My first experience of Canada was Chinese
I went to Toronto for a month in 2003. There I got to experience the real Chinese Canadian culture. Staying in Toronto I stayed at the guest house of a Chinese couple from Shanghai, who had been living in Canada for around the past ten years. I lived in a Chinese area where my nearest supermarket was a Chinese store. In fact it was in eastern Canada where I had some of the nicest Chinese food I’ve had anywhere to date - including China! But it was through my pen friend I was lucky enough to meet a number of other great people.
He had grown up in Singapore, but moved to Ottawa with his parents to continue his education where he excelled in robotics. It was through him I met his other friends and their families. Their families seemed very big and close knit, and the families of friends seemed to all know each other through one way or another. I remember Ottawa for its pleasant, small-town feel and some great restaurants, including a bar that was open late at night that just served a large variety of cakes. Heaven.
I was fortunate to have visited a number of friends at their houses in Ottawa and Toronto, all of whom were very generous and welcoming. My pen friend’s mother–who had spent most of her life in Singapore–insisted on cooking me a very large breakfast, consisting of so many different kinds of food that she dictated to me what to eat next. ‘Have this! Now try this one!’ She beamed. My friend was embarrassed and had warned me that his mother would try to feed me copious amounts of food. I was taken aback by her generosity and great cooking. Her English was not that good, and it was difficult to engage in conversation very well above small talk, but she seemed quite content to communicate instead by food. I ate as much as I could, but my embarrassed friend was quite eager to get me out of the door to ‘save me’ from his mother’s generous cooking and insisting that I eat more.
I found it interesting that the Chinese Canadians who had grown up in China could not always speak Chinese that well. I made a few Chinese friends who had grown up in Canada but insisted to me that their Chinese wasn’t great. They could read it and understand it, but again not that well, and would have difficulty writing it. They could get by in restaurants easily enough, but they weren’t fluent. Visiting their home, I was struck by their close family bond - they had cousins popping over to visit them and shared their home with their grandmother who couldn’t speak a word of English. They seemed to communicate with her pretty well, so perhaps they were being biased about their level of Chinese.
They took me to their uncle’s home, who lived in a well-healed neighbourhood in the suburbs of Toronto. Their house was large and had a big living room in which the centre of attention seemed to be karaoke. I was unable to leave without being encouraged to have a go.
I randomly found myself on a road trip to Montreal while I was there. I’m not quite sure how it came about, but it seemed that the guys and their respective girlfriends fancied a trip to Niagara Falls, and then some of them would continue on to Montreal. We took three cars in convoy, along with walkie-talkies. If they felt like another driver on the highway had done wrong by them, they would coordinate a defensive attack via their walkie talkies and block the offending car in. Perhaps in their heads they were not driving cars, but were in fact flying military fighter jets. We made it to Niagara Falls unscathed, where the walkie-talkies then started tuning in to the area’s hotel radios. Then they attempted to communicate with the hotel staff to order porn to certain room numbers. I don’t think the hotel staff took the requests seriously, but I guess we will never know.
Niagara was much tackier than I had imagined it would be, full of casinos, flashing signs, and cheap restaurant chains. I have to admit that I was disappointed by the commercialisation.
Although the town was not impressive, the waterfall was. The spray came up and drifted across the road so we had to put the wipers on like it was raining. The Canadian side of the falls had a naturally large spray. The guys informed me that the Americans were jealous of the Canadian’s spray, so they had put big boulders underneath the waterfall in an attempt to make more spray.
We had a wander around the town and went into a casino where we had to show our ID to prove we were over 21. ‘They can’t tell the difference anyway!’ said Chi Wing, and took my friend Tun’s ID and swapped them over a few times. ‘Don’t!’ Send Tun, taking his back. He went through to get his ID checked. The guy checking the ID was very unsure. He looked at the ID, then at Tun, then at the ID, then at Tun, and finally decided to hand it back to him. It turns out Chi Wing was right; they had a difficult time telling the difference between Chinese people!
Chi Leung and I left Niagara to continue on to visit his friends in Montreal. Accidentally he took a wrong turn and found himself driving over the bridge toward Buffalo in the USA. ‘I don’t wanna go to the USA!’ he exclaimed, ‘I want my Mommy!’ Thankfully the panic subsided when we found a turn off the fateful road to the US and headed back to Canada.
We arrived in Montreal some time later. A storm began as we parked up - the sky lit up pink with lightning and the wind roared. I met a large group of students, all Chinese, and dumped my bag and belongings in their shared apartment. On a rainy night in Montreal, we all went out drinking. I don’t actually remember much of this night, but I remember feeling very tired and crashing on the sofa to sleep in the early hours of the morning. The guy we had gone to visit stayed standing, ‘All night go-carting?’ he suggested. And off he went at around 3am with some other friends to go all night go-carting.
Montreal wanted to be older than it actually was. It had cobbled streets and tacky tourist shops and horse and carts to remind you of old times gone by. Coming from Europe, it didn’t quite cut it. But it was a pretty town. I spent sadly little time there.
My experience of Canada wasn’t an experience of Canada you would initially expect. I went to Canada and ended up involving myself in a Chinese community. But why would I have really expected anything different? We live in a truly globalised world, with communities of other cultures and immigrant communities living throughout the world, and I’m more than happy to embrace it, especially if that embracing means fantastic food and lovely people.
Although perhaps I did get to experience more ‘traditional’ Canadian culture. On one of my first days in Toronto I was walking through a park and passed a house with the garden backing on to the park. An older man with white hair wearing a white string vest stared back at me; next to him was a spit roast, with what looked like a greyhound mounted on it. It was skinned and was the same size and shape as a greyhound, and seemed to have the same kind of snout. Spit roast greyhound? A traditional Canadian dish?
