scratchpad – Page 5 – Jenneral HQ

On Ethnoburbia

I’m writing my term paper on (so, reading a lot about) the Canadian ethnoburb – a relatively new subtype of suburb populated by newer, wealthier Asian immigrants.

I spent most of my life living in Don Mills and Scarborough, two very prominent Torontonian examples.

I’m reading about the ethnic shift in areas near Chinatown that my parents used to rent a basement in. When I still wrote my journals in Chinese as a very small girl.

I remember that even once we moved out from Chinatown, my parents would bus in on the weekends to buy groceries, since they were much cheaper there and it had selections of Chinese vegetables that weren’t available outside it.

I remember the first time a Chinese supermarket opened near where we lived, how much more convenient our lives got.

I’m reading about a place that our family used to go to for takeout a lot before it shut down. It’s located in the first Chinese shopping centre outside of Chinatown, and it’s a block away from where my parents still live. One that sparked massive protest by the then-mostly-white residents of Scarborough. It’s now mostly empty. (We still go to the dim-sum place next door though, pretty much every time I head back to Toronto. It’s really good.)

My parents tell me stories about the struggles they first faced here, and now I see them reflected in my textbooks. And suddenly it’s like I realize another facet to this whole personal-being-political thing.

On going off to uni.

When I was seven, I realized that all the books that I’ve read had happy endings. What was up with that? I wondered. Maybe when I grow up I will write the first story with a sad ending, and it would blow everyone’s minds.

Twenty minutes later, I’ve decided that the world is too large and too strange for there to be no sad books in existence. It’s more likely that they just don’t give that kind of story to seven-year-olds.

When I first discovered the word “tragedy”, I felt a pulse of satisfaction.

When I was thirteen and at the tail end of my listless emo phase, I wondered why no one else seemed to mind the meaninglessness of their existence here on this tiny ball of mud in an infinitely large universe. School, work, children, retirement; is there all there is?

A week later I woke up at 4 in the morning with a revelation: people who don’t follow this american-dream path probably won’t live in the suburbs either. The world is too large and too strange for everyone to choose the exact same path through life, I just happened to live in a place that valued traditional dreams a lot.

Even later on I discovered Nietzsche, was immediately bored by Beyond Good and Evil, and went back to playing Neopets.

All in all, I think I’m pretty good at figuring out how the world works.

When I was seventeen I had exactly one moment of being afraid of university, before I shut down that line of thought. Don’t be silly, I thought, in the millions of people have gone to university, there’s bound to be some dumber than you who also went and succeeded. There’s bound to be some lazier than you, whoalso went and succeeded. There’s also bound to be many who fail, too, either to pass high school or to get accepted or to continue on into their second or third or fourth year, but if they all ended up on the streets our homeless problem would be much, much larger, which means that there’s other ways to make a living. You just haven’t found them yet. If you need to, you will.

Or, that’s how it’s supposed to work. I’m still a little panicky, to be honest. Would I be part of the 33% who don’t go on into second year? That would suck. My family would be so disappointed. It’s a distant fear, but I guess what makes us human is that some parts of our brains can’t be soothed with logic.

Still, I am very very excited about uni. My mom has the best stories of all the things she did there, all the road trips with friends who were not that close at the start, all the passionate arguments about literature and philosophy (have a feeling those might be in short supply at Waterloo tho), a fucking ballroom club where she had the same boy as a partner for four years and they never spoke outside the club, never even exchanged names.

If I have even half the adventures she did I’m in for a fantastic time, but let’s be real, Imma blow her experiences out of the water. I’m off tomorrow!

In the meantime, though, I gotta finish up my packing.

Future History

My grandfather owns a small museum, tucked away in my hometown. It is about the cultural revolution. Some things inside are my mother’s childhood silk slippers, the mahogany carriage my grandmother rode in for her wedding ceremony, and a curious wooden tool whose purpose was to help with darning socks. Although things like these were ubiquitous two generations ago, by the 90s my grandfather had to go to the furthest of traditional, dirt poor farming villages to curate new items for his collection.

If I follow in his footsteps, and start a museum in my retirement age, of things that existed during my childhood but not any longer, what would be there? Old technology is obvious, so I won’t bother with that. But what else? As dress codes loosen more and more, I think household irons might die out. As would print newspaper, as traditional media continues to lose their authority. Simpler kinds of candy, such as popeye’s candy sticks. Books won’t, but printed photographs might. Dollar store ceramic figurines, also.

This also makes me wonder about the things that existed in a baby boomer’s household, but don’t anymore. Again, radios and vinyls, yes, but what else? What things will be lost to time because no one thought to keep them until too late? Some clever tool to solve a transient problem that only existed in the nuclear age, something that would otherwise make us pause and exhale at the ingenuity of humanity, except they’re all decomposing now, and no one would even put them up in an attic because they’re tools, they were bought at the local general store for pennies, they don’t hold any sentimental value.

You throw them away when you move, saying to yourself that it will only take up space and you’ll buy a new one if the problem comes up again, and you’re relatively sure you won’t. You haven’t encountered that problem in ages.