The upcoming Asian Canadian heritage month has made me think a lot about my identity as a Chinese Canadian. More specifically, I have been thinking about our society’s shift in attitude towards people who look like me— from xenophobia in the past (and present), to the current romanticization of East Asian culture.
When the pandemic first began, I encountered tireless casual bigotry. From acts as seemingly innocuous as people deliberately not going through doors I held open for them, to bold insolence like passersby dramatically holding their breath as I walked past, I experienced subtle and not-so-subtle discrimination. I was yelled at to “go home”, but where was I supposed to go? This is my home.
The sad truth is that I experienced the best of it. Asian Elders faced the bulk of the anti-Asian hate crimes during the pandemic— a quick Google search for “elderly Asian Canadian hate crime” provides 17,700,000 sickening results. Social media was no stranger to the rise in hate crimes, either. As any regular Instagram user can attest, one would open the app to be barraged with infographics, articles, and surveillance footage of yet another brutal attack against an elderly Asian person.
In reality, East-Asian Canadians have faced discrimination and xenophobia for hundreds of years. For example, the Canadian government passed the Chinese Immigration act in 1885 as a way to restrict Chinese immigration after the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway. This act enforced a $50 head tax on Chinese immigrants, becoming the first piece of Canadian legislation that excluded immigrants based on their ethnicity (Gagnon et al.). The Canadian Pacific Railway itself is a fitting example of Canadian discrimination against East Asians— the construction of the CPR would not have been possible without the 15,000 Chinese labourers who suffered under inhumane working conditions (Lavallé 2008), and yet the federal government did not formally apologize until 2006 (Chan 2016).
Additionally, Asian Canadians continue to encounter a myriad of harmful stereotypes, including but not limited to the “model minority myth” and the “Yellow Peril” movement. Firstly, according to Yao (2021), the “model minority myth” is a stereotype that “depicts Asians as hard working [sic], successful at school and in the workplace, and as economically prosperous”. While this may seem like a positive stereotype at first, the myth “overlooks a history of systemic racism towards Canadians of Asian descent and trivializes contemporary problems within Asian Canadian communities” (Yao 2021). Secondly, “Yellow Peril” refers to the social movement that was formed after Asians immigrated to Western countries and agreed to work for lower wages, which was seen as a threat to society (Tsu 2005). Asians were portrayed as barbaric and uncivilized, which can be compared to COVID-related anti-Asian racism.
I am astonished by how quickly our society has shifted from alienating East Asian Canadians to overly romanticizing our culture. Just two years ago, East Asians were ostracized at an all-time peak, and now East Asian culture is glorified and fetishized by our society. At times, it feels like non-Asians love my culture more than I do. By “love”, I don’t mean self-acceptance or anything of that nature— I mean an intense idolization of cultural traits for which I was made fun of before.
Suddenly, my appearance, which is used to “other” me, now seems to be in vogue. For example, the “fox eye” trend, which gained popularity in 2020, consists of people applying makeup around their eyes to make them appear elongated and slightly upwards-slanting. This technique is most commonly used by people with rounder eyes that are considered “beautiful” by the Eurocentric standards that exist in North America (and, by extension, the world). Why is this okay? My naturally almond-shaped eyes subjected me to name-calling in the predominantly white elementary school I attended. Now, the same people who pulled their eyes back to mock me are wearing makeup to look more like the face they made me resent.
It goes without saying that makeup can be a fantastic outlet for self-expression, but when that expression comes from an oppressor mimicking a feature for which the oppressed were shunned for hundreds of years, it becomes more complicated.
Other examples of our society’s shift to romanticizing East Asians include the hyperfeminine “exotic” trope used to portray East Asian women in popular culture, and deifying East Asian media (i.e. K-pop and anime), both of which may be classified as “Yellow Fever”. “Yellow Fever” is a derogatory colloquial term that refers to white men fetishizing East Asian women, or non-Asians fetishizing East Asians in general (Spolia 2021). One cause of Yellow Fever is the harmful stereotypes associated with East Asians— for example, being docile and subservient. This fetishization places East Asians in a position where society objectifies and puts us on some kind of sick pedestal, on the basis of racial stereotypes.
I hope that this article has provided another outlook on our society’s perception of East Asians, and the way it has shifted. Please keep in mind that the majority of this article was anecdotal, and may not reflect the views of others.
NOTE: While personal accounts can certainly be useful and informative, it is also important to learn from formal texts as well. Provided below are some resources to learn more about the topics discussed in this article.
Resources for further learning:
Hu, Nian. 2016. “Yellow Fever | Opinion.” The Harvard Crimson. https://www.thecrimson.com/column/femme-fatale/article/2016/2/4/yellow-fever-fetishization/.
Yao, Diamond. “Anti-Asian Racism in Canada.” The Canadian Encyclopedia. Historica Canada. Article published November 18, 2021; Last Edited March 30, 2022.
Yao, Diamond. “Model Minority.” The Canadian Encyclopedia. Historica Canada. Article published November 18, 2021; Last Edited March 30, 2022.
Yu, Henry. “The white elephant in the room: anti-Asian racism in Canada - Beyond.” Beyond: UBC. https://beyond.ubc.ca/henry-yu-white-elephant/.
References
Chan, Arlene. 2016. “Chinese Head Tax in Canada.” The Canadian Encyclopedia. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/chinese-head-tax-in-canada.
Gagnon, Erica, Jan Raska, Lindsay Van Dyk, Monica Macdonald, Sinisa Obradovic, Steven Schwinghamer, and Western University. n.d. “The Chinese Immigration Act, 1885 | Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21.” Pier 21. https://pier21.ca/research/immigration-history/the-chinese-immigration-act-1885.
Lavallé, Omer. 2008. “Canadian Pacific Railway.” The Canadian Encyclopedia. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/canadian-pacific-railway.
Tsu, Jiang. 2005. “Failure, Nationalism, and Literature: The Making of Modern Chinese Identity.” Stanford University Press, 2005, 80.
Yao, Diamond, Jing H. Wang, and Greg Moreau. 2021. “Model Minority.” The Canadian Encyclopedia. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/model-minority.