Great cities spin myths. Toronto’s myth is that it is the most multicultural place on earth, a place of disappearing majorities. More than 100,000 immigrants flock to the city every year: despite the myth, they have a hard time trying to fit in. Their children know better. There’s nothing to fit into; the city is all about improvisation.
What We All Long For traces the lives of four young people, the children of immigrants to Toronto. Tuyen, Carla, Oku and Jackie are close pals—a bunch of young people you could see laughing it up on an early morning subway ride in Toronto. Tuyen is the youngest daughter of a Southeast Asian family who came to Canada as refugees, worked hard and got rich. Although it pains her parents, Tuyen has abandoned their toney suburban house for grittier digs downtown where she spends time using family and friends as subjects for arty installations. She does go home now and then to visit, and to raid her mother’s purse when the older...
Morton Beiser is a professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at the Joint Centre of Excellence for Research on Immigration and Settlement, and has devoted his career to research about immigration and its effects on adults and children.He is author of Strangers at the Gate (University of Toronto Press, 1999), which describes the settlement of the Vietnamese boat people in Canada.
Advertisement
Advertisement