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A Story of an Immigrant Kid: They Called Me a Banana

Banana: yellow on the outside, white on the inside. Illustration by Ahmara Smith.

My family moved to Canada when I was ten. We settled in Surrey, which is a sprawling suburbia about an hour from Vancouver. I didn’t speak a lick of English, but luckily, I didn’t pee myself when moving to a foreign country this time.

When we arrived, Baba had to come up with new names for my younger brother and me.

He gave my younger brother the option of “David” or “Davis”. The little eight-year-old boy chose “Davis,” so Davis he became.

With me, Baba said that I should be “Kayo,” the Japanese pronunciation of my Chinese name. I wanted a fancy English name like Davis, but Baba was persuasive.  So, Kayo I remained.

However, when I got to school, the other kids butchered my name. They called me “Kay-yo” when it was supposed to be “Ka-yo”. I tried to correct them with my limited English but to no avail.   So, “Kay-yo” I became. Now, everybody calls me Kayo, even my parents.

Remember that Day-O Banana Boat song? My classmates used to sing their adapted version: “Kayyyy-yo! Kayyyy-yo! Daylight comes and me wanna go home!”  My face would go beet red and they would howl with laughter. I hated that song.

Despite that, I learned English and became a typical teenager. I met my friend Chelsea in a math and science split class in grade eight. On Sundays, we went to the flea market to look for Sailor Moon Cards. In grade nine, I bought my first CDs: No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom and Smashing Pumpkin’s Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. I saw Gwen Stefani when No Doubt was touring with Weezer—I was a very excited fourteen-year-kid.

Back when pagers were cool.

In grade ten I smoked my first cigarette. By grade eleven, in addition to my smoking, I also had (still have) a book addiction. Remember those Scholastic catalogs we used to get from school? Mama bought me anything I ever wanted from it, unknowingly created a book-devouring monster. To pay for my smoking and book habits, I got a part-time job at the cinema that opened the same day as Star Wars: Phantom Menace. I made friends outside of school. I met my first boyfriend.

I have known Chelsea since we were 13. This picture was taken shortly after our graduation, on my 18th birthday.

Luckily, the kids in secondary school didn’t sing the stupid Day-O song. Instead, Chelsea gave me a cool nickname: Knock Out, aka KO.

Everything was trucking along in my teenage life. I almost felt cool—  until a new Taiwanese kid moved to my school. His name was Rodney.

Every time Rodney saw me walking down the hallway with my friends, he greeted me in Mandarin.  I was mortified each time. I always replied to him in English and kept the conversations as short as possible.

He reminded me of my foreign-ness, my otherness— and all I wanted was to blend in, be like everyone else.

I avoided him at all cost.

Back then, I didn’t want to be Taiwanese or Asian. I tried to minimize any perceived differences between my friends and me. For instance, I refused to bring Taiwanese food to school for lunch. Instead, I ate the mush and Jell-O at the cafeteria or munched on chips from the vending machines. Also, I wouldn’t associate with Rodney or the other Taiwanese kids.  They thought I was a snob and called me a “banana”—yellow on the outside, white on the inside.

I realize now that I’ve carried that label around for most of my life. The first time my husband Derek went to Taiwan with me for Chinese New Year’s, he asked me why I wasn’t in the kitchen learning to cook all the amazing Taiwanese dishes Mama was making. I shrugged. Now I understand that underneath the exterior of the worldly 30-something Kayo, there is a teenaged Kayo who felt humiliated by her otherness. Buried even deeper is the ten-year-old Kayo who was taunted because of her weird name.

Perhaps this why I get upset when people only see my Asian face and not my Canadian-ness.

Derek suggested that my Canadian-ness is keeping me from my Taiwanese-ness. He is absolutely right.

I will not subject myself to this “banana” label anymore. Next year, I will be in the kitchen with Mama during Chinese New Year.

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You are Chinese

 

What does it mean to be Chinese these days? Illustration by Ahmara Smith.

Several posts ago, I made an argument that many Taiwanese people are ethnically Chinese. Since then, more than a few of you, my dear readers, pointed out that I need to clarify what I meant by “Chinese”.

I have spent days agonizing over this post. Then I realized that the whole idea of “Chinese-ness” is loaded because it covers so many different aspects—ethnically, politically, and culturally.

In this post, I will make an attempt to address the ethnicity and political aspects of being Chinese. In the future, I will discuss the cultural aspect and show that all aspects of Chinese-ness are connected— this why the idea is so contested and messy.

Let’s define “Chinese-ness”. There are two-folds of Chinese-ness. First, you are Chinese if you can trace your ancestry back to the Middle Kingdom.

Second, the word “Chinese” also describes something or someone that have an association with the Chinese state— in the mind of the current Chinese government, the CPC, this association is trans-historical, linking the PRC with every previous Chinese state all the way back to the Qing dynasty.

For the sake of clarification, in the context of this blog, I will use the term “Chinese” to refer to the ethnic group. For those who are politically or culturally associated with the Chinese state, they are “Zhongguo ren”, or “Middle Kingdom people.” Middle Kingdom people are subjects to the Chinese state, and they may or may not be ethnically Han Chinese.

In other words, not every Chinese person is a Middle Kingdom person. (a second-generation Chinese Canadian may be ethnically Chinese but not a Chinese subject), and not every Middle Kingdom person is ethnically Chinese— I will elaborate below.  

Contrary to popular belief, the PRC isn’t a monoethnic state. The Middle Kingdom is a country of diverse ethnic groups— there may be as many as 400 ethnic groups, though the CPC only officially recognizes 56 of them. At 92% of the population, the Han Chinese are the dominant ethnic group in PRC. 

The CPC see themselves as the leader of the Chinese and the Middle Kingdom people. They also see themselves as the custodians of the Chinese culture. Anyone who poses a threat to the dominant and national narrative of Chinese-ness and Middle Kingdom-ness, like the  Uighurs, are punished relentlessly. The Uighurs are a minority ethnic group from Xinjiang Province, located in the northwest region of the country. They are distant cousins of the Turks, speak a Turkic language, and are predominately Muslims.

Uighur is an ethnic group in China genetically related to the Turks. Photo from Wikipedia.

When Mao took power in 1949, Xinjiang province became a part of PRC. The CPC encouraged the Han Chinese people to settle in Xinjiang. They took vital roles in government, often discriminating the Uighurs, leading to numerous protests and uprisings that challenge the authority of the party.

Needless to say, the Uighurs in Xinjiang is a thorn in the party’s back. In an effort to control them, they banned the Uighurs to express their culture by outlawing long beards and wearing veils. Furthermore, even as recently as January 2018, the party is still trying to assimilate the Uighurs by forcing them into re-educational camps. The plight of the Uighurs people is appalling and terrifying.

The Uighurs, are Middle Kingdom people, as they are holders of People’s Republic of China citizenship. However, they are certainly not Chinese.

As for me, I am Chinese— my ancestry can be traced back to Fujian Province. However, I was born in Japan to Taiwanese parents and grew up in Canada; I do not identify as a Middle Kingdom person. In other words, I am not a Chinese subject, though PRC would beg to defer. I am of Han Chinese ancestry, my family is from Taiwan, a contested territory  —both of which makes me “Chinese” (ethnically, politically and culturally) in their eyes. All Taiwanese are Chinese and Middle Kingdom people, they believe— we will realize that soon enough.

I shudder at that thought. Taiwanese people use a special “return to motherland” permit to go to China (including Hong Kong) since the PRC doesn’t recognize our passport. I am in Hong Kong as a Canadian citizen. I hope that the PRC wouldn’t be able to tell that I was Taiwanese since I was born in Japan.  If I get into trouble somehow (through this blog, for instance),  I might be able to access Canadian consular services instead of the alternative— disappearing into a black hole where no one can ever find me.

Illustration by Ahmara Smith.