It was uncanny. I don’t know if it was just that I happened to be stumbling on all these titles around the same time or that reading one revealed the roads to the others: Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction by Gina Marchetti, Curry: Eating, Reading and Race by Naben Ruthnum, Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong, Know My Name by Chanel Miller. Somewhere between Minor Feelings and Know My Name, I had a conversation where I mentioned how I’d read a picture book at the library sometime around first or second grade that talked about the Chinese head tax (my memory produced the number $500, which, surprisingly, proved accurate, and if that doesn’t strike you as a large sum, think about inflation: using the Bank of Canada inflation calculator going back as far as they are able (1914) to now, that $500 would amount to $11,575 now) and the dangerous work Chinese labourers did for railroad construction. Someone asked what the Chinese head tax was, which got me thinking whether I’d learned anything about it in school, whether I’d encountered this information at all after that picture book, which I’ve not been able to find since; there’s a lot we don’t learn in Canadian history classes, isn’t there?
Shortly after that conversation, the shooting in Atlanta. Shortly before that, Half Baked Harvest’s inauthentic pho incident and why it matters (I’ve also discussed food and cultural appropriation before here, but Rebecca Du has presented the case very thoroughly, including information about what the issue is here, how Teagan could’ve handled it better, and what reparations might look like, as well as links to more resources, so I’d urge you to check out the article on Medium). “This is an American problem”, you might think: nope, Canada’s not immune.