In writing this blog portraying and in some cases defending a British Canadian's perspective, I am doing something that many might find distasteful, making a stand. It's something we British and British Canadians have a history of doing only at the last minute, when our back is against the wall and even then only when rallied by a Shakespeare, a Churchill or perhaps a vivacious viscount of vengeance vexing a venerable villain such as V. An improbable people made of Hobbits and Aragorns as another British writer once wrote of, who have shown to be the key players in the formation of the free world as we know it and have proven to often be the last line of defense when some great shadow looms. The keepers of the light. We often find ourselves in conflict with those peoples who would spread the dark values counter to ours, deceit, fear, the rule of a hidden few. We are the wielders of the written word and that is our sword and shield starting from the time of the Magna Carta Libertatum (The Great Charter of Freedoms) until today. Freedom of Speech and Freedom to Be, is at the core of who we are and every country the British have played a part in forming.
Of course, words can be used by anyone who has the strength and skill to handle them and so I will also address in this blog, how, particularly on the West Coast of Canada, they are being used to attack Canada and separate it from it's British Heritage. Although many seek to ridicule Canada's British roots, they are the bedrock of this country and what makes us so great and so different from anywhere else. That is easy to forget when you live here and even easier to erase when it serves your purpose.
Setting the stage:
It is not hard to tear us down. From the very beginning Britain starts from a place of plurality and accountability and within that, there are always fissures to exploit. The Irish, Scottish, Welsh and English make up the British Isles and in the multi cultural countries that have been created via the multi-cultural United Kingdom; Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the USA, we have today even more voices, taught in different ways and taught different histories from our own with different beliefs and new grievances.
What is alarming to me is when people from other cultures come to Canada on a vendetta to tear the British part of our heritage out or create divisions within while not paying any respect to the history and heritage of the country that has accepted them. What motivates these people is often personal hurts or learned vendettas, often because of anti western teachings by the governments from their home cultures and passed down through their families.
A Brief history of now:
My life in Vancouver today has been a witness to the growing anti British culture in this city. Growing up in Vancouver was pretty non eventful as a kid raised in a house hold to British Canadian parents until oooo say about Expo 86. I think we can safely say that was the time that everything started to change. I am sure the foundation of this change had been laid long before but the stage show of the change, was Expo so lets take things at face value shall we.
Looking back at Vancouver and the world at that time we had not long been out of the recession of the early nineteen eighties. Our inanely grinning Premier Vanderzaam had just given the Expo 86 land away to Chinese Billionaire Li Ka-Shing for an "am I your new best friend?" of 11 million dollars and British Columbia and Canada began selling citizenships to Hong Kong Chinese residents fleeing the turn over of Hong Kong as long as they brought a degree of investment to the region. But everything has a cost, even money as a friend of mine once said.
The turn over of Hong Kong was a telling event. It was framed by Chinese government to the Chinese people, particularly after Tiananmen, to look like a humiliation for the British. This despite the fact that the turn over was done in complete accordance to the treaty and was hoped by the British to be received as a measure of good will and progress in relations.
But that is not how the Chinese government wanted it portrayed. The Chinese government has been teaching it's population for years that the West and the British in particular humiliated China for the last 100 years starting with the Opium war and was seeking to portray the reclaiming of Hong Kong as a victory for their culture over the British and hence western culture. That quiet re-manipulation of fact continues today, particularly here in Vancouver.
The Chinese government through its teachings at home and now abroad is in fact promoting their own century of humiliation against the British as retribution. Here in Vancouver, that perspective is taking hold as money and resources, not to mention a newly arrived population from Asia pour resources into media, education and culture of this city. As a result the city is being taught a new history that often attacks or ridicules the British history and culture of Canada. You can see evidence of its growing influence it in the letters to the editor, the comments like, "Karma for colonizing...." in blogs and with cries that government and businesses are all controlled by “old white men” in Newspaper Articles themselves from time to time. As I would like to remind the world, especially those deciding they have the right to divine karma, the world owes Great Britain much more than it will likely ever get credit for.
Of course, times have changed and Britian's influence on the surface of things at least is waning. Some pragmatists might say, well, if Britain or even Canada can't afford to match Chinese investment in media, culture and arts, then so be it.
Is that really all that we are; opinions and history and our future for sale to the highest bidder of the moment? Well that would be a very short sighted approach but then again I am taking an Asian perspective, I am thinking long term in defending my own culture.
Move over "Big Brother", here comes “Little Sister.”Gone are the trunchons and bullhorns, here come the networking sites and smartphones. The war going on out here on the streets of Vancouver for the hearts and minds of the population of the city is an important lesson, especially in a free media democracies such as ours. Groups previously powerless against the west with its military might and freedom of speech values are now exploiting what we champion, democracy and free speech for their own purposes. Welcome to the era of information technology and culture warfare where identity is King. The new superpower is not a nation, its the media, arts and academia and the new tank division is made not of an A1 Abrams, its Facebook, art, a lecture hall or a documentary. All you need to do to alter the path of a nation is sway one generation to your point of view and that is what is being worked on in this city.
If I can paraphrase the CBC documentary, "Love, Hate and Propaganda", the first act of aggression in war is the assault on the publics opinion. Choose your punch lines and hammer the message out in academia, arts and media until it “is” fact. Leverage guilt, anger, indignation and fear to get others to fight for you. “Victim Power,” a term coined by feminists is now being packaged for anyone with an angle. Let’s face it, in the west, guilt is gold if you can make it pay and we excel in tearing ourselves down. Just look at any parliament.
Getting Personal:
At first I did not understand I was a foot soldier and mostly a target in this dynamic. Comments made to me by some of the Chinese and even Irish community in Vancouver about my very British last name; inferences that I thought myself better than everyone else. (As I mentioned, it did not take long for those with grievances against British Canada to find one another once the demographic of this city began to change.) I should probably qualify this because I am very public about being proudly British Canadian and my last name says it all but I never knew how much hate others had for the Brits nor even what century’s old beef would be brought up as an excuse for intimidation today. Brit bashing is actively being fostered here, particularly towards the English. Divide and conquer after all.
The instance that showed me beyond a shadow of a doubt that this was a war against who I was and that I was neither imagining this nor was it going to go away, was when I was working in my community garden and a Chinese couple stopped and started talking to me. Lets give you a bit of perspective, I flew a British and a British Columbian flag over my garden as a bit of character.
The conversation started with a smile and compliments on how beautiful my garden was and then the man looked over my shoulder ( at my neighbors garden coincidentally ) and told me my poppies were very big and beautiful. I said thanks but they were my neighbors. He did not seem to hear me I thought, because he asked me again if I liked poppies. I said sure but by this time starting to realize that this was another, not so innocent conversation. His wife was moving away by this point not looking entirely comfortable to her credit. He finished off with a comment to the effect that he was not allowed to grow poppies in China, where he comes from. I got the reference of course but just reminded him with a smile, that this was Canada, where we are allowed to plant what we want for the most part. The rest we are debating.
That is an example of one of the more polite street level interactions you might encounter. If you are a Brit or a Brit Canadian here and not aware of or prepared to stand up for your role in history, you are going to get blind sided by those who try to use history as a weapon.
And when that history is being re-written to suit a particular agenda, the blades get sharper still. Usually that is left to the victors but some have learnt that you can create victory, if you just convince enough people to believe in your version of history and your version of the future. I am referring to the Academic war against British Canadian History and one of it's main proponent showed his true colours with a very judgmental and poorly thought out article on Feb. 1 edition of the Vancouver Sun entitled Vancouver's not so quiet Revolution. He is a UBC professor named Henry Yu.
Yu's pattern is easy to recognize, simple and effective. It is also a typically disrespectful if not hateful one with catch phrases straight out of a PRC propaganda do it yourself book such as "Colonial English" and "white supremacy" referring to modern Canada. His aim is to unite every created "other" against the Canadian white male particularly of British descent or has he terms it, "Anglophone Canada".
In his opening paragraph of his Feb 1, Vancouver Sun article, Yu begins with:
"On the eve of the Winter Olympics, there is a not-so-quiet revolution going on here every bit as important as that which transformed Quebec a half a century ago, even if the anglophone journalists and commentators of this city and of our nation seem oblivious to its consequences.
Inexorably, the tenor of civic debate in this city is no longer being carried out only in the colonial language of English. But rather than in French, it is in a multiplicity of Asian languages -- Mandarin, Cantonese, Punjabi, Tagalog -- that the voices of people long silenced are talking. What are they discussing? Important issues that bespeak both the deep colonial past of "British" Columbia and the need for a frank and open discussion about our collective future."
His basic premise seems to follow along two trains of thought; minorities which will soon be majorities within the Vancouver city limits are not having enough of their homeland languages recognized and that the Vancouver neighborhood of Kitsalano is inherently racist because it has not followed the pattern of becoming 30% or more Asian.
He says in irate wealth Canadian yuppie form...
"It struck me last weekend when I was shopping in Kitsilano what an aberration that neighborhood is -- one of the few areas in Vancouver that has not been transformed in the last three decades by new migration from Asia. Kits, for instance, does not have a significant ethnic Chinese Canadian presence in a city where almost every other neighborhood has percentages of ethnic Chinese that range from 20% to 55%. What is wrong with Kits? The same thing that is wrong with so many newsrooms and boardrooms in Vancouver, where a quick glance around at who shapes opinion and leadership decisions reveals a blinding uniformity of faces as white as driven snow."
Mr Yu. (Exasperated sigh.) Too many white faces for your liking? They must all be "...those nasty Brit's eh?" to quote the a Chinese Vancouverites blog, "The Ugly Chinese Canadian". No Ukrainians, no Dutch, no Irish, no German and certainly no Spanish or god forbid the blond haired ultra white Scandinavians. Yes sir, they must all certainly be "Colonial British" for there is no diversity among white faces, at least it seems according to Yu.
I and a few others could not believe I was reading this or worse, it was not being responded to by other members of the Vancouver Chinese Community in a negative light because after all, if a white person said of Richmond, a predominantly Chinese suburb of Vancouver, that it was racist, they would be slammed as the same. Worse still, this was coming from a UBC professor! This is someone we want to think of as intelligent but then again, UBC needs to make money and I am sure his perspective fills seats in the new Vancouver. It certainly seemed warmly received by Vancouver's Chinese community judging by the Chinese reader responses websites such as the previously mentioned "victim power" "The Ugly Chinese Canadian" site. Remember, guilt is gold out here. If you can get someone to feel sorry for you, you can get them to fight for you.
Maybe in the eighties and nineties perspectives like Yu's were new and a valuable way of looking at the formation of Canada by breaking the centuries old white male defined world but what Yu is now doing is pushing past the definition of multiculturalism or even the mandate of the feminist writers who he predictably aligns himself with. (Just check out his latest book - "How Tiger Woods lost his stripes.") The lack of perspective in Yu's message is verging on propaganda and it does have a purpose. No one seems to be considering that this Professor Yu might have his own agenda; that he is not providing unbiased history, but biased history and that we are selling the history and future of our country for a song, a bad one at that.
To give you another example of Yu'ian work and rhetoric lets look at his piece: "Is Vancouver the Future or the Past: Asian Migrants and White Supremacy. The title says it all. He seeks to paint modern Canada as a white supremacist venture based on events and policies generated a century ago.
Yu rests much of his rhetoric, that Canada and the British founded Canada were racist, on the Vancouver race riots of 1907, the exclusion act and head tax placed upon the early Asian immigration to Canada, the Komagata Maru incident and the treatment of aboriginal cultures. Why stop there, even recently I was told the deeds of the houses in the British Properties, a well to do neighborhood of West Van have a out of date clause in some of them forbidding the ownership of those properties by Jewish, Chinese or Indian Canadians. Well faux pas indeed considering that with Vancouver being transformed into Hollywood North, Bollywood West and Hongcouver, those are exactly the groups moving into those houses. But those deeds were written over a hundred years ago. Canada and the UK at least have come a long way since then.
But acknowledging that would not be worth a dime. Nor would it earn him respect from the community Yu is promoting in his work. Yu judges late 19 century Canada by its modern 21th century human rights standards. What he deliberately omits is not only how all other nations of the world would have also acted during turn of the 20th century, but how some still act today, including that of the culture he promotes. He paints the British as villainous racists while ignoring the behaviors and agenda of his own culture .
Certainly by todays standards in Canada, such things would not happen but in the world culture of the time, in the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, the founding policies of Canada were very typical and in fact probably more lenient that what could be expected anywhere else. In fact I suspect that it is very likely that immigrants and the aboriginal populations would have been treated far worse should events have been duplicated under any other governing nationality.
The formation of Canada has been a far more liberal process than how Yu and those who repeat his message would have us believe. It is this lack of perspective that is very typical of his assault on Canadian history, to tear it down so it can be re-imagined by himself and others to their own advantage.
In revisiting Yu's own opening paragraph in his article "Vancouver's not so quiet Revolution" in the Vancouver Sun, he raises the prospect of an Asian heritage and language based separatism arising in the West to match that of the Quebec separatist movement in the East. He says,
" There is a not - so - quiet revolution going on here every bit as important as that which transformed Quebec a half century ago, even if Anglophone journalists and commentators of this city and our nation seem oblivious to it's consequences."
Say no more My Yu. Say no more.
Some might say he is only referring the issue of language as most of his article dwells on this topic but as any historian knows, language is the underpinning of nationhood and culture and language is the underpinning for the separatist movement in Quebec.
Professor Yu is making a veiled reference to Quebec separatism and is implying in the future of Canada, that an Asian based separatist movement may also arise. Certainly, some in the new community of Asian immigrants would like to foster this, egged on by his re-interpretation of Canadian history and purpose. A separatist Western Canada, one that has closer cultural ties to Asia than to French Quebec, America or Europe. Convenient.
On our present course and with the media, arts and education of the west coast financed by those with similar interests to Mr Yu, this is indeed Canada's future unless the government of Canada seeks to counter Yu'ian rhetoric with a more objective history of this land, one that does not vilify our British heritage at every chance it gets.
But here is the clincher. In raising the vague specter of Asian separatism in Western Canada Mr Yu has debunked his own argument that Colonial Canada was racist.
After all, according to Mr Yu's own threat of emerging Asian separatism, the colonial government of Canada was doing exactly what was needed to maintain the integrity of the emerging country now called Canada.
The so called racist policies of colonial Canada were designed to prevent this new British Colony from being swamped by settlers from Asia for it was feared that if this happened, they might out populate the "white" population and agitate to form their own country. Britain would loose control of the emerging Canada. The purpose of early British Canada was to build a modern nation that could compete with its neighbors, Spain, Japan, Russia and particularly of course, the USA in order to maintain its integrity.
If the British had not prevented massive early immigration, as Yu himself now points out with his own threats, it is unlikely Canada would exist today. The Policies of early British Canada were critical in developing the multi cultural democratic nation today that allows people like Yu to settle and have the freedom of speech to say the sort of things he does. That is because British culture promotes freedom of speech and expression where just about every other culture does not. But it has been a process that did not happen over night.
Does Yu somehow think that if early British Canada had allowed unchecked Asian immigration at the beginning of the 19th century, that those immigrants would not have also threatened as Yu is doing today, the specter of separation lest they get their way?
Of course racism existed in the eighteen hundreds and nineteen hundreds, it still exists, more so in other countries than in Canada. But if Mr. Yu is suggesting that the way the British formed this country is any worse than how any other group might have during the same period in history, he is delusional. If Mr. Yu is suggesting that the aboriginal or Chinese would have been better served if another power had colonized this part of Canada he is lying.
If the British had stopped their colonization of Canada and said, hands off everyone, there are native people here; does anyone think for a moment that the Americans, the Russians, the French or the Spanish or maybe even the Japanese would have respected the British and stopped their own colonizers? Not a chance. Mr Yu does not even respect the British history of Canada now as one of the citizens of Canada. He is tearing it apart. (I think he is suffering from a serious case of British envy.)
Is Mr Yu really suggesting that Canada would have turned out better if it had not protected itself from early massive Asian immigration? Lets look around at the world for a minute and find out.
Empirical Evidence:
If you look at the world today and you have all the evidence you need. Empirical (excuse the pun) evidence shows that there are very few countries in the world that champion human rights, freedom of speech, women's rights and minority rights. Those countries all imperfect have been a long time in the making. They are the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the USA.
Have you noticed anything in common yet folks. Oh yes, where not Britain herself, all former British Colonies. Out of those former colonies, the ones that is farthest behind in human rights are the ones that, to borrow some Yu'ian rhetoric from a CBC comments forum, "shirked off their colonial masters "earliest and that would be primarily the USA. It would seem then the British influence overall is one for good if you don't mind the Haggis or rolling cheese.
China the culture Yu is implicitly supporting does NOT promote free speech or freedom of the press or human rights. It puts citizens who speak out in mental hospitals to silence them or jails and bull dozes neighborhoods to put on displays of prestige like the Olympics; just ask Liu Xiaobo and the children of Tiananmen. Is this the Canada we want because it is the Canada that is being imported unchecked at the moment if we respect preachers like Yu.
Yu and those who are pro Chinese frequently point to the wisdom of Chinese culture with its long patriarchal lines passing down wealth and knowledge from one generation to the next but if this is so, how can modern China be explained? To the west it seems a repressive place and only recently a rich one. It is a place where speaking with your own voice is not allowed but speaking the party line is; from the time of the Emperors to the Great Father as he was called, Chairman Mao. ( No wonder it is so at odds with Britain, the birthplace of free speech, parliamentary debate, women leaders and the British Tabloid. In fact I have no doubt that is also why Britain is now singled out for attack by so many in the Chinese community. ) China is a place few of us would like to live in. Is Yu claiming it's influence would have somehow worked differently in nascent Canada?
As mentioned, Mr Yu and those who are pushing his agenda appeal to every other to the white male in Canada he can. In doing this he has reached out to the aboriginal population of the West Coast who obviously have Asian characteristics. The irony here is that the country of Mr. Yu's heritage which he is promoting treats its own native populations with the utmost disrespect. Even today the government of China settles its own Han Chinese into native Tibetan and Uyghur lands to silence the native voices. I am not sure how anyone can buy into a story of a repressive British colonial culture that is being written in a land where even today they lock dissenters up in mental hospitals and prisons such as Xiaobo, or use covert neighborhood informants to intimidate citizens such as in Nien Cheng’s accounts of life in Shanghai during the cultural revolution in her book "Life and Death in Shanghai" or roll over students with tanks such as in Tiananmen.
The British heritage in Canada is much better that what is portrayed by biased, agenda bent historians. It includes the concepts of human rights and free speech that allow immigrants to come to this country and say the things Yu is saying, unfortunately. It also includes the resources that we cherish and enshrine in our national symbols, the ones not plundered as they would have been had this country belonged to any other group.
The critical omissions of Mr Yu.
If Mr Yu's and everyone else who today seek to portray the British as evil racist colonizers are to have credibility, they have to also assume that any other group would have done things differently at that period in history. The truth is, this is not very likely at all.
Mr. Yu, in judging late 18th century Canada by the modern western values of Human Rights is ignoring that the country of his own culture has not even adopted these values today. I think if we ever did have a point of comparison, the world would consider itself lucky that as reasonable a people as the British were the ones who did the colonizing of the better part of the globe at a time in human history when considering ones nation as superior to all others was the norm. Can you imagine, for example, if there had been a world spanning German empire or maybe a world spanning Iranian one, more frightening still a Russian one or a Chinese one. I do not think human rights would be on the table. Do you?
That is not to say the British Empire was perfect. Far from it but then what do you expect? It was a product of a people barely out of the renaissance as I recall. The world had just been declared round and racism, as we call it today was simply a phase of evolution for most of the leading nations of the world. Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Britain, China, Japan these are all countries that at one time or another exhibited racist qualities. Some still cling to them today and I won't name names.
I believe what helped the British to be the first of the great nations to evolve out of racism was the fact that it's soldiers travelled in great numbers over seas to protect its empire. In the process they quickly learned of all the faults and horror the white man could inflict on the world and also the horrors of other cultures and peoples too; but also benefits. War, it seems, was the greatest social mixer of the twentieth century. Also notably, when we look at countries where their war time populations did not travel in great numbers over sea, we still see the most flagrant cases of racism and xenophobia. Coincidence?
The bottom line is, if Yu is suggesting that British Canada acted differently from how any other nation would have acted in the world of 1907, he is lying. But then, Yu and the new Vancouver communities that support him are not interested in truth. Yu is interested in stirring up emotionalism. He is creating a villain to rally his troops against, one that he can maximize his following with and one that fulfills the conservative Chinese communities mandate of humiliating the British just as they are taught to. But Mr. Yu is just a front man for a bigger picture.
Creating the other:
Like the self titled website "The Ugly Chinese Canadian", which seeks to drum up pity for itself, Yu uses a subtle "us vs. them" language that makes it seem like he is speaking for all Canadians and that it is the British who are the outsiders in Canada. If Yu is really fighting for a better Canada he was he would not be seeking to hack away at one of it's most important roots, but for Mr. Yu, its personal.
Mr. Yu is the grandson of Chinese immigrants to Canada who chose to leave rather than live in the anti Asian atmosphere of early Canada. For him this goes far beyond the warbling of the propaganda machine of the Chinese government taught to his parents, this is vengeance, this is war for what was done to his fore fathers and from what I understand of the Chinese community, pride in your family heritage is very important. They have long memories so I am not putting myself in a good place writing this but then again, there is nothing more British or Canadian than standing up to bullies.
All the more ironic then that by threatening a separatist western Canada in the future because of Asian immigration, that the has in fact vindicated the very policies that made his grandparents leave. You have to applaud Yu for the effort. It takes a lot of skill to weave a message of hate and vengeance that does not sound like one or to take down a country from inside by attacking its roots without getting kicked out. Would have his work been targeted to any other group than the "Anglophone" Canadian white male, I am sure his work, as it is currently crafted, can and would fall into the category of a hate crime. As the British and English become an increasing minority in Western Canada, maybe it will. If his message sounds like it was made in the Peoples Republic of China, it's because it was, the problem is , its getting a more receptive audience every day in Canada though sheer numbers but certainly not intelligence.
Canada is after all experiencing an unprecedented wave of immigration from Asia. Approximately eighty-four thousand Asian immigrants arrive in Canada every year compared to only about eight thousand from the UK. They are taught by their home countries to hate the West and particularly the British. These efforts were redoubled after the Tiananmen protests shook the Chinese government’s confidence in controlling the opinions of its people. Is it any surprise that with so many new Canadians from China that they are receptive to picking up their old rhetoric from back home in the form of Yu's teachings.
Julia Lovell writes in her Blog China Beat
"But the most convincing gloss on today’s patriotic distemper presents it as a substantially state-engineered phenomenon, rooted in one of the Communist Party’s most successful post-Mao political crusades: Patriotic Education. Searching for a new state religion around which the country could rally after the bloodshed of 1989, the Party skillfully reinvented itself through the 1990s as defender of the national interest against Western attempts to contain a rising China. To dislodge the worship of the West that had helped foment much of the unrest leading up to 1989, successive Patriotic Education campaigns waged in textbooks, newspapers, films and monuments drew concerted attention to China’s “century of humiliation” (c. 1840-1949) inflicted by foreign imperialism, always beginning with the Opium Wars, always passing slickly over the CCP’s own acts of violence (most notably the manmade famine of the early 1960s; the Cultural Revolution; the 1989 crackdown)."
Yu is merely the new spokes person for the Chinese government message now within Canada. Side by side with the cuisine and culture we have imported come the hackers and hacks. To provide a further anecdote for where this anger comes from, the Chinese government teaches its nation thirty pages on the Opium war in the government produced text books but only about three pages on the Cultural Revolution. For those of you who need a refresher, in the Opium war the British forces used drugs, opium, to try and weaken and submit the population of China to colonize it's south coast . ( A very similar dynamic that we see today in Vancouver’s reversed Opium War.) Some say that about eleven thousand Chinese died outright of drug addiction and related violence in China in the Opium war period and many other families were affected. However, in the Cultural Revolution, an event of Chinese vs Chinese violence, it is estimated that thirty million of the free thinking, pro western Chinese died at the hands of Mao Tse Tung and his cronies. I guess that Yu is even alive today is a miracle. Well, then again, he is not exactly pro West….
But Yu, he cannot lash out at that. It seems to me that within Chinese culture you are not suppose to question your own and it has a great deal of pride which deals harshly with anyone speaking out against it. In Canada, not only can Yu speak out, he can lash out at Canada itself, particularly the British parts of it and receive accolades from the Chinese community here and abroad while making new political allies. That is the odd benefit of freedom of speech.
While wrapping himself in the Canadian flag as someone speaking out for multiculturalism and the Chinese heritage in Canada, Henry Yu deflects critics of his own racism while vilifying the Canadian and British culture as static and racist, a caricature of itself dated 1907. He is not promoting Canadian Culture, he is actually promoting the Asian, read Chinese, culture he seeks to replace it with. He is simply repaying an old debt, repaying the "Century of Humiliation " as China termed it by exacting the same on the Canadian British heritage here and we are gullible enough to let him.
In his writings he wraps this message in any and every form of academia to cloak it claiming that BC's language laws are racist, its demographics are racist, its immigration laws are racist, the media is racist and of course it's politics are racist. He even goes so far as to say in “Is Vancouver the Past or the Future”, that when Vancouver passed a law to forbid new home owners from cutting down trees, that that too was racist because he perceived that as aimed squarely at Chinese who don't like trees on their property. Is there anything else Mr. Yu?
This from a Princeton PhD and a professor at UBC but then again, it is not without precedent for academics to engage in the intellectual orgasm of mass manipulation; Joseph Geobbles was also a PhD.
It seems clear to me that according to Yu, anyone who opposed the Chinese community’s perspective as defined by him is a racist. It also seems clear to me that that is exactly what the professor himself is verging on being if not already. Let’s be specific, a great actor, Edward James Olmos said, "There is only one race, the human race." I am sure Yu has many white friends. He just is on a mission to humiliate the British and their Canadian descendants. He hates that the British and Canadians frequently take his homeland and culture to task on human rights and that they made his grandparents feel unwelcome. All his motivation can be reduced to his clan vs. my clan. If so, how far have we really evolved if we listen to him?
The United Kingdom is about Unity. Unity of nations within and with out its boundaries. It has been since it was formed. Canada is about unity of people under the symbols of the British Throne which do in fact make us different and better than our neighbors to the south. It is such small thing which is the key and it is this small thing, a picture of a queen on every coin or a crown above every government symbol which Yu and his allies hoping to weaken if not erase. The monarchy today is seen by some as a non sensical relic but it is the symbol not of riches or power as some try and paint it, but of hope for a better way, an ideal of a better nature than hate, a better way than greed. Yes maybe it is a romantic ideal but I would not want Canada without that.
Yu is also reminding us that in a democracy, united by the emotionalist teachings of agenda laden historians like Yu, what were ill informed interest groups yesterday can unite tomorrow and the things we hold dear can be changed; names of places, symbols, ways of government, alliances, history, things that seem to mean so little in the age of money but actually mean so much. He is actually thumbing his nose at Canadian multi-culturalism saying "Look what I can do to you, I can manipulate you." He is showing us that China's system of Oligarchy and imposed racial homogeny is far stronger and more secure than what Canada has grown to become; after all, China won't be changing due to any wave of immigration any time soon.
Pity.
It is a shame that this is the way of things. That people are so ready to embrace his hate as progressive and for a paycheck when really it’s a dead end. What Yu and the cult he is cultivating won't ever admit to or look at is that we British Canadians have a love far greater for the human aspects of Chinese and Asian culture than hate it even if Yu seeks to portray the reverse. Yu simply seeks to transfer his hate onto us. All you have to do is take a walk to the Institute of Asian Studies at UBC where Yu is a member and read the names on the founding plaque: Potter, Piper, Granot. What is the favorite meal in England today? Its curry, not bangers and mash.
My graduation picture from UBC was taken beside the statue of The Goddess of Democracy because I was so moved by and never want to forget the Tiananmen Square protest; some of the bravest, happiest and most hopeful young people I ever witnessed. The man with the grocery bags telling the tank where to go. That is how I feel writing this.
That is the real China waiting to be born, maybe alive just barely in Taiwan. That is the real Canada that I am fighting for in this blog. That is real Britain. That is the world united against the shadow of darker days.
When Yu asks why we Anglophones seem oblivious, as he puts it, why we don't do more, why we don't speak out against his threats of attack on our culture well maybe Mr. Yu, we are not as racist as you hoped; maybe we like plurality, maybe we just want the respect that is due along with your slanted version of events, or maybe at least in Vancouver BC where big money and big gangs from Asia run the show (more often than not carefully behind their front men) we are just too afraid of the repercussions. Boy then, ain't I a big dumb gweilo.
Replacing Ivy with Bamboo
Ya know, I was walking through English Bay the other day and I was reminded how quickly things can change in the places you love. There was a new art installation of statues there. The statues were of a group of Asian men with heavily exaggerated features, laughing. The inscription near the statues said they were from a artist from China who had never displayed out of the country before and they represented ecstatic joy.
I could not help but l remark at a couple of the statues, that I had never seen fingers held up behind the head like devil horns to represent ecstatic joy; and then it occurred to me, Chinese slang for white people, Gweilo, Foreign Devil.
Even I had to laugh. It was a very good joke if you knew where to look and had a knowledge of Chinese culture and language. No wants to believe that racism and hate can be re-imagined, reinvented, regurgitated or re-embraced. Not when we in Canada and Britain at least have spent so much effort in erasing it.
But it can.
Sometimes it's staring at you right in the face.
So who is the racist now, is it me , or Yu?
Reference:The Vancouver Sun, Feb 1, 2010 "Vancouver's Not So Quiet Revolution"
http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Vancouver+quiet+revloution/2507847/story.html
The Vancouver Sun, Feb 8, 2010 "Should we talk about skin colour in Kits"
http://www.vancouversun.com/Should+talk+about+skin+colour+Kits/2536157/story.html
The Vancouver Sun, Feb 8, 2010 "English is the language that unites us"
http://www.vancouversun.com/life/English+language+that+unites/2536173/story.html
Essay by Henry Yu: Is Vancouver the Future or the Past? Asian Migrants and White Supremacy
http://www.history.ubc.ca/documents/faculty/yu/YU_PHR_essay.pdf
The victem culture blog: The Ugly Chinese Canadian
http://www.uglychinesecanadian.com/
Quick Reference on Opium War
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars
The Blog: China Beat
http://thechinabeat.blogspot.com/2009/04/its-just-history-patriotic-education-in.html
CBC article: Minorities to rise significantly by 2030.
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2010/03/09/statscan-minority.html
