Judy Fong Bates

With the exception of The Five Chinese Brothers, every book I read as a young child in small-town Ontario in the late 1950s and early 1960s was filled exclusively with characters who were white. When I was thirteen I encountered a non-white person in Gone with the Wind. I was in my early twenties when I finally met a Chinese person in Canadian literature in…

I first saw Shenzhen in 2006, gazing through the window of a bus, driving past miles of medium-rise apartments shrouded in a smog of pollution with nary a piece of greenery in sight. It was a place I could not wait to leave. Until 1980, when the Chinese government declared Shenzhen a Special Economic…

I come from a culture where, traditionally, fair skin is prized. As a child, whenever I became deeply tanned from playing outside during the summer in southern Ontario, my parents would tell me that I looked like a Siwashee. I never understood what they meant, but I knew that it was uncomplimentary. It was only in later life that I realized that Siwashee was actually a mispronunciation of the word…

I arrived in Canada from China in 1955 as a five-year-old. Fifty years later when I returned to China for the first time, it was as someone with no memory of her homeland; it was as someone raised in the West. However, because I am Chinese and lived with Chinese parents, I had some innate understanding of Chinese culture—nothing that I am able to explain in concrete…