To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

Another common theme which runs
through both the stories and the anecdotes
is racial prejudice. There is a general acceptance
among the older generations that to
be treated as inferior, not good enough to
live amongst the white population and not
good enough to mix socially, was part of
life in Canada. But even in the narratives of
younger women, who are in their late 30s
and early 40s and who are established professionals,
there is a lack of organized
aggressiveness. By studying and working
hard, by making their children achieve
ambitious goals, they believe they are
showing the Caucasian society that the
Chinese are just as good, if not better. This
attitude raises some questions which this
anthology has not dealt with, but which
perhaps a more theoretical study could
investigate, for example: is an individualistic
philosophy effective enough in combatting
racial prejudice, and what are the new
reasons for hostility towards Chinese
immigrants in the 1990s?
In an end-section called 'Keep Listening',
one committee member mentions the
diversity within the Chinese-Canadian
communities, which is an issue this anthology
cannot but fail to address successfully.
The Chinese who live in Canada now are
from all parts of Southeast Asia and China,
as well as Taiwan and Hong Kong. They no
longer are limited to running laundries and
produce stores. Quite often, they maintain
a kind of jet-set itinerant way of life, with
the parents travelling back and forth
Canada and the native country. One also
cannot ignore the fact that among the
Chinese themselves, there are internal prejudices
based on differences in dialects,
social background and countries of origin.
These are essential components of what is
homogenously called the Canadian-
Chinese community, and should constitute
a jumping-off point of further investigation.
The poems collected in Looking for Home,
an anthology of poetry written by women
who were born in other countries but are
now writing in English, are also concerned
with differences. Although the subtitle of
Keenan and Lloyd's anthology is Women
Writing about Exile, the 125 poems in this
book deal with a much wider range of
problems women face today, from being a
stranger in a new and sometimes hostile
country, to a child's memory of sexual
abuse by her father. The nature of exile may
be cultural, but also spatial, temporal and
psychological. One is immediately struck
by the overwhelming sadness in these
poems : to travel is not to have an adventure,
to explore; instead, to travel is to be
displaced, to escape, sometimes without
destination.
And yet some women thought that they
had arrived. In Mitsuye Yamada's 'I
Learned To Sew', an uneducated seventeenyear-old
leaves Japan for Hawaii as 'a picture-bride'.
Upon arrival, the intended
bridegroom refuses to sign for her papers.
The immigration man advises her, "your
man is not coming back/he told me he does
not want you/he said you are too ugly for
him/why don't you go back to Japan/on the
next boat?" Some live in the new country
but retain the deepest affection for the old,
such as the old woman in Sara Hunter's
'Travelling Back', "And never again : the
arrival,/the flowers, the tears,/the babble of
familiar accent/lulling her like a baby". In
this poem, the 'arrival' is in effect a sayinggoodbye
to one's homeland. When one
lives in many places in one's heart, words
such as 'home', 'leaving' or 'returning' have
ambiguous and conflicting meanings.
In Jin Guo, many of the women interviewed
could neither speak nor write in
English, and their narratives have been
transcribed and translated for them. The
text in a way has been smoothed out,
though there are different voices. One gets
the opposite impression in Looking for
Home. The poets are all too aware of the
power and the problems of languages, and
93