A Snapshot of Three Generations

Rae — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 02:58:26 +0000

My dad was born and raised in Jamaica. He came to Vancouver as a student and there he met my mom, a girl from Oakville, Ontario whose parents had emigrated from Scotland and who was also a student. One thing led to another and, as they completed their studies they planned their wedding. I still cannot fathom that mom’s parents refused to attend her wedding because she was marrying this dark skinned guy.

Fast forward a few years and I’m eight years old. My grandmother has died a number of years previously; my grandfather is living on his own back in Oakville. My mom makes a trip back there to visit and ends up bringing him home to Vancouver to live with us, where he was part of the family for the next thirteen years until he died. It wasn’t my first exposure to the values I grew up with, but it is the example that has stuck with me.

To this day, I will be walking down the street and people will stop me and say: “You’re a Wong, aren’t you?” Inevitably I will discover that we attended elementary school together or grew up in the same neighbourhood and they remember me from that time. As one of the three dark kids – the other two being my brothers – in my school, in my church, in my neighbourhood, we stood out from the crowd. I’d like to think it was because my parents tended to dress us a triplets, but I know it was the colour of our skin. And we grew up in Surrey. Try walking down any street in Surrey today – it might be easier to count the number of white faces you see rather than the brown ones.

Now I view multiculturalism through the lens of my children. Out of the 25 kids in my daughter’s grade one class you will find perhaps twenty different ethnicities. More importantly, those differences are celebrated. Where else would you find her classmate Sahej dressed as Abraham Lincoln for Historical Halloween, or Ginger dressed as Aretha Franklin? To them, colour is something you paint with, not the tone of someone’s skin. We should all be so lucky to see the world that way.

- Geoffrey in Victoria

A Vision of Colour at Age Five

Rae — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 07:28:09 +0000

I’m aware of living in a multicultural country. The fact that I’m aware of it, is the point of my story. When one of my sons was 5 years old, he came home from daycare talking incessantly about a boy he played with that day. I was trying to decipher who the boy was, so I asked my son to describe him. He told me his name and then went on to tell me the colour of his pants, the sound of his laugh and the location of his “cubby” in relation to my son’s.

The next day I asked the staff to point out my son’s new friend. He was the confident, outgoing kid in the corner – with 4 other kids bouncing around him. Adopted a few years earlier from Sierra Leone, he was the only black kid at the daycare. Had my son described his skin colour, I would have known who he was instantly. However, it wasn’t the boy’s skin colour or accent that registered with my son as “different”, rather it was the sound of his laugh and the colour of his pants. I love that. – Erin in Vancouver

Making Multiculturalism » colour

A Snapshot of Three Generations

A Vision of Colour at Age Five