AlliterAsian (2 page)

My Mother

Ricepaper
6, no. 3 (2001)

Janet Lumb

“Mom, are you home?!” we'd scream down the hall after answering the phone. “No, I'm putting my face on,” she would reply as she rushed around the house.

I'm a busy musician (sax player), film composer, activist, and director of the Montreal Asian Heritage Festival. My mother, Jean Bessie Lumb, is busy at the helm of an extended family of twenty-three, including nine grand-children. She has more energy than the whole family put together, and her health and well-being continue to improve. She can still touch her toes at the age of eighty-one. My mother is the source of my inspiration.

I was raised in what appeared to be a typical Chinese-Canadian family. My parents ran a grocery store, a laundry, and a Chinese restaurant. My mother was always very proud of how the family was raised. She took that pride to include the divine order of our births. “I have three boys and then three girls,” she said mischievously.

There are many immigrant families that experience a “frozen-in-time” phenomenon—where traditions are passed on from generation to generation even though they're living in a new country. Our grandfather, a Toishan from Canton, came to Canada in 1899 with traditions from the Ching dynasty. Confucian rituals and superstitions were considered sacred. Authority figures were to be respected. Family obligations were assumed.

When I was young, I lived in a rough neighbourhood in downtown Toronto. My parents were unforgivably strict. They were clever
and kept us off the streets. But we were busy. Every school night, the three girls had either Chinese school, Girl Guides, or baton lessons. On weekends we worked at the restaurant, the Kwong Chow, and went to Chinese dance lessons at the dramatic association. After these activities, we had to be home for supper. “Your father works hard. Suppertime is the only time the family is together. I want you here for supper!” my mother would often scold.

Values that my mother cherished were ingrained in us—the importance of family and community, respect for others, and respect for ourselves. This meant that we were to be “proud of being Chinese.”

Little did we know that my mother, born in Nanaimo, BC, as Jean Bessie Wong, had to walk past a white school to go to a segregated school attended by only Chinese, Natives, and Japanese. She was a tomboy and played on a baseball team made up of her eleven siblings. She quit school at the age of twelve to help the family pay for her older brother's tuition. At sixteen, she left Vancouver for Toronto to work at my aunt's restaurant and, only a year later, at the age of seventeen, opened her own grocery store. The store did so well that she brought the rest of her family to Toronto.

At the age of twenty, she met my father, who had arrived in Canada from Canton in 1921. They were chaperoned when they went for ice cream on their first and only date and the next day, their arranged marriage was settled. Because of the laws at that time, even though my mother was Canadian-born, she lost her citizenship when she married my father in 1939. In 1947, Chinese were granted the right to vote, and my mother applied to regain her citizenship.

In 1957, at the age of thirty-eight, she was chosen as the only woman on a committee of twenty Chinese delegates from across the country to meet with Prime Minister Diefenbaker. Their purpose
was to persuade the government to change the immigration laws that separated Chinese families from the rest of society. These immigration laws were a result of the Exclusion Act. Although it was repealed in 1947, even ten years later families continued to be separated. Only those who had been granted full Canadian citizenship could bring their families to Canada, and only family members who were over the age of sixty-five or under the age of eighteen could come into the country.

My mother helped Wong Foon Sien, who was chosen by the committee to speak on behalf of Chinese-Canadians, to prepare the speech.

“I already knew the speech because I helped Wong Foon Sien practice it over and over again,” said my mother. “I was asked to sit beside the Prime Minister because I was the only woman. He kept asking me to repeat everything. I repeated the speech word for word, because I knew it by heart. The meeting was a success.”

My mother explains, “I didn't know at the time that Diefenbaker was partially deaf. Wong Foon Sien was sitting beside his bad ear, and I was sitting beside his good ear!” My mother always laughed when she told this story. She became the unofficial mayor of Chinatown from that point on.

I was the fifth child in our family and was called by my Chinese name: “Jing.” My personal conflicts with living in an environment where two different worlds clashed ended up pitting my family demands against the ties I had with my Canadian friends. I was traumatized. These crises evolved into issues, then reasons for my eventual involvement with the Asian Heritage Festival. As a teenager, the cause of my angst became the basis for my defiance against my family.

When this happened, my mother would sigh in surrender and say,
“I planted turnips, but I got a carrot. If I said the moon was round, Jing would always argue with me.”

In the meantime, my mother kept up an exhausting schedule of organizing Chinese community dance classes, saving Toronto's Chinatown from further demolition, working full-time at the restaurant, and constantly heading up various community and political activities. In 1976, she received the Order of Canada for her work as a “defender of Chinatown” and her work as a representative of the Chinese community during the appeal to change immigration laws.

When I moved to Vancouver, rebelling against my family was redirected toward social politics. For ten years, I performed at numerous benefits, demonstrated at various political rallies, and worked with juvenile delinquents and with the Vancouver Folk Music Festival. Had my mother's example of tireless community activism rubbed off on me? Eventually, I moved to Montreal and began working with autistic children, playing with many bands, and exploring my music through other disciplines.

In 1995, I was approached by Bernard Nguyen to start an Asian heritage festival. Initially, I was more intrigued by the possibility of finding musicians for my film work.

Needless to say, the festival has evolved into another entity for me. Its goals are ambitious. Our mandate is to break barriers and build intercultural, interdisciplinary, and intergenerational bridges. Many of the ethno-cultural communities are ghettoized, especially in Montreal, as a result of the immigration policies and the precedence of the language issue. However, institutional changes are happening, the social climate is improving, and the dialogues are beginning. One of my dreams is that there will no longer be a need for an Asian heritage festival.

The role I chose to take with the festival is based on my passion
for the arts and my activities in the community. This includes my interest in the politics of the cultural issues of being a Chinese-Canadian. Most importantly, the festival is creating a sense of family and a sense of community. My many interests are now unified as one.

The importance of family and community, respect for who we are, respect for others, and a belief in human nature are all values that have been passed on to me from my parents. Yet I am still far from achieving these goals. My ghosts, rages, neuroses, passions, illusions, and frailties continue to haunt me. I have always strongly identified with my mother, but I do wonder about my superwoman complex.

I have fond memories of my father who arrived in Canada with nothing but the shirt on his back. Little did we realize that the gold he came to find was found at the hearth of our family. My mother.

       
A
UTHOR
C
OMMENTARY

“Hearth of Gold” was conceived in 2000, thanks to the relentless determination of a colleague/friend/partner in crime at the time and to date, Milton Tanaka. Since the festival's inception in 1995, the work included behind-the-scenes soliciting for multidisciplinary arts funding that was, at the time, nonexistent. In 1998, thanks to the inspiring perseverance of numerous wilful cultural activists, Montreal Asian Heritage Festival, now called Festival Accès Asie, was awarded funding from the Canada Council for the Arts. —
Janet Lumb, 2015

       
A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

Janet Lumb (
janetlumb.com
) was born in Toronto, lived in Vancouver, and has resided most of her life in Montreal. Janet loves to play, explore, and work with artists in multidisciplinary settings.
As a third-generation Chinese-Canadian and a social activist in heart, mind, and spirit, she is inspired by arts, community, ecology, and education. Defying Canada's geographic borders, Janet aims to connect people in a profound and interactive way with her current project, the Asian-Canadian Wiki (
asiancanadianwiki.org
).

A Buck a Bag for the American Dream (Tobias Wong)

Ricepaper
9, no. 2 (2003)

Alan Woo

Armed with a cotton candy vendor apparatus and fifty bags of air labelled “Dreams,” Tobias Wong stands on a busy corner in Soho, New York. The bags come in sizes of S, M, and L. At an asking rate of one dollar per bag, the dreams sell out in a matter of hours.

Has Wong hit it so big in the Big Apple that people would clamour to buy his bags of air?
Wallpaper
seems to think so, having profiled him in its March 2003 issue. Even Wong's own account of life in New York sounds like the stuff that dreams are made of.

I last saw Wong in 2000 at the Ovaltine Cafe on Hastings Street in Vancouver, where we ate an early dinner. Now, through emails and transcontinental telephone conversations, we discuss his work as a “paraconceptual” artist, his Asian-Canadian identity, and the bright lights of the big city.

“Living in NYC is like having everything at your doorstep. There's very little that I can't do here,” says Wong. “Here, you can do anything at anytime—buy drugs, have sex, go to parties, look for art supplies … It's all here, it's wonderful,” he says. “I do have thoughts about settling here, but I'm not so serious about that at the moment. It's a very difficult city in which to balance your sanity. It's very fast-paced. And that gets to be nerve-racking at times.”

Wong has other cities to compare New York with, having grown
up in Vancouver and schooled at the University of Toronto. “I hated it there,” he says of Toronto. “So fucking pretentious. They think they're a big city like New York. The fact is, they've mistaken being curt as some sort of snotty attitude.” Then there was a short stint in London, England: “Now, there's attitude.”

When Wong moved to New York in 1998, he didn't know what to expect but soon realized, despite being Asian-Canadian, it was not that hard to fit in. “I often credit Vancouver for being a large enough city to grow up in, allowing me to adapt to New York so well. Vancouver really is up-to-date with many trends. Also, travelling around and jumping from a few schools prior to my move to NYC gave me a good start. But when I tell people that I'm Canadian, they are usually shocked.”

In terms of his Asian heritage, Wong claims that it has had little effect on his experience living in New York. He does notice, however, that the Asians in NYC are predominantly from mainland China, and “… the Americans aren't so familiar with the differences between them and those from Hong Kong.”

The difference between Canadians and Americans? According to Wong, it all comes down to one thing: “Sensibility—the Americans lack it. We're also a little more well-rounded and familiar with the rest of the world. I also think we learn from the Americans a lot, both about things we can improve upon and things we can avoid.”

But times have changed. When the United States declared war on Iraq, Canada did not lend its support. As a Canadian stuck in the centre of the American universe, was Wong worried about a backlash toward him as an artist, or worse, as an individual? “There's really little anti-Canadian shit reported down here,” he reveals. “They are too busy picking on the French. The news here is highly
censored. I have to watch the BBC to get any real information on the war. Everything else is bullshit.”

But before that nightmare, there was September 11. “I was a few miles away. I watched both buildings go down from my rooftop. It's taken a while for me to realize how much that day has affected me and my work,” says Wong.

Wong had been busy trying to clinch an agreement with Prada, after nine months of negotiations and scrambling through red tape. He was on the verge of closing the deal when the World Trade Center was hit. Soon after, borders closed, immigration halted, and America shut itself off for a time to heal. And sure enough, the deal between Prada and Wong was off.

“One of the first things I screamed out loud to a friend who was with me at the time was, ‘I'm gonna lose my fucking Prada job!'” remembers Wong. “But that only occupied my mind at the beginning. For the rest of the day, which felt like eternity, we all thought we were going to die.

“Financially, I don't think I have to explain the number of jobs and opportunities lost right after 9/11. The economy was already going downhill before then. But emotionally, it took a big stab at all of us. All my friends were affected. We didn't realize how much until months later, though. We all tried (encouraged by the city and by New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani) to move on with our lives as quickly as possible. Christmas was around the corner, and we shopped and pretended to be merry. And everything seemed to be normal very quickly afterward, but it was a new kind of normal. The new normal. It wasn't until the first anniversary that I, and many of my friends, realized what a mess we'd been for a year. The first anniversary acted as an alarm clock for us to finally wake up. That was
the hardest part. We had gone a whole year forcing ourselves to be normal, and we weren't. We were pretty messed up.”

Wong soon felt that his work became very irrelevant, especially since a lot of it had to do with luxury and extravagance. “I felt like there was little purpose for me to continue my work in that manner. I still feel that way. But I know I must continue. It's what I understand, and I need to keep it going.”

And Wong has kept it going. Who needs Prada when you can rip off Burberry? Wong took the patented Burberry pattern, made buttons out of them, and distributed them at art openings and among friends and colleagues. Burberry caught wind of Wong's work and used it in its own advertising campaigns. As Wong describes it, it was “a knock-off of a knock-off.”

Other interesting facets of Wong's work include test tubes filled with plastic babies, silver pills “so your shit will sparkle,” a redesign of Philippe Starck's Bubble Club chair as a giant lamp, a mirror puzzle, a modern-day menorah, glass chairs, gift wrap made from original Andy Warhol prints, and a Tiffany cock ring (made by simply placing a cock ring inside a Tiffany jewellery box, obtained with permission from Tiffany & Co).

Wong describes himself as being a “paraconceptual artist,” a term he coined himself. “It's like a paralegal, someone who knows just enough about the law but not as much as a lawyer, so you don't think of it as being so slimy,” he explains.

“It's the same for paraconceptuals. I don't want to be tied down as being a conceptual artist. Conceptual art is usually considered a little dry. Too dry for my own taste. It's also a little too much of a cliché right now—everyone's doing it. I'm really trying my own things right now, but I still want people to know that my work
derives from, or has something to do with, conceptual art, yet more beautiful.”

One of his pieces in response to 9/11 was a zinc-cast, chrome-plated box cutter that was produced just in time for Christmas of 2002. Engraved on the side of it are the words, “Another Notion of Possibility.” Wong received a lot of flak for this. He received even more when he voiced his opinion that 9/11 was, from an artist's point of view, very clever and artistic. “They hit one building to get our attention,” he explains. “Then they make us watch as they hit the other tower. I'm not saying it was a good thing. If it wasn't in this context, and it was just about an artist trying to get attention, he would've done it very well this way.”

Wong's foray into the art scene in New York has had fewer hurdles than one would think. Wong says that being Asian-Canadian was not a roadblock for him. “I truly think that not making it an issue myself allowed me to forcefully advance people's attention into the areas I wanted them to see most,” he says. “Also, it's hard to be racist in New York. It's made up of so many cultures. It's very similar to Vancouver that way. But the Mexicans and Puerto Ricans have it tougher. Asian artists are also a hot thing right now—but only if you make art that looks Oriental, which I do not.” Interestingly enough, he doesn't fit into the Asian art scene because of that.

Wong does not hide his Asian-Canadian roots, however. Some can recognize him as being Canadian from miles away. “They hear it in my words:
about, process, eh
?” Because of New York's diversity, people just assume he's a local rather than someone fresh off the boat. “Growing up, my mom made us proud to be Chinese,” he says. “We went to Chinese school every day, and I hated it, but now I really appreciate it 'cause I can read and write it. I used to say that English was my second language because we grew up speaking
Chinese at home.”

Previously using the moniker “Tofu Boy,” Wong believes that his ability to create something over and over again by hand comes from his heritage. He attributes the skills of mass production, patience, and repetition to being Asian. “It's that Zen ability,” he says. “I find it calming, and I can make a million of the same thing in my art project and find it very therapeutic. Hand-crafted as opposed to machine-made. I never used to believe in crap like that, but I feel it's in my blood.”

There is one hurdle, however, that Wong has trouble getting over. He confides:

            
I fight the appearance of looking young—like many Asians—but I've got a head full of ideas that I want people to see instead. I hate having my photo taken. People are ageist. I want my work to represent my maturity. Hopefully, puberty will hit soon.

                  
It's so fucking obvious that the good-looking people get more attention. They are listened to even if they have little intelligence. I fight it every day. I don't want to be cute. But I have no choice. So sometimes I try to use it. But my work is actually too serious to toy with that way.

So how did he end up toying with others by selling these dreams in a bag? Wong explains that in New York, people aren't allowed to sell anything that's considered a “product” on the street. For instance, musicians who make their own CDs, or artists who make their own jewellery, cannot sell their wares on the sidewalk. It is considered competition for the stores. “There was one week where they were all arrested,” Wong tells me. “I wanted to put something out that was confusing,” he says. “The dreams were something in between
product and art, and I didn't get arrested.”

When asked about his home, Wong admits: “I do miss Vancouver. Friends and family. The mountains and the water. The politeness. The slow pace.” But for now, he is content to stand in the middle of Soho, thinking up ideas to peddle, in a city built on dreams.

Check out Tobias Wong's website:
brokenoff.com
. [Note: this website hasn't been updated since before Wong's death in 2010.]

       
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UTHOR
C
OMMENTARY

I miss Tobias [who died in 2010]. I always found him mischievous, intelligent, and funny. I think those qualities are reflected in his art. When I interviewed him for this article, he was just becoming the darling of the New York art scene and making a splash internationally. Even in death, though, controversy swirled around him. He had suffered for years from a sleep disorder and ended up hanging himself while sleepwalking. Retrospectives of his work have been showcased at the San Francisco MOMA and at the Museum of Vancouver, which did an amazingly thorough exhibit for the homecoming king. Whether he is destined to be known as the “Father of the Sun Jar” or for his artistic antics like the pop-up shop that never opened or the wedding registry for his “marriage” to his straight male companion, it's clear that his memory will live on through friends, family, and fans, but mostly through the collection of work he has left behind. —
Alan Woo, 2015

       
A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

Alan Woo started as a volunteer with
Ricepaper
magazine, editing the bi-weekly online newsletter
RiceBeta
listing Asian-Canadian art events across the country. He went on to write numerous articles for the magazine, including interviews with high-profile names such as Margaret Cho and Wayson Choy, while also profiling
up-and-coming artists in the community. He has since written a children's book,
Maggie's Chopsticks
, which won the Christie Harris Illustrated Children's Literature award at the 2013 BC Book Prizes. His next children's book,
Chinese Skip
, is currently in development with Kids Can Press.