in ideological anthologies. Most of these stories are about making a heaven for yourself while suspended between two worlds. That particular enthusiasm is missing from Making a Difference.
On the down side, The Whistling Thorn is poorly prepared and designed. It is rife with typographical errors. The editor's introduction is thin, and the book is more excited than thoughtful. Sugunasiri is undoubtedly an enthusiast, but in some ways the collection is random. For one thing, the subtitle: it would be nice to have a definition of "South Asian". Though all the authors have origins in the Indian subcontinent, often the line goes back several generations. M. G. Vassanji, for example, is more East African than Indian-definitely more Dar than Delhi. Others, like Neil Bissoondath and Cyril Dabydeen, come via the Caribbean.
Which brings to mind the old question: When do immigrants finally get to be Canadian? Will they always be viewed only by their pigment, or cultural background? Sugunasiri suggests that one is always South Asian, despite place of birth. By extension these writers will never get to be Canadian, or to be seen as Canadian-as Canadian as Margaret Atwood or Robertson Davies.
Laura Goodman Salverson will always be Icelandic. We can soon expect The Banishing Volcano: An Anthology of Icelandic-Canadian Fiction, featuring Salverson, David Arnason, Kristjana Gunnars, Valgardson, and other Icelanders. Or Shedding Light: An Anthology of African-Canadian Fiction. In short, we will always be kept in our places: for each a box with a multicultural label. Canada will always be a hyphen away. No wonder our literature is full of such bile, such hatred for Winston's.

I live ten minutes from a Chinatown and a Little India; I live in a Greek neighbourhood, near an Italian neighbourhood; my favourite part of town used to be a wild mix of Portuguese and Hungarian, but is now being ruined by undergraduate bars and fancy ethnic restaurants. Yesterday I bought Bok Choy, then picked up some Samosas and on my way home got a souvlaki. That was my dinner: meat (Greek), vegetables (Indian), and salad (Chinese with an Italianate dressing). Is this multicultural?
It would seem so, on the surface. Certainly it presents a variety of choices; here is another statistic. But the choice does not make me or my meal any more interesting. Nor does the choice suggest I had hearty meal. Choice alone is not an argument.
Little India is nothing like a real Indian bazaar. There is the smell, but not the stench; the bad service but not the obnoxious rudeness; the lift of Hindi musicals, but not their unbearable blaring. Missing are the beggars, the flies, the dust, the car exhaust, the heat, and the traffic. What there is is thoroughly Canadian; sanitized perhaps, but fascinating nonetheless. For me it brings out the best of both worlds. The smells, the sounds, without the reek or the danger. Or the flies.
And that is precisely what we need in our Canadian Multicultural Literature: a true hybrid. A creation of a new world by mixing two and more. (Playwrights and filmmakers have attempted it much more than authors and poets.) While our writers have been worried about Voice Appropriation they have ignored Soul Expression. A true hybrid requires an honest embrace. There is a lot more to being a "multiculture" than just raving on about the state. There is learning of a cultural language, losing of a heritage, accommodating guilt, and understanding freedom. There is a lot more to life than a bunch of -isms. Making a Difference is suffused with them; The Whistling Thorn is a small counterbalance.
A ready model would be Michael Ondaatje. Particularly In the Skin of A Lion, where a Canadian of Sri Lankan descent tells of Portuguese lives building an exotic Toronto. That novel creates a new city, and that is what multiculturalism was always meant to do. To rejuvenate the old through the experiences of the new.
I am reminded of a favourite story by W. D. Valgardson. In "The Man from Snaefellsness", the narrator describes his girlfriend:
"She was vaguely WASP but not in any connected way, no accent, no relatives in the British Isles, no Christmas customs except frantic shopping and paying too much for a tree imported from the U.S. She missed what I had, she said, belonging to a specific place. She loved going to the Multicultural Festival and drifting from booth to booth, eating langosh, satee, peroghis and washing it all down with cappuccino and German beer. The folkdance costume she wore to parties was made up of pieces from India, Yugoslavia, Germany, Finland. People who didn't know better thought it was authentic."
People who don't know any better will think Making a Difference is authentic. They'll be half-right; it is an authentic confusion; a thorough, and statistically sound reflection of a tiresome politics. The Whistling Thorn is a little more confident.
It's only been thirty years; the culture is still young. If nothing else these two anthologies expose our frustrated attempts to know ourselves. Let them be object lessons. There are still differences to be made.