“What is Canadian Culture?” a friend asked me the
other day.  “When I think of Japan,” he said, “I think of pagodas,
sushi, samauri… what do we have in Canada? Beavers?  That's not
culture!” He stated.

In Canada, Culture is what you make it.  Culture evolves
according to the people are are active creating it.  I have been
called a cultural engineer because I actively create cultural events
such as my signature event “Gung Haggis Fat Choy: Toddish McWong's
Robbie Burns Chinese New Year Dinner.

But culture lives and breathes and sometimes you have to change it's
diapers.  Today I discussed culture with Michael Dangeli who is a First
nations artist and performer.  We are sitting inside our “carving
tent” with our wood carving projects, and discussing how through time,
cultures get appropriated by individuals, absorbed into societies and
emerge in new forms. 

We have been discussing the origins of dragon boat racing, since we
have a dragon boat on display in front of our visual arts carving tent
just behind the Vancouver Maritime Museum.  We are part of
the Sea Vancouver Festival, as artists and presenters.  Dragon
Boats originated in China, further developed in North America and the rest of the
world, and now has entered a kind of sports metamorphosis.  Dragon
Boats have also been appropriated by Breast Cancer dragon boat teams as
a method of exercise and support groups.

I also told Michael about how “Chop Suey” and “Fortune Cookies” are
not from China
originally – but originated in North America to beome “Chinese
traditions”… at least in North America.  It is an example of how
cultural values and customs
transform in a new land.  Witness how Scottish deep fried bread
called Bannock travelled across Canada and became absorbed into First
Nations cuisine.

Gung Haggis Fat Choy is a cultural fusion.  It is a blend
of cultures.  It is a cultural evolution.  It is
representative of the traditions and values that the immigrating
cultures of Scotland and China brought with them.  And it is
representative of how their descendents adapt to living in this new
land, while trying to retain some sense of ethnic ancestral culture
while living in a present day “Canadian culture”.

Below is a description of Canada's Cultural Mosaic according to Frommer's

http://www.frommers.com/destinations/canada/0216020043.html

Canada's Cultural Mosaic — Canada has sought
“unity through diversity” as a national ideal, and its people are even
more diverse than its scenery. In the eastern province of Québec live 6
million French Canadians, whose motto, Je me souviens (“I
remember”), has kept them “more French than France” through 2 centuries
of Anglo domination. They've transformed Canada into a bilingual
country where everything official — including parking tickets and
airline passes — comes in two tongues.

The English-speaking majority of the populace is a mosaic rather
than a block. Two massive waves of immigration — one before 1914, the
other between 1945 and 1972 — poured 6.5 million assorted Europeans
and Americans into the country, providing muscles and skills, as well
as a kaleidoscope of cultures. The 1990s saw another wave of
immigration — largely from Asia and particularly from Hong Kong —
that has transformed the economics and politics of British Columbia.
Thus, Nova Scotia is as Scottish as haggis and kilts, Vancouver has the
largest Chinese population outside Asia, the plains of Manitoba are
sprinkled with the onion-shaped domes of Ukrainian churches, and
Ontario offers Italian street markets and a theater festival featuring
the works of Shakespeare at, yes, Stratford.

You can attend a native-Canadian tribal assembly, a Chinese New Year
dragon parade, an Inuit spring celebration, a German Bierfest, a
Highland gathering, or a Slavic folk dance. There are group settlements
on the prairies where the working parlance is Danish, Czech, or
Hungarian, and entire villages speak Icelandic.

What is a visible minority?

Am I a Visible Minority? – even though I am a born and raised Canadian of 5 generations in the City of Vancouver?

Do Visible Minority’s have their own culture, or is it simply the non-culture of the Visible Majority?

Is
my cousin a member of the Visible Minority, even though her mother is a
member of the Visible Majority, and she looks more like the Anglo side
of the family, then her sister who looks more like the Asian side of
the family.

Is
my mother’s cousin a member of the Double Visible Minority, because her
father was of Chinese ancestry and her mother was of First Nations
ancestry – doubly discriminated against by the Visible Majority on both
sides of the family?

Stats
Canada released a report last week that suggested that “Visible
Minorities” will become “Visible Majorities” in Toronto and Vancouver.  This
is all based on statistics that infer that the Visible Minority
population is growing 6 times faster than the Visible Majority.  The report is tracking ethnicities reported in the census.

This interpretation raises much debate about how to view and interpret statistics.  A recent letter to the Vancouver Sun suggests that immigration would be a truer gauge of the supposed cultural shift.  This letter was written by Karen Ennyu, a  multi-generational Chinese Canadian like myself.  She writes that “English is my first and only language.”  This
is true for many multigenerational Asian-Canadians, African-Canadians
and First Nations peoples who all love to cheer during the Stanley Cup
playoffs, drink Molson’s beer, singalong to old songs by Gordon
Lightfoot, Anne Murray and even Celine Dion. 

How do we measure culture?  How do we measure assimilation?  How do we measure interest in one’s cultural ancestry?  It is widely known that I have taken a lively interest in Scottish culture – due mostly to the creation of Gung Haggis Fat Choy.  I
have been thanked repeatedly by many Canadians from racially mixed
families and heritage for representing the kind of world that properly
recreates the way their family looks like.  Well, gee… it sort of looks like mine with all my cousins and an uncle or aunt or two marrying somebody non-Chinese…  That’s just the way love is sometimes, non-discriminating…

This
all makes one wonder how did the First Nations people start reacting to
the news from their local shamanic staticians making the announcement
that the Visible Minority of White settlers to the area would soon
outnumber the Visible Majority who had lived along the inlets and banks
of the lands inhabited by the Salish Peoples since the beginning of
time as they knew it?

Did they react by saying we have to limit immigration, by imposing a head tax to deter them.  And
if they keep coming, we will raise the head tax repeatedly to an
astronomical sum that will cost them 10 years of wages. And if they
keep coming after that, we will impose an Exclusion Act that will ban
them outright, not based on country of origin but on the colour of
their skin.

The colour of their skin.

That’s what being a Visible Minority is about.  It’s about other-ness, and being labled by the people in the Majority.

 
 
What
happens when the Romeo’s and the Juliet’s of the different tribes fall
in love, defying their parents’wishes, get married and start having
babies.  Do we define these New Canadians as Half-Visible Majority and Half-Visible Minority?
 
Or do we agree that we become greater than the sum of our parts.
Multiculturalism,
as we know it, helped us to give value to our visible minority cultures
and traditions, rather than to create a negative self-identity that
continues to haunt many of the Canadians born of the many ethnic
ancestries that suffered through the Potlatch Law, Chinese Head Tax and
Exclusion Act, and Japanese Enemy-Alien Re-location camps.
 
Canada to me, is truly One family that shares many cultural heritages from around the world.  It
is just like my family, where my uncles, aunts and cousins have married
people from different nationalities from around the world, including
First Nations. 
 
It is time for Canada to move beyond the colonial language and mentality of Visible Majority / Visible Minority into the 21^st Century.  We
can still recognize where are ancestors came from without imposing the
immigrant behavior of Euro-centric or Asian-centric viewpoints into
Canadian society.  Canadians of European,
Asian and African ancestry have been in this country long enough to
evolve our own unique blends of culture and Canadianess where we can
simultaneously embrace where we have come from, and where we are going
on a global scale.