Disorientation

by Ian Williams

  Like the Greater Toronto Area, the Greater Vancouver Area also has its ethnic enclaves. The city becomes more diverse as you travel east. Affluent white and Asian people live in Point Grey. I lived near Little India. As you go east and south beyond the city, you’ll find large Chinese populations in Burnaby and Richmond (53 percent) and South Asians in Surrey (32 percent).

  Vancouver is more conspicuously moneyed than Toronto. BMWs are Vancouver’s Honda. It’s no big deal to see Porsches, Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Aston Martins. Students traverse campuses in Balenciaga and Supreme. They carry boxy Fjällräven backpacks. They step on the backs of their Gucci shoes until they’re flattened into a pair of slippers. At minimum wage, those shoes cost two weeks of work. Two of Canada’s three most profitable malls are in Vancouver. Near Pacific Mall, in the city’s luxury zone, there are stores so fancy I have never heard of them, but I know they’re not for me. (How do you know that? Why are you limiting yourself? Please. Let’s not kid ourselves.)

  Allow me a hypothesis. I’m fine if it’s proven wrong. I can’t help but think the extreme valuation and conspicuous consumption in Vancouver is a display of people proving they are worth being here. The policies of immigration attract the best people of a foreign country—more points for doctors, graduate degrees, etc.—then question their credentials, then underemploy and devalue them with stunning systemic biases. I don’t know how many generations it takes to get beyond that debasement. And so, to compensate, the immigrants to Vancouver (those who can) buy expensive properties, things, so all you see upon looking at them is their value, taken to a literal extreme. Not all. Some of the money is old money, built over generations in Canada, and held quietly. Some of the money is relocated money, perhaps from Hong Kong into Canadian investments in the event that political tensions with mainland China escalate. Some of the money is young money, spent as if the world were a playground. Again, of course, there are Asians in Vancouver for whom none of this is true. Yet how are they perceived? I wonder if all of the money associated with Asians in the region looks equally threatening to white Canadians who see no way to compete with it. Hence the headlines.

  * * *

  —

  In Vancouver, at the University of British Columbia, I gave my (mostly white) students an exercise designed to increase their capacity for risk and empathy. The exercise goes like this: Visit a place that makes you uncomfortable or insecure. If you grew up in a city, go into a forest, into the wild (safely, etc.), veer off path (safely, etc.), encounter the terror of aporia. If you are from a suburb, venture into the poorest postal code in Canada, East Hastings. Don’t rush through. Find a place to be and stay there. Don’t ignore people. Write there without anthropologizing or trafficking in misfortune. Note your anxieties. As a third option, I suggest entering an upscale store where you don’t think you’d be welcome. Process the experience and allow yourself to be processed.

  One fall, I did that last version of the assignment. I went into an expensive store in Vancouver’s luxury zone with a friend, a Brown guy, born and raised in a very white Quebec town. My friend was expensively dressed, as usual. See the above hypothesis. The salesperson was friendly. He followed us upstairs. We were not harassed. In my head, I heard the white chorus say, See, we told you so. You’ve been a presumptuous, paranoid dick. The problem is with you, not us.

  Would I ever go back to that store again? No. Why? Beyond the evidence of this experience, I know that I am not the desired client in that space. It cannot be proven. It can only be known.

  The exercise that I would like to give students involves asking them to go into a place where they are the only person of their race and attempt an interaction without using any of their privileges, of whiteness, of gender, of money. As a minority in that situation, divested of power, how do you even begin to engage with an impervious world? Like Prufrock, when you are pinned and wriggling on the wall, then how would you begin?

  KOREA: FOREIGN BODY

  There once was a little boy named Amir, my partner tells me. He was in an after-school programme created to keep kids off the Chicago streets. The programme was run by earnest white people and staffed by college students, like my partner, trying to make tuition money.

  One day, she stood over Amir’s desk as he was drawing. She was careful not to compliment his work because he had a habit of destroying whatever art the adults praised.

  Without lifting his eyes from the page, he asked, Are you Chinese?

  She was taken aback by the question. He had seen her every school day since the programme began. Was it a blanket question about whether all Asians were Chinese? Or was it the opposite, an attempt to precisely locate her ethnic roots within the Asian diaspora? Chiayi is not Chinese. She is Taiwanese. It’s a point she insists on with adults. But with little Amir, she was unsure how to respond. Nearby children tuned in for her answer.

  Amir answered before she could. He said, I’m Chinese.

  No you’re not, said one of his friends.

  Shut up, Amir said. You don’t know what being Chinese means.

  * * *

  —

  In the title story of my short story collection Not Anyone’s Anything, I write from the point of view of a Korean student. She resists the advances of a Serbian grad student, a real chameleon, who tries on identities and discards them. It’s the kind of identity-fluid story one could write unmolested a decade ago.

  Recently, in an interview about appropriation, that story came up. The interviewer asked, “Did the idea of potentially crossing acceptable boundaries—in taking stories or voices—enter your thinking as part of the process?” It’s the kind of question where you see a bear trap opening over your career.

  I acknowledged the obvious, that I was neither female nor Korean. I noted that I had lived in Korea for a while. I pointed to years of Korean language classes as evidence of my process before writing that story. I talked about embodied research. I admitted that no amount of research could get right to the soul of someone else. We devalue people when we assume that we know them fully. I didn’t mention that the story is all about identity shifting, but apart from that, I made the points I wanted to make.

  Still, the lie at the heart of fiction, of an author becoming someone else in a story that is not his own, will forever remain unresolved. What made me think I could write credibly as a Korean woman? Should I shut up? Do I know what being Korean means?

  * * *

  —

  In Korea, I was relatively unbothered by my status as a 외국 사람 or foreign person, outsider, literally other country person. See, I still want to impress you with my Korean. Although I was conspicuous by race and language, I was nevertheless handled with care. I’m not naive. My basic humanity did not prompt the effusion of Korean hospitality. Everyone knew I was there temporarily to teach English. The private education industry in Korea is valued at US$17 billion. English institutes alone account for $5 billion. Apart from that one skill with my tongue, I would make no meaningful impact on the country. The kindness of Koreans had more to do with cultural norms than with a verdict about the worth of my humanity.

  At the English institute where I worked, the adult students could be housewives or businessmen. It was in Korea that I first made a point I would often repeat in the future. Your English ability has nothing to do with your intelligence. The fact that you can’t express yourself doesn’t mean that you don’t have thoughts to express. Some people appreciated that validation. Some university students came to the institute to improve their TOEFL scores, or as a reintroduction to education after military service, or to prepare for the job market. Some were under a spell that English would make them happier. The school-age students were overworked, overstuffed with knowledge, visibly fatigued—the institute one stop among many on an after-school educational circuit designed to make them competitive in the future. To meet all these needs, classes ran from six in the morning to ten or
eleven at night.

  Many Koreans I encountered had an almost infantile fascination with difference. White instructors basked and racialized instructors bristled under the Korean curiosity about our hair, skin, jawline, neck length, you name it. Random people on the street would ask me, Where are you from? I made them guess. Africa, the children guessed. America, the university students guessed. Or hoped. Nobody ever guessed Canada.

  I am altogether too forgiving about this sort of thing. Even now, I understand that the inquisitors were partly placing my skin and partly placing my accent. Accents aren’t readily apparent if one is still learning a language. I was a vessel of a certain kind of English and students wanted to know where each vessel was made. To be sure, they preferred white teachers. They associate America and Canada with white natives, not Indigenous or any other race, and so the purest form of English should come from the white body. The institute that I worked for—and many others—limited its teachers to citizens of the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and South Africa. You better hold one of those passports. Teachers from the Philippines were second-class. Native English speakers who were Asian-Canadian or Asian-American were made to answer many more questions to prove their English authenticity.

  Among the foreign teachers, there were sometimes squabbles. In one city, I taught among South Africans—one white, one Black. The white South African was civil to me, and a chillier level of civil to the Black South African. I can recall his face. Tightness near the lips. This evidence would not be valid in a court of law, yet the white one looked at the Black one with disapproval, meant to be invisible but nonetheless readable by any Black person. Why such contempt? I’d guess that the Black South African equally represented their home country to these Koreans. The white South African had the breezy, adventurous ease of a life of whiteness and mountain air. The Black one was in Korea for the money more than the experience. He maintained his cheerfulness in spite of the white one. There they both were, struggling to uphold or abolish apartheid in a country where they were both conferred equal footing yet were both in the minority.

  AMERICA: BODY DOUBLE

  Chiayi and I met at a job interview in Indiana. The university was staging some sort of initiative to diversify their non-diverse faculty with diverse people of diversely diverse diversity. In this manner, the university sold itself to us. We sold ourselves to it. Chiayi and I wore black and snuck looks at each other through the rain. Neither of us got jobs there.

  Ten years later, we were in Vancouver, putting on our sneakers to go running, and I asked her a question I should have asked her when we met in Indiana.

  Have you ever had a Black prof?

  She scrolled through her memory. No, she said.

  How about a Black teacher?

  Definitely not, she said. She grew up in a small Midwestern town that was 94 percent white, a census number she argues is a gross underrepresentation of its whiteness.

  Have you ever had a teacher or professor who was not white?

  Nope.

  I paused to consider the implications of this thoroughly white education, given that we both work within universities.

  No, wait, she said. My Japanese instructor was Japanese. She wasn’t a professor, though.

  I clarified: I don’t mean language teachers. My Korean prof was Korean.

  Then no.

  We stood up, ready to leave the condo.

  There was one Asian professor who taught computer science, she said.

  It felt like a victory, albeit a bit of a stereotype. Chiayi’s brother is a math teacher, by the way.

  I never had class with her, Chiayi said.

  A few days later, I found her at her laptop, scrolling through the faculty of the institutions she attended for confirmation.

  Not one, she said to no one in particular.

  * * *

  —

  I am the only Black professor some of my students will ever have. Occasionally, they remind me that I am a novelty.

  At the beginning of my teaching career, students in my composition class were completing course evaluations around the time of the Great American Boycott of 2006. Immigrants, led by Latinx people, planned to withdraw from work, school, and commerce on May 1 in protest of proposed reforms to immigration laws. I absented myself from the room, as college policy goes, while students completed the evaluations, but from the outside I could hear them—all white—buzzing in debate over the boycott. By the time I was signalled in, the buzz had grown to a roar, and the students weren’t so much debating as trading clichés about immigrants. They seemed to have reached consensus, more or less. One particularly vocal student saw me in the doorway, realized his opportunity, and struck: Dr. Williams, you can come in now. We have your green card ready.

  What followed was the kind of laughter and wincing that comes when someone gets roasted. Too slow to react, I played the part of a good sport. This class was one of my favourites that semester. The students were frank and open to identifying and interrogating their biases. Yet, in that moment, I felt my status slip away, the way it did whenever I left my role as professor or writer and became simply a Black man in America. Suddenly the classroom had become a politicized nation, patrolled by student-officers who were bound in solidarity as Americans. And I, literally stepping in from the outside hallway, had become the immigrant.

  Later, walking back to my office, I processed that bout of disorientation. Why didn’t I defend myself? Why didn’t I say, at the very least, That joke is inappropriate? Why did I find my resources as Herr Dr. Professor Williams, PhD, bankrupt at that moment?

  I remembered where I was: a dying mill town making perennial efforts at revitalization. Upon arrival at the train station, one beheld destitute people trying to stay warm inside a Dunkin’ Donuts. According to the 2010 US census, the town was 78 percent white, 5 percent Black, 4 percent Asian, less than 1 percent Native American, 4 percent multiracial, and 9 percent other. Among these groups, 21 percent also identified as Latinx. (Wherever I live, I’m interested in such numbers.) The university was the major employer. It was integrated into a residential part of the city yet segregated from the residents; that is, the racialized people who lived in the surrounding streets never walked through campus.

  The university itself was predictable in its composition. There were no Black people in senior administrative positions. Black professors were concentrated in the sociology department. Racism in academic circles tends to be subdued and systemic rather than direct and interpersonal. It occurs in the insistent invisibility of whiteness. In seven years, I taught fewer than seven Black students.

  Racialized people of my generation know what it’s like to be educated more or less exclusively by white people. I survived that. Now I wonder what happens to racialized people who teach predominantly white classes year after year. Every time we look into our classes, we are aware that people like us are missing. There’s nobody to fact-check our existence. Instead, we’re checked against a series of stereotypes.

  The usual inferiority issues smouldered in me that would in any young professor, not even a year out of grad school, in his first tenure-track job. What was I but an affable guy, awfully miscast as a professor? To be harder on myself, my identities not only undermined my claim to the position but rendered me forever unable to be good at my job. I was, after all, a Canadian teaching American literature to Americans, a Caribbean Black man teaching African-American literature, again, to Americans. I received my credentials by studying literature but my credibility by passing as (African-)American in class. When convenient or necessary, the closeness of my ethnicity and geography to the assumed American standard could be substituted for authenticity. Black is Black. Canada’s close enough.

  The official course evaluations were mercifully uneventful, considering that professors of colour are routinely rated lower on such evaluations. Or maybe I’ve blacked them out. The only comment I r
emember from my first year of teaching—from all my years teaching in the US, in fact—was posted on RateMyProfessor.com, that paragon of dispassionate commentary (comment since “redflagged” and removed): “Liberal Canadian snob.”

  * * *

  —

  The need that foreign professors feel to pass in America, to melt in the pot, exhibits itself in anxiety over teaching, because the skin, the hair, the accent, the hijab that is concealed in scholarly writing becomes undeniably apparent when we stand before a class.

  In response, a racialized professor might find herself stripping words down to Latin etymology to show mastery of English (seen it) or marking severely to suggest higher standards than other professors (seen it, done it). A POC of a different temperament might become passive, frustrated, nervous, or terse in front of his classes. Teaching becomes a draining performance of composure; office hours interminable stretches of holding one’s ground while appearing accommodating.

  When it comes to nationality, as a Canadian in America, an identity that is not as apparent as being British or Indian, say, I have heard my share of hockey and igloo jokes, seal hunting even, some of which I genuinely find funny. But I didn’t find liberal Canadian snob funny. Whatever mild political view I held remained outside the classroom at the time. Even during what should have been a contentious classroom debate on immigration, I mainly strove to trouble unexamined media regurgitations. After checking the date of the entry, I surmised that the student was displeased with a recently returned essay.

  Sorry to keep dwelling on this. I really shouldn’t fixate on a little negative comment among generally positive ones, especially when other professors, who cannot pass as American, receive even more hostile comments because of their accents, as if American pronunciation were a measure of intelligence. I refer again to RateMyProfessor.com: “Horrible teacher. Did not speak English too well”; “He is hard to understand due to his thick accent and it hurts to listen”; “She is the worst teacher ever! her accent is hard to understand”; “Hard to understand at first, and gets a little nervous in front of the class”; and so on. For English professors especially, in North American society, where oral communication, not writing, is the measure of authority and authenticity, the inability to speak in cadence raises doubt as to whether the professor has anything of value to say at all.