Passages: Welcome Home to Canada (15 page)

I arrived as a radical journalist incubated by the New Left. After several years of campus politics, supporting struggles that were always happening elsewhere,
it was like going into the field. With the most radicalized labour movement on the continent, Quebec was becoming a test tube of class war, a combustible mix of socialism and separatism. And I was infatuated, an Anglo yearning to go native. Everything sounded better in French, especially politics. The language of European Marxism, with words like
débordement
and
petite bourgeoisie
, had the harpsichord ring of high science. And I developed an ear for the funky slur of
joual
, the no-nonsense voice of our much-vaunted
classe ouvrière
.

Learning a language as an adult turns you back into a child at the grown-ups’ table. Struggling to decipher conversation above the din of a bar, you look for openings. You rely on innocence and charm to get by, hoping that your blunders will be amusing. Rock-hopping from one familiar piece of vocabulary to the next, you learn to say what you can, not what you want, uttering whatever words come to mind until they form sentences. Now I speak French quite well, but I still find I’m a different person when I do so, someone younger and more naïve—more intuitive, even though French is considered a more rational tongue than English.

The first time I really
got
French—that is, felt the language originate from inside of me—was listening
to singer Robert Charlebois, Quebec’s original rock star. There’s something about music that lets you in. You process the words with a different part of the brain. And at the concerts of Charlebois, Pauline Julien and Louise Forestier, I could melt into the embrace of this foreign culture until there was no line left between it and me. I’d felt the energy of a crowd at plenty of rock concerts, but this was different. There was a sense of articulate collectivity—perhaps not far removed from the parish harmony of a Catholic peasantry. Yet there was nothing provincial about it. It wasn’t about anthems or flags. The music was inflected with a transcendent whimsy. Charlebois, who fused rock’n’roll with the Latin rhythms of
joual
, was Quebec’s Dylan, Elvis and Jagger all in one. But he invested his “I’m a frog” status as a
beau/laid
icon with enough irony to deflect facile nationalism. When he sang of
trois Amériques en unison
, you imagined a kind of stratospheric parfait, something far more exotic than the club sandwich of sovereignty-association proposed by the PQ.

To be in Quebec in the early seventies was like being in on the continent’s best-kept secret. Patronized by France and misunderstood by English North America, it was a unique culture, freshly awoken from generations of Catholic repression by
the Quiet Revolution. It was a world of art, music and politics that combined the sophistication of Europe with the energy of America, and the only place you could appreciate it was from the inside, in French. So my infatuation with Quebec culture wasn’t groundless. At the same time, however, it was part of a romance with the Other.

In Montreal, whatever double identity I’d developed as an English immigrant in Canada became wildly exaggerated. I lived between two worlds. At
The Gazette
, I became the labour reporter. (That quaint job description has since disappeared, absorbed by the rubric of “business” reporting. But at the time, after a general strike in the public sector, the jailing of the province’s top union leaders, and a wave of illegal walkouts and occupations, labour militancy had become
the
major threat to political stability in Quebec, and the best story in town.) While dutifully reporting on the class war for Anglo Montreal’s establishment paper, I also worked, anonymously, with a band of Marxist revolutionaries (nothing involving terrorism, in case anyone from CSIS is listening). I saw myself as a kind of spy, commuting back and forth across class lines. And I developed an irresistible urge to declare my true allegiance,
to go over to the other side
. I meant that in
every sense—not just to quit the “bourgeois press,” but to go from being observer to actor, and embrace
la patrie imaginaire
of a country not yet invented.

In other words, I was a nervous breakdown waiting to happen. A fault line was opening up in my psyche, which ultimately cracked under the pressure of a political crisis. It’s a complicated story, and I was an unreliable witness, so I’ll spare you the details. Let’s just say that I staged my resignation from
The Gazette
at a press conference. I went quite mad, and fled to Europe, where my lunacy burnt itself out in the volcanic islands of southern Italy. Back in Montreal, I became enchanted with an African drum group led by a Québécois and a Haitian. Whatever inhibiting mechanism in the brain prevents people from succumbing to outlandish desires seemed to have dissolved in mine. I studied voodoo drumming from the Haitian, dropped out of journalism, and returned to Toronto to join a band led by a singer who had just stolen my girlfriend.

I realize this resumé is getting a little wacky, and I won’t take you through our Spinal Tap adventures on the road to ever-elusive rock stardom. Suffice it to say that eventually the band broke up, and I re-entered journalism. But touring as a musician involved another kind of emigration. Those years of
playing small-town bars—working with my hands—were as close as I’d ever come to the working class I’d spent so much time talking about. Finally, I was
déclassé;
I had calluses. We played Up North and Down East, drinking all night with strangers in corners of Canada I would never have set foot in otherwise. Doing drugs with odd names. Playing a biker bar and hearing the crack of a pool cue across someone’s head above the din of the band.

It was a dubious career, and one that couldn’t last. But at the time, playing music seemed the most honest way imaginable to make a living. Playing music is the essence of being
inside
. And making art is the ultimate repatriation of self. So even now, when I write about performance as a critic—a professional observer—I try to remind myself what it’s like to be on the inside looking out. The immigrant is someone who, by definition, is on the outside looking in, someone whose trip really begins
after
he arrives. And perhaps, through this circuitous passage—immigrating from one Canada to another and back—I had finally landed.

In writing down the circumstances of a life, trying to connect the dots, you wonder what any of it has
to do with anything. You want a life to add up, like a work of fiction. But what I’ve realized in trying to relate my rite of passage is that it’s ongoing—and that may say something about the nature of this place. Canada is elusive. It’s a shape-shifting country, a trickster nation that keeps forcing us to look inward to understand who we are. Yet for a long time I persisted in looking for answers elsewhere, anywhere but here.

I have no family in Canada aside from my mother, wife and son. My brother lives in Oslo. My mother lives alone in the house where I grew up. There, the faces of my father’s ancestors adorn the dining-room wall, as a gallery of gilt-framed miniatures dating back to a certain Edward Johnson in 1694. Photocopied evidence of my mother’s Danish heritage recently arrived in the mail, sent by her brother. I learned that my great-uncle, Odin Rosenvinge, made his living painting Cunard ocean liners for postcards—ships that were the forerunners of the one that brought me to Canada. The documents also included a chart from the
Yearbook of Danish Nobility
, which traces my mother’s family back to royal roots in Denmark. My heritage, which I have tried so hard to escape, is beginning to look more exotic. Maybe I’m not English after all. For a moment
I entertained the notion that I could be related to Hamlet, which might explain the touch of madness.

On some level, we all emigrate in search of who we are. With or without a ship. Even if we never leave the country, we leave the family to create our own world. Then, at a certain point, when our past begins to loom as mysterious and undiscovered as any place on earth, we try to find our way back before it’s too late.

Ying
Chen

ON THE VERGE OF DISAPPEARANCE (END OF THE CHINESE LETTERS)

D
EAR FRIEND
,

Your letter, coming from so far away, and after such a long silence, first brought me joy, then troubled me, even more so because I’m in the habit of granting the greatest attention to your feelings and opinions.

I’m glad that even while successfully managing your affairs, you have found the time to read and reread the words of Kong Zi. The two activities should be very complementary, the link between them being so fragile.

You believe that those who don’t read Kong Zi are not real Chinese. You seem to be worrying yourself about the moral education of my children, who weren’t born in the land of their ancestors. You imagine them in the company of robots, efficient but without souls. I remember, in times past, you weren’t preoccupied with moral questions. But now
you treat us differently because we’re in the West and we run the risk, more than you, of sinking into decadence. I don’t know what to say about this. I have the exact same feeling of powerlessness each time a Westerner comments loud and clear about continental China’s political system. I don’t think a foreign country should be judged according to second-hand information. We can’t form a sensible opinion as long as a country and its people are strangers to us, when we don’t deign to learn their language, and when we haven’t shed sweat and tears on their land.

Don’t worry: my descendants born into this land won’t be particularly demoralized. I admit that my children won’t read the words of Kong Zi (who is here called Confucius) right away. They don’t have to learn the science of governing or the necessity of obeying at their young age. They also don’t know the Bible yet, which has caused so many torrents of blood to flow. But already they can recite many ancient Chinese poems, and they watch the film
The Little Prince
every day.
The Little Prince
is an excellent moral lesson, accessible to the children and also to me. It portrays the principle of Love, as in all the holy books, but this work has a tenderness and sensitivity without equal, it teaches nothing but the art of
living, it questions without resolving. It pleases me because a child is at the centre of the story, and not a sovereign.

You regret the fact that after the Cultural Revolution a new elite left China. You consider this departure one more betrayal of the great tradition. You compare this gesture to the May Fourth Movement at the beginning of the century; you judge them both to be ill-omened. You don’t even distinguish the escape and disenchantment of the eighties from the madness of the sixties. You don’t untangle the causes from the effects. You prefer the fighters to the escapees. “Once gone,” you say, “this elite is quickly Westernized.” As you aren’t very objective in matters concerning me, it seems, you didn’t know to exclude me from this elite. And no one is unaware of the profoundly derogative meaning of the term “Westernized,” and the haughty tone of anyone who pronounces it. I left, therefore I’m Westernized, eliminated, lost, disappeared, finished. This is the fate reserved for traitors throughout history.