Being Canadian

Posted by Chris in Culture, Observations | 1 comment

Here’s an audio documentary in two parts from CBC Radio’s Ideas, on being and becoming Canadian, and the experiences of one Korean family.

The first time I took the citizenship oath, back in 1979, I was 12 years old. My family had been in Canada for only a few years and we were living in Regina.

The ceremony was in a big beige building on Victoria Street. And everyone in the family was very nervous.

My mom made us get “dressed up” in our very best outfits. They were so uncomfortable that my sisters Yu-Kyung and Hi-Kyung, and my little brother Ung-So and I were all fidgeting.

My dad kept saying (over and over): “This is a Very Important Occasion. When we come home today we’ll be Canadian.”

I had no idea what he meant: would we stop eating rice? Stop using our Korean names? Stop being… Korean??? And when I looked around the room, things got even more confusing. Everyone was white, except for us. As far as I knew, white people were already Canadian. So what were they doing here?

The question of what it means to be Canadian is one I like to think most Canadians have gnawed at sometime in the past.

For a Korean living in Korea, one of the world’s more monolithic monocultures, the question of what it means to be Korean is pretty easily answered. For an immigrant to Canada, the questions of what it means to be Korean or Canadian, or both, becomes a lot more slippery.

I’ve lived in Korea for more than ten years, and though I am a permanent resident and may soon receive dual nationality, I am not in my mind or in the mind of any Koreans I know, anything but Canadian, and that won’t change even if I receive a passport.

Were the situation reversed, it becomes harder, for the Korean immigrant, of course. Though in the eyes of the law, and in the eyes of their fellow Canadians, once they have been granted citizenship, they are Canadian. But in their minds and hearts, the balance is lot more precarious — to what extent am I Canadian, and to what extent and in what ways Korean?

For most Koreans, the answers venture into things folks in the west, outside of America at least, feel a little uncomfortable talking about these days — bloodlines and ‘race’. We prefer to talk about ethnicity, or culture, or language, at least in part because it feels like history has left fewer examples washed up on the beach of organized murder and institutional hatred based on these.

I believe — the inevitable strains of racism and xenophobia aside — that Canada’s way (or at least ideal) of accepting and encouraging immigrants to become Canadian while retaining their own cultural identity has been the wisest way, and stands in stark contrast to the America’s ‘you come to American, you’re American now, son’.

But it doesn’t make for easy answers to hard questions.

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