by RAF KATIGBAK

An Iranian, a Pakistani, two Vietnamese, a couple of Filipinos and two Chinese Canadians walk into a bar...

While it sounds like the set-up for some insipid barroom gag, that was, in fact, the scene on a crisp Friday afternoon when I gathered together a group of local Asian-Canadian artists for an informal chat. The location was a quiet, vine-covered terrasse on St-Denis, and present were filmmaker Shahin Parhami, writer/filmmaker Omar Majeed, photographer May Truong, Annam Le (aka DJ Mana), artist/singer Cheryl Sim, filmmaker Yung Chang and the head of Canada’s longest-running Asian Heritage Festival, Accès Asie, Janet Lumb.

The subject of our informal 5 à 7 rendez-vous was the month of May, more precisely, Asian Heritage month, and Accès Asie—the nine-day festival taking place in venues across town that includes performances by taiko drummers, a cyber-improv session between a scratch DJ, contemporary pianist and VJ, photo installations, documentary films and much more.

Now, I’ll forgive you for not knowing May was Asian Heritage month; not a lot of people do. And it’s okay if you didn’t know that Montreal’s Accèss Asie Festival—which runs from May 4 to 13 and features amazing work by Canadian artists with origins that range from Indonesia to Iran—is Canada’s longest-running Asian Heritage festival.

Heck, I’ll even cut you slack if you didn’t even realize that Iran was an Asian country (so is Turkey, by the way). Do you know why I can be forgiving? Because I’m Asian, and all Asians are zen-like, peaceful beings who would rather sit quietly in the lotus position than stir up trouble.

And if you believe that, why don’t you ask me to show you some kung fu and how much rickshaw drivers make while you’re at it? (In New York, about $1 a minute, which ends up being, like, $15–$20 a ride.)

Searching for common threads

The truth is, like most minorities in this province, many Asian-Canadians are frustrated. That is one of the reasons we—an Iranian, a Pakistani, two Vietnamese, a couple of Filipinos and two Chinese Canadians—are here, to have a chat about Asian heritage, and what it’s like to be Asian-Canadian today. Here’s a small excerpt…

Mirror: Janet, what made you decide to start up Accès Asie, and what sort of challenges did you face putting it together?

Janet Lumb: When I was approached about the idea of Asian Heritage Month, I was aware that there was a lot of talent in this city, but everyone was in their little ghettos. So, Chinese in Chinatown, the Japanese in their centre, the Indian community in their temples, and there is still very little integration. There are still these cultural ghettos everywhere, which is a natural movement. But my idea was to promote, celebrate and integrate all that into the mainstream. Make sure these histories, incredible talents and secrets are revealed to the Montreal public.

In cultural life there hasn’t been much presence at all. At one point I was at the NFB and Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee’s names came up and someone asked, “Who are they?” This is someone from the NFB, who works in that medium, and who didn’t know who they were. To me, you can’t get much bigger, they’re like the Michael Jackson of Asian cinema! This was an indication of how important having a festival is.

Yung Chang: One of the reasons why it’s so difficult to have an Asian heritage month is that there are so many different Asian cultures. Even if you look at who’s just sitting around this table...

M: So with such a diverse ethnic make-up, how do you tie a festival together? What is the Asian commonality?

Cheryl Sim: Living here. Being a hyphenated Canadian, being newly arrived and having experienced the same blanket perceptions. Those are very strong common denominators.

JL: Plus having a history that is so ancient.

Shahin Parhami: Plus we’re immigrant cultures, the whole diaspora thing.

YC: Plus we’re all willing to read subtitles.

The Q-bert factor

M: As artists, do you find your ethnic background helps you or hinders you?

CS: Well, there are so few Asian artists out there working in our different mediums, that we have to bear the responsibility of telling the majority what’s it like to be a fill-in-the-blank Canadian. And everybody puts that responsibility on you once you go public with your art.

YC: But I don’t really mind playing into some of those expectations, because it’s not actually playing into them. It greatly influences me. At least at this point, doing a film about truck drivers or something like that doesn’t feel right. I’m working on a film called Up the Yangtze, and because of my background, I’m able to get certain access, and to give a perspective different from someone more Western. In a sense, I’m able to explore two sides of a story.

DJ Mana: When I was growing up, there were no role models for young, up-and-coming Asian-American youth. The only thing I connected with were scratch DJs like DJ Q-bert and the Beat Junkies, DJ Babu, all those guys. I always liked DJing, but I got into that style because I saw these visible minorities succeed in their art and it was empowering to see. I never really had any problems, or maybe I never paid attention, I was just too focused on practising. But that’s what I learned from Q-bert and all those guys: just practise and never mind everything else, you’ll just break the boundaries through your music. It’s irrelevant what I look like.

New ghettos

M: “Multiculturalism” and “diversity” are two words that are thrown around a lot in the political and art world, but don’t really seem to be doing as much as they could.

May Truong: Actually, I was just having a conversation about that with another artist. She happens to be white, and she’s trying to make a documentary about natives in Canada. She was complaining that she, as a white woman, was ineligible for a lot of grants, because most of the grants were going to minorities, and how there was a whole backlash against white pride. What she didn’t understand was that when you are a minority under the grant system, all minorities fall under the same category. There’s no differentiation between Dominicans and Asians; everybody is considered the same. So while it seems that there are a lot of equity and minority grants out there, that’s not actually the case.

CS: And it’s not just the visible minorities that are grouped together. It’s people with disabilities, aboriginal people, it’s even cultural, like Polish and Italian people. The problem is that we’re all grouped together like “the collective other,” and it’s totally constructed by institutions that are trying to address—in any way they can—the pressure that’s been put on them by artists of colour, aboriginals and people with disabilities who are trying to get a little bit of equity to get their projects made. But it’s obvious to anyone in the system that their idea of, “Okay, let’s catch-all everybody into the same basket” doesn’t work.

YC: It’s almost like you think you’re working under the umbrella of multiculturalism and all of a sudden you’re working in...

CS: ...another ghetto.

Nice, quiet immigrants

Omar Majeed: Another problem is that controversial perspectives can get lost. There’s a certain emphasis, a certain agenda to put out good PR for Canada as a very tolerant, multicultural country. So there’s a certain kind of project that emerges through the grant system, one that tends to focus on being self-congratulatory.

Right now I’m working on a doc about Islam. It’s not for Islam or against it, it’s about being a North American Muslim and trying to reconcile the difficulties in that. I think I get a lot of resistance, because it’s not clearly endorsing the idea of, “Yeah, we’re multicultural, we’re getting along great!”

SP: As an Asian, Iranian, Middle Eastern, artist, if you’re applying for a grant, then the subject should be just related to your experience. If you’re Iranian, you have to make a film about Iran. I once worked hard on this proposal with three Ph.D. scholars; it was their thesis on dance in India. We knew each other, the dancers etc., and we wanted to go there to shoot. It didn’t get accepted. Then I just wrote one proposal the night before about Iran and my little community in Montreal, and I got the grant.

It also extends to other stages in the development of your artistic career. You get into festivals, that’s what they want to see—someone with that kind of name they can associate with Iran, and either it has to be something against Islam, or pro-Islam, or about female circumcision. It’s like, if you’re not making films like that, you’re not a filmmaker, not an artist.

OM: In a way I think there’s an element not actually of innovation in style, but more about representing. It’s not about developing your voice. But identity is such a fragile thing—how can you identify yourself as someone whose influences derive solely from your cultural background? Anyway, we’re all Canadians as well. I grew up with the Guess Who and Men Without Hats just as much as anyone else—why should those aspects of pop culture not shape me? I think we’re often asked to play a little into the exoticization of it.

M: Cheryl, I saw you wince when he said exoticization.

CS: One of the long-standing issues for Asian women particularly is the whole exotic-therefore-erotic notion in popular North American society—actually, Occidental society in general—the idea that Asian women are docile, submissive, meek. I work at a contemporary arts centre and sometimes when I wear something a little audacious, it’s impossible for my non-Asian colleagues to not say something like, “Wow, an Asian woman dressed like that, that’s so crazy, that’s making such a statement.” It’s not a hard criticism, it’s just an indication that these things have not gone away—the exoticization is real.

OM: I think we have to let ourselves off the hook for trying to be all things to all people at all times. We don’t have to love Bhangra and not be into the Stones. We can pick and choose.

MT: Yeah, we can just love the Bhangra remix of the Stones.

OM: (to DJ Mana) Yeah, get working on that...

Ethnicity vs. nationality

M: We talked a little about some of the challenges faced as Asian Canadians, now I’d like to ask, how do we move on? What would you like to see change?

CS: It’s about language. Not necessarily French or English, but words that we use. I don’t mind people asking me where I come from, when people talk to you and ask, “What’s your ethnic background?” or, “What’s your origin?” That’s cool. But when people say, “What’s your nationality?” as if being from here is a preposterous notion... I mean, we’re all curious about people, I’d just like people to think about the language that they use when we talk to each other.

OM: It’s also about losing certain aspects of condescension—people coming up to me asking, “Well, I’m going to a Moroccan wedding, what should I bring?” Like, I don’t know! It’s not like you’d go up to a white person and ask, “What was Scottish history like in 400 BC?” It’s a certain element of—not to say the myth of multiculturalism, because I understand it did a lot of great things—but under the myth of multiculturalism, there is not as much interconnection as people think.

MT: Also as Asian-Canadians, we all know what it’s like to be the only person of fill-in-the-blank origin in school.

YC: I grew up in Whitby, Ontario, a really small town where it was myself, a Chinese kid, and my best friend, who happened to be Indian. And for some reason, everyone at the school assumed that we were brothers. I even remember my teacher writing on the blackboard, birds of a feather flock together. And then looking at us...

OM: People used to think my brother and I were twins. He was nine years older and looked like my dad, and I was considerably heavier and looked like my mom... I mean, twins! That’s a strong word!

M: Maybe they meant twins

in the Danny DeVito/Arnold Schwarzenneger sense of the word?

MT: I was part of a photo show, with 65 international women photographers, the theme was redefining beauty. I submitted a picture of two Asian girls, just because I wanted some representation of that in the show. But when I was at the opening, because I was the token Asian or whatever, I was being interviewed from some women from Star TV. Before the interview, she approached me and said, “Which one of you was the model and which one of you is the photographer?” It was crazy, we don’t look the same at all.

Different in Quebec

JL: On a national level, it’s more multicultural, there’s an exchange, it’s accepted. The inter-culturalism we have in Quebec is pretty well one-way; it’s not an exchange. It’s integration into the white francophone culture.

M: But there’s a reason for that.

JL: Right, because the white francophone culture is so threatened outside of Quebec. It’s such a delicate issue here. In all of North America, it’s the sole place for francophone culture. Is it more racist here than in B.C. or Ontario? No, it’s very different. I had people from out west trying to get me to say it’s more racist here, but it’s just different. The history of immigration here is different, the dynamic for needing to protect francophone culture... they have to fight for that. I agree that going under one big umbrella is disputable, but by going under one thing, it’s in the power of numbers that you gain more visibility. It promotes conversation. You get people saying, “Oh, I didn’t know that Turkey is part of Asia!” Being in that situation, it forces people to ask these sorts of questions.