本文发表在 rolia.net 枫下论坛Everywhere I travel in Scarborough I get the same story -- Asians and blacks keep a wary distance between them
By VERNON CLEMENT JONES
Name a Chinese restaurant, snack bar or take-away on Spadina Avenue, and my mother and I can tell you if their black bean sauce is too soy or if they're using MSG.
For us, the question isn't what to eat, but where to get it.
One Saturday, we decide to get "it" in Scarborough. After an hour's drive down a long, flat road, we pull up to a mall in north Scarborough.
With the exception of the store names that are written in English, every sign is in Chinese. And as the only black people, or for that matter non-Asians, in sight, we're the star attraction.
The shoppers stare, some point, and still others whisper loudly, although I'm not sure why they bother. They're all speaking Chinese. We, unfortunately, do not.
The restaurant's hostess spots us a mile off. In Chinese, she cries back toward the kitchen, and out runs the cook to the rescue. He points to the door and stammers, "We are closed."
Closed? It's 2 o'clock! The sign on the door says they're open. What's he talking about, closed?
We point to an east Asian family cracking crab legs in the corner, and to an east Asian kid at another table poking holes in the plastic tablecloth. His parents look up at us, then down into their menus.
At this point, the cook gets angry. "Sorry, we're closed!" He doesn't have to tell us twice. We're outta there!
Scratching heads
Sixty minutes later, we're at our favourite restaurant, scratching our heads and looking for an explanation.
In a city lauded for its finesse at integrating the peoples of the world, we have just hit a hard truth. T.O. may not be awash in racial turmoil, but there are certainly enough communities living side by side who have no truck with one another.
Take Scarborough, where approximately 100,000 Chinese-Canadians live side by side with 60,000 black ones -- or rather, they live on one side, the blacks live on another.
The Chinese community here, thanks to Tiananmen Square and the return of Hong Kong to China, has mushroomed. According to K.W. Ling, news editor at Ming Pao, Canada's Chinese-language newspaper, the area is still mostly Cantonese, but Mandarin speakers now make up 30 per cent of the population.
Like any other daily, Ming Pao gives crime in Toronto the front-page treatment, and Ling feels his readers have some fears. "Many older people who don't speak English are afraid. Sometimes they don't understand different people, blacks."
The president of the Black History Society, Rosemary Sadlier, tsk-tsks -- respectfully, of course. If you're going to paint a picture of blacks in Scarborough -- the right picture -- don't leave out the bright spots. "Blacks have been in Toronto since before there was a Toronto. They were here as fur traders, the coureurs de bois, in the 1500s. And in the 1700s they helped build the first parliament buildings in Toronto."
But the first large population of blacks, arriving from the West Indies, would make their home in Scarborough after 1967, when Toronto's push eastward turned the burb from farmland to apartment complexes and subdivisions.
Since then, wave after wave of black immigrants, most recently from Somalia, have come to join them here. The blacks in Scarborough run the gamut -- some rich, some poor, doctors, lawyers, even undertakers.
Sadlier, the author of three books on the subject of Canada's rich and untold black history, suggests a reason for Chinese fears of blacks in Scarborough.
"We're bombarded with images, mostly from the States, of people of African origin, displaying the population in a way that could leave someone who doesn't have any other information to work with feeling that we are incredibly, incredibly undesirable."
Indeed, knowledge of the other with the different skin or the different eyes is at a premium.
A second-generation Canadian, Kan-Ping Li queues up for the 129 McCowan North bus. He's just come from work, and like the other working stiffs in line, he's tired, his feet ache and all he wants is dinner and an hour of Baywatch.
He tells me, "From nowhere comes this black guy pushing his way through the crowd to the front of the line. You can see him strut down the aisle while the rest of us stand there looking on. I mean, I'd like to say something, but you know, you choose your battles."
Patrice James is a second-generation Canadian as well. Her parents are from Jamaica. She's recently graduated from U of T and is searching for new digs in Scarborough to match her new job.
On the phone, a Chinese woman's basement apartment seems just the thing, plus she's practically begged James to come and see it.
No answer
Knock one, no answer. Knock two, no answer. Knock three, the door opens a crack and the woman says, "The room's rented. Sorry." The door shuts in James's black face, now red.
For the past 12 years, Debbie Smith, another black woman, has lived in a mostly Chinese-Canadian section of Scarborough. She has no horror stories to share about black-Chinese relations in her middle-class neighbourhood, but says the two groups do give each other a wide berth.
"The two communities operate in parallel," Smith says. "They hesitate to cross that line. But I think that's more from the language barrier than anything else."
However, she wonders if "the Chinese living in Scarborough, an area with a lot of blacks, have a preconceived fear of them based on media images. There's an affluence within the Chinese, and maybe an inferior feeling exists (among blacks) as a result of the lack of affluence in the their community."
Smith also doesn't doubt that the "gangsta" attitude of some black teens scares many Asians -- it certainly does many blacks.
But there are no gangstas on her tree-lined street, with its two-car garages. And she wonders why she had to wait two years for her Chinese-Canadian neighbours to return a hello.
By the pool at the Agincourt Community Centre, I join Baba Wong to watch a school of toddlers swim in the shallows. Somewhere in that bunch are his two girls. A restaurant captain at the Toronto Hilton, he agrees with Smith: "Hello isn't too much to ask."
Wong lives a couple of streets down from Smith. "I'm from Mauritius -- there are a lot of blacks there," he tells me. But when he needs to borrow a tool or ask someone to pick up his mail when he's on vacation, Wong goes two doors down, to another Chinese Canadian. "We have more in common, we understand each other."
Looking around this community centre with its 20-foot-high water slide, two ice rinks and concession stand that serves everything but oysters Rockefeller, I think back to the community centre I just left.
Malvern's about 10 minutes away, in a section of Scarborough as predominantly black as this one is Chinese. I wonder how two publicly funded centres can be so different.
Why, here at Agincourt, under this new roof, do children spend an hour or two at the most swimming, skating or on tutored lessons while at Malvern black boys play basketball from 4:30 to 8:30 pm Monday to Friday, day in, day out, or tune into Rikki Lake as they zone out on a faded couch in a faded lounge in a faded building.
subhed
As I said, both these centres are paid for from the public purse. Though they're separated by 10 minutes, they're a world apart.
At this point I'm still confused, wondering "Why can't we all get along?" Why, in the two weeks I've been loitering on Scarborough's streets, haven't I seen a black and an east Asian, or a black and a south Asian, or even an east Asian and a southeast Asian -- or any two coloured people of different colours -- walk together or talk together or laugh together? Phew!
My Baptist training tells me to seek out a church, find a minister. If I seek there, I shall find.
On the phone, I speak to Reverend Chadwin Mak, minister at the Scarborough Chinese Gospel Church. His congregation of approximately 300 is almost all Chinese, with a sprinkling of white spouses. Like the evangelical movement throughout the world, Mak's congregation is growing by leaps and bounds.
Mak is forthright and speaks to me with sincerity, and though the accent is Cantonese, he reminds me of a black Baptist minister. Baptist is Baptist.
I listen as he explains the difficulties between blacks and Chinese in Scarborough.
"Some people build up walls and don't want to make friends with different people. (Uh-huh.) Unfortunately, most of the criminals are black (Huh?) and that influences our minds, our hearts."
Mak's candour shocks me -- he must think he's talking to a white guy. I ask for statistics. He hasn't any, but the sermon continues. "Unfortunately, there are so many cases in the Jane and Finch area. (Oh, boy.) And case by case, black people are committing crime." (Oy! )
Now, to save us both any further embarrassment, I tell him I'm black. But the reverend reaches for his other foot and opens wider. The two groups are different -- one is no better than the other. However, most Chinese are middle-class. They manage their families, their properties. How many of the Chinese people are on social programs? How many black people are on social programs? When the classes are different, of course, that affects the relationship.
Now, the rev's no diplomat, and I wonder what it is he preaches on Sunday mornings, but does he have a point about class differences? I head back to Kennedy and Steeles, to the same "Chinese mall," to find out.
This time I wear a suit and carry a briefcase. In the stores, the Chinese merchants greet me with their best smiles. So is the reverend right? Is the discrimination based only on class, not racial prejudice?
Well, I've seen enough. I make my way to the mall exit -- I want to leave on a high note -- but the fates intervene. A young east Asian couple sees me approach, he grabs her waist, she grabs her purse and they both dive for cover. There goes the reverend's theory. (Just as well. I'd hate to have to wear a suit every time I go shopping.)
The morning after the Leacock Lions take Scarborough's basketball division, I'm invited in to chat with some students there.
Naheem Charania, a member of the student council, the Leacock Super Council, acts as my host. Unlike my high school, here the student body reflects the new Toronto. It's beautiful! East Asian, south Asian, southeast Asian, black and white faces crowd the corridors.
Charania fills me in on the multicultural events the council's spearheading -- a ski trip for new, or rather, newer immigrants, a cabaret of world culture, an ethnic food fair, and the list runs on.
We pick our way past the hordes in the halls to the cafeteria, and it's here I find the worm in the Leacock apple: at one table sit the Chinese kids, at another the Tamils, the blacks at yet another and, yes, there's also one for the whites.
It's after lunch that I sit down with eight of Leacock's brightest, two whites, two Chinese, two south Asians and two blacks -- fair is fair. I share my observations, and they very kindly share theirs.
subhed
"I think it's culture. I really don't think it has anything to do with race," says Stacey Nolan, one of the two blacks.
Melissa Ho, a self-tagged "CBC" (Canadian-born Chinese ), can relate. "The different cultures stay separate. I'm like that, too. I think everyone is. It's like a natural instinct kind of thing. When people understand you, without you even having to say anything, it's so comfortable."
Nolan wonders if everyone isn't a little too comfy. "You're constantly hearing about the differences between all of us, and I promote that to an extent, but we need to focus on what we have in common, too."
Ho's the first to fess up. "Honestly, the stereotyping that goes on in Scarborough pisses me off!" Everyone claps. "Some in my family see a crime with a black person, and they're always afraid. But they don't see that there's crime with Asian people, too."
Mona Ismael, of Somalian heritage, points to the media. "They make such general statements about different ethnic groups and don't take the time to understand where other people are coming from."
Seeing their young faces so full of hope, I remember my own youthful pledge to end racism, to change my world. But didn't time prove me a liar? And didn't it you? Will the same thing happen to them?更多精彩文章及讨论，请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net
By VERNON CLEMENT JONES
Name a Chinese restaurant, snack bar or take-away on Spadina Avenue, and my mother and I can tell you if their black bean sauce is too soy or if they're using MSG.
For us, the question isn't what to eat, but where to get it.
One Saturday, we decide to get "it" in Scarborough. After an hour's drive down a long, flat road, we pull up to a mall in north Scarborough.
With the exception of the store names that are written in English, every sign is in Chinese. And as the only black people, or for that matter non-Asians, in sight, we're the star attraction.
The shoppers stare, some point, and still others whisper loudly, although I'm not sure why they bother. They're all speaking Chinese. We, unfortunately, do not.
The restaurant's hostess spots us a mile off. In Chinese, she cries back toward the kitchen, and out runs the cook to the rescue. He points to the door and stammers, "We are closed."
Closed? It's 2 o'clock! The sign on the door says they're open. What's he talking about, closed?
We point to an east Asian family cracking crab legs in the corner, and to an east Asian kid at another table poking holes in the plastic tablecloth. His parents look up at us, then down into their menus.
At this point, the cook gets angry. "Sorry, we're closed!" He doesn't have to tell us twice. We're outta there!
Scratching heads
Sixty minutes later, we're at our favourite restaurant, scratching our heads and looking for an explanation.
In a city lauded for its finesse at integrating the peoples of the world, we have just hit a hard truth. T.O. may not be awash in racial turmoil, but there are certainly enough communities living side by side who have no truck with one another.
Take Scarborough, where approximately 100,000 Chinese-Canadians live side by side with 60,000 black ones -- or rather, they live on one side, the blacks live on another.
The Chinese community here, thanks to Tiananmen Square and the return of Hong Kong to China, has mushroomed. According to K.W. Ling, news editor at Ming Pao, Canada's Chinese-language newspaper, the area is still mostly Cantonese, but Mandarin speakers now make up 30 per cent of the population.
Like any other daily, Ming Pao gives crime in Toronto the front-page treatment, and Ling feels his readers have some fears. "Many older people who don't speak English are afraid. Sometimes they don't understand different people, blacks."
The president of the Black History Society, Rosemary Sadlier, tsk-tsks -- respectfully, of course. If you're going to paint a picture of blacks in Scarborough -- the right picture -- don't leave out the bright spots. "Blacks have been in Toronto since before there was a Toronto. They were here as fur traders, the coureurs de bois, in the 1500s. And in the 1700s they helped build the first parliament buildings in Toronto."
But the first large population of blacks, arriving from the West Indies, would make their home in Scarborough after 1967, when Toronto's push eastward turned the burb from farmland to apartment complexes and subdivisions.
Since then, wave after wave of black immigrants, most recently from Somalia, have come to join them here. The blacks in Scarborough run the gamut -- some rich, some poor, doctors, lawyers, even undertakers.
Sadlier, the author of three books on the subject of Canada's rich and untold black history, suggests a reason for Chinese fears of blacks in Scarborough.
"We're bombarded with images, mostly from the States, of people of African origin, displaying the population in a way that could leave someone who doesn't have any other information to work with feeling that we are incredibly, incredibly undesirable."
Indeed, knowledge of the other with the different skin or the different eyes is at a premium.
A second-generation Canadian, Kan-Ping Li queues up for the 129 McCowan North bus. He's just come from work, and like the other working stiffs in line, he's tired, his feet ache and all he wants is dinner and an hour of Baywatch.
He tells me, "From nowhere comes this black guy pushing his way through the crowd to the front of the line. You can see him strut down the aisle while the rest of us stand there looking on. I mean, I'd like to say something, but you know, you choose your battles."
Patrice James is a second-generation Canadian as well. Her parents are from Jamaica. She's recently graduated from U of T and is searching for new digs in Scarborough to match her new job.
On the phone, a Chinese woman's basement apartment seems just the thing, plus she's practically begged James to come and see it.
No answer
Knock one, no answer. Knock two, no answer. Knock three, the door opens a crack and the woman says, "The room's rented. Sorry." The door shuts in James's black face, now red.
For the past 12 years, Debbie Smith, another black woman, has lived in a mostly Chinese-Canadian section of Scarborough. She has no horror stories to share about black-Chinese relations in her middle-class neighbourhood, but says the two groups do give each other a wide berth.
"The two communities operate in parallel," Smith says. "They hesitate to cross that line. But I think that's more from the language barrier than anything else."
However, she wonders if "the Chinese living in Scarborough, an area with a lot of blacks, have a preconceived fear of them based on media images. There's an affluence within the Chinese, and maybe an inferior feeling exists (among blacks) as a result of the lack of affluence in the their community."
Smith also doesn't doubt that the "gangsta" attitude of some black teens scares many Asians -- it certainly does many blacks.
But there are no gangstas on her tree-lined street, with its two-car garages. And she wonders why she had to wait two years for her Chinese-Canadian neighbours to return a hello.
By the pool at the Agincourt Community Centre, I join Baba Wong to watch a school of toddlers swim in the shallows. Somewhere in that bunch are his two girls. A restaurant captain at the Toronto Hilton, he agrees with Smith: "Hello isn't too much to ask."
Wong lives a couple of streets down from Smith. "I'm from Mauritius -- there are a lot of blacks there," he tells me. But when he needs to borrow a tool or ask someone to pick up his mail when he's on vacation, Wong goes two doors down, to another Chinese Canadian. "We have more in common, we understand each other."
Looking around this community centre with its 20-foot-high water slide, two ice rinks and concession stand that serves everything but oysters Rockefeller, I think back to the community centre I just left.
Malvern's about 10 minutes away, in a section of Scarborough as predominantly black as this one is Chinese. I wonder how two publicly funded centres can be so different.
Why, here at Agincourt, under this new roof, do children spend an hour or two at the most swimming, skating or on tutored lessons while at Malvern black boys play basketball from 4:30 to 8:30 pm Monday to Friday, day in, day out, or tune into Rikki Lake as they zone out on a faded couch in a faded lounge in a faded building.
subhed
As I said, both these centres are paid for from the public purse. Though they're separated by 10 minutes, they're a world apart.
At this point I'm still confused, wondering "Why can't we all get along?" Why, in the two weeks I've been loitering on Scarborough's streets, haven't I seen a black and an east Asian, or a black and a south Asian, or even an east Asian and a southeast Asian -- or any two coloured people of different colours -- walk together or talk together or laugh together? Phew!
My Baptist training tells me to seek out a church, find a minister. If I seek there, I shall find.
On the phone, I speak to Reverend Chadwin Mak, minister at the Scarborough Chinese Gospel Church. His congregation of approximately 300 is almost all Chinese, with a sprinkling of white spouses. Like the evangelical movement throughout the world, Mak's congregation is growing by leaps and bounds.
Mak is forthright and speaks to me with sincerity, and though the accent is Cantonese, he reminds me of a black Baptist minister. Baptist is Baptist.
I listen as he explains the difficulties between blacks and Chinese in Scarborough.
"Some people build up walls and don't want to make friends with different people. (Uh-huh.) Unfortunately, most of the criminals are black (Huh?) and that influences our minds, our hearts."
Mak's candour shocks me -- he must think he's talking to a white guy. I ask for statistics. He hasn't any, but the sermon continues. "Unfortunately, there are so many cases in the Jane and Finch area. (Oh, boy.) And case by case, black people are committing crime." (Oy! )
Now, to save us both any further embarrassment, I tell him I'm black. But the reverend reaches for his other foot and opens wider. The two groups are different -- one is no better than the other. However, most Chinese are middle-class. They manage their families, their properties. How many of the Chinese people are on social programs? How many black people are on social programs? When the classes are different, of course, that affects the relationship.
Now, the rev's no diplomat, and I wonder what it is he preaches on Sunday mornings, but does he have a point about class differences? I head back to Kennedy and Steeles, to the same "Chinese mall," to find out.
This time I wear a suit and carry a briefcase. In the stores, the Chinese merchants greet me with their best smiles. So is the reverend right? Is the discrimination based only on class, not racial prejudice?
Well, I've seen enough. I make my way to the mall exit -- I want to leave on a high note -- but the fates intervene. A young east Asian couple sees me approach, he grabs her waist, she grabs her purse and they both dive for cover. There goes the reverend's theory. (Just as well. I'd hate to have to wear a suit every time I go shopping.)
The morning after the Leacock Lions take Scarborough's basketball division, I'm invited in to chat with some students there.
Naheem Charania, a member of the student council, the Leacock Super Council, acts as my host. Unlike my high school, here the student body reflects the new Toronto. It's beautiful! East Asian, south Asian, southeast Asian, black and white faces crowd the corridors.
Charania fills me in on the multicultural events the council's spearheading -- a ski trip for new, or rather, newer immigrants, a cabaret of world culture, an ethnic food fair, and the list runs on.
We pick our way past the hordes in the halls to the cafeteria, and it's here I find the worm in the Leacock apple: at one table sit the Chinese kids, at another the Tamils, the blacks at yet another and, yes, there's also one for the whites.
It's after lunch that I sit down with eight of Leacock's brightest, two whites, two Chinese, two south Asians and two blacks -- fair is fair. I share my observations, and they very kindly share theirs.
subhed
"I think it's culture. I really don't think it has anything to do with race," says Stacey Nolan, one of the two blacks.
Melissa Ho, a self-tagged "CBC" (Canadian-born Chinese ), can relate. "The different cultures stay separate. I'm like that, too. I think everyone is. It's like a natural instinct kind of thing. When people understand you, without you even having to say anything, it's so comfortable."
Nolan wonders if everyone isn't a little too comfy. "You're constantly hearing about the differences between all of us, and I promote that to an extent, but we need to focus on what we have in common, too."
Ho's the first to fess up. "Honestly, the stereotyping that goes on in Scarborough pisses me off!" Everyone claps. "Some in my family see a crime with a black person, and they're always afraid. But they don't see that there's crime with Asian people, too."
Mona Ismael, of Somalian heritage, points to the media. "They make such general statements about different ethnic groups and don't take the time to understand where other people are coming from."
Seeing their young faces so full of hope, I remember my own youthful pledge to end racism, to change my world. But didn't time prove me a liar? And didn't it you? Will the same thing happen to them?更多精彩文章及讨论，请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net