Category Archives: Canada

The New York Times on 18 March ran a cheery little sketch of a community of tropical immigrants in northern Alberta.

FORT McMURRAY, Alberta, March 13 – Forty below zero isn’t so bad once you get used to it. At least that was the message of a seminar at Keyano College called “We Love the Winters Here,” attended by 30 new immigrants from warm-blooded places like Venezuela and Nigeria, drawn here by the promise of hefty salaries in an oil boomtown….

Venezuela, where President Hugo Chávez fired more than 5,000 employees at the state oil company after a failed general strike, has been particularly fertile recruiting ground for energy companies.

“When you are in Venezuela and you read the word ‘cold,’ you don’t really know what that word means,” said Cesar Mogollon, an electrical engineer with Suncor Energy who arrived from Venezuela in November….

But Mr. Mogollon said that once he found that local supermarkets carried the white maize flour dough used to make arepas and empanadas, “I was O.K.” He and his wife have adjusted, he said, and his 9-year-old daughter and 13-year-old son are snow tubing and skiing with gusto.

At least 4,000 foreign-born immigrants now live in Fort McMurray, and the number is growing fast. Local supermarkets carry halvah from Saudi Arabia, mango nectar from Egypt, jarred yellow cherries from Guatemala, rice sticks from the Philippines and marinating sauces from South Africa. There are cultural organizations for Latinos, Hindus, Filipinos and Chinese. The first Islamic school opened last year.

Mushtaque Ahmed, a 54-year-old engineer at Syncrude Canada, who was born in Bangladesh, has worked previously in Iraq and Saudi Arabia. He says that 10 families from Bangladesh arrived here in the last three years, and that they now get together to celebrate Bangladeshi holidays with potluck dinners that mix their native cooking with Canadian fare: typically roast turkey and assorted biryanis….

“I like the friendliness of the people here,” Mr. Ahmed said, although he admitted to one misgiving that has nothing to do with the weather: “I can get uncomfortable with what’s on television. There’s a lot of tolerance to things I am not accustomed to.”

via OxBlog

The Britishness of Victoria, the main city on Vancouver Island (and the official capital of British Columbia), seemed exaggerated to me. With its red phone booths, wrought-iron pavilions, pubs, Wax Museum, Crystal Garden, afternoon tea, and kilted bagpiper playing Christmas tunes out of season, Victoria was a Busch Gardens version of England. But the cloying atmosphere was not wholly invented; there were historical and social reasons for it. Though the Canadian Pacific had hoped to extend the transcontinental rail line to Vancouver Island, the railway had never gotten this far; it had terminated in the city of Vancouver, on the mainland. From that point onward, Vancouver projected itself into the future, as the rail bridge across the continent is now being reconceived as an air bridge across the Pacific. Meanwhile, Victoria, in its isolation, clung to the comfortable colonial past, redolent of the Hudson’s Bay Company and the British Navy. By the turn of the twentieth century, Victoria was a Bournemouth-on-the-Pacific, a clubby haven for “remittance men,” the unemployable sons of wealthy English families.

Elizabeth Archibald, a medieval scholar from Cambridge, England, who teaches at the University of Victoria, told me that when she had been at Yale, “Everyone was enchanted by my English accent. In Victoria it’s not even noticed. The flights between London and this part of Canada are full. Many Britons come here to live.”

The abundance of Britons in Victoria, along with the nicely cadenced speech of English Canada, has produced a wonderfully clear local accent. The words slip from people’s mouths like springwater vectored by rocks in a stream. This, at any rate, is what I thought when I met Douglas Homer-Dixon, who has spent his life as a forester on Vancouver Island. He escorted me for a walk along the coast in East Sooke Regional Park, pointing out the western cedars with their fanlike, matronly branches, the gnarled, sienna-hued arbutus trees, and the Pacific yews, whose coat of carbohydrate-rich lichen deer feed on. A gentle wind blew through the fog and ash-blue Strait of Juan de Fuca, connecting Puget Sound with the Pacific; it had been named for a Greek explorer who had sailed for Spain and adopted a Spanish name. Unlike the eastern fog, weighted with heat and humidity, the fog here is a silken lacework, draping the hillsides. I watched a Steller’s jay, described by Meriwether Lewis, land silently on a branch, its fabulous midnight-blue color clashing with the green background. Each rain droplet seemed to have hardened in the cold air, as if millions of glass beads rested upon the leaves.

SOURCE: An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America’s Future, by Robert D. Kaplan (Vintage, 1998), pp. 324-325

And, speaking of Vancouver Island, the Dictionary of Received Ideas alerts us to an online exhibit of the Virtual Museum of Canada entitled Graveyard of the Pacific: The Shipwrecks of Vancouver Island. The South Pacific has quite a few nautical graveyards as well.

Being gay and an Asian, I am very blessed. There is certainly a discussion among the gay Asians about not fitting into the Asian communities, nor into the gay communities. The gay male culture is built around the “buffed” Caucasian male: pumped biceps, beautiful body and appearance. If you don’t look like the ads in the magazines, you are marginalized. You are not seen as desirable as others. This is something that some support and discussion groups want to deal with.

When we came out, Mama was teaching in Women’s Studies at SFU [Simon Fraser U.]. This is not a place for the timid of heart because there are women who either have been involved in feminism, are lesbians and out of hiding, or militant! Father is a notary public and has an office in downtown Vancouver. He had been notarizing domestic partnership agreements for a long time. I was twenty-six, and Andy, my little brother, was nineteen. He was attending Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. He had heard that people in Vancouver were spreading word about him being gay. He decided that Mom and Dad would hear about his being gay from him first instead of someone else. He wrote to them saying that he had something important to share with them the next week. And they said, “O god, he is going to quit school and become a poet!” In a separate note to me, Andy gave me warning that he couldn’t keep it a secret any longer and he would have to tell them.

We don’t necessarily consider siblings as sexual beings. He guessed it about me, but I hadn’t a clue about him! We weren’t as close as we are now. I called him saying, “I know I cannot tell you not to write the letter. But you realize that it is going to be a package deal.” He replied that he knew but he had to tell them. He wrote his letter and it arrived. I knew it was coming, and I just stayed out late that evening with some friends. Went home and it was there. I penned my own letter and left it. The next day, my parents went out, so we didn’t talk about it until much later in the day. They said, “Well, we sort of guessed about you, but we never guessed about him. Perhaps a little bit about him.”

It was tough for my parents, harder than they let on. But they have been supportive always.

SOURCE: “Pomelo,” by Walter Keoki Quan, in Being Chinese: Voices from the Diaspora, by Wei Djao (U. Arizona Press, 2003), pp. 92-93