![]() ![]() Education was a very high priority for their parents, and Mom and Dad both completed high school, which was considered a good education in the 1920s. My parents went to schools with other Canadians, and though Japanese was the first language each acquired at home, they soon were fluently bilingual and had many non-Japanese friends. ![]() Asians, Canadian-born or not, differed from other Canadians in language, physical appearance, and behavior. My father and mother were born in Vancouver in 19, respectively, and survived the trauma of the Great Depression thanks to hard work and a strong extended family, which was held together by economic necessity and the forces of racism in British Columbia at that time. But in the early part of the last century, there were no constitutional guarantees in this country. ![]() They bring to it their vigor and their exotic practices, languages, and beliefs. Today I watch the Chinese family that operates the corner store, the Punjabi cab driver working long, hard hours, and the Mexican itinerants picking vegetables all doing jobs that few Canadian-born folks are willing to endure, they are part of the stream of immigrants like my grandparents who have enriched what has become a highly multi-cultural society. He's stopped by his friend, who tells him, “Leave it there we'll start work tomorrow.” One of them looks down and spots a twenty-dollar bill, which he bends to pick up. Two immigrants arrive in Canada on a Sunday and take a stroll together along the street. There is a story that neatly encapsulates this belief. Like the waves of immigrants who have come to this place over the past two centuries, my grandparents saw Canada as a land of opportunity and plenty. They had no formal education, spoke no English, and were of a culture totally alien to Canadians of the day, who had different attitudes and perspectives about everything from family to customs. My grandparents started their lives in Canada with little more than hope and a willingness to work. They went back to Hiroshima, and both were dead in less than a year. After my birth, my father's parents never went back to Japan, and my mother's parents returned only after World War returned only after World War II, disillusioned by their treatment in Canada. But it was a journey to a distant land with no assurances they would ever return. Japan was their home, and their intent was to return to it when they had made their fortune. I cannot imagine the terrible conditions that made them take the chance to come to a country that regarded them and treated them as belonging to a kind of subhuman race. Like many other Japanese, my maternal and paternal grandparents came to Canada less because they wanted to make a new life than because in Japan they were locked into extreme poverty. Laws were passed to bar them from voting, purchasing land, and enrolling in universities. Small, diligent, smelling of strange foods, speaking heavily accented English, these Asian newcomers seemed to be another kind of human being, willing to live in cramped quarters and squirreling away their hard-earned money. JAPANESE IMMIGRANTS BEGAN arriving in Canada in great numbers at the end of the nineteenth century, lured by the tremendous abundance of land, fish, and forests that promised money. Сhapter ONE My Happy Childhood in Racist British Columbia ![]()
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