The Divine Words of Mr. Luk
Non-fiction by Christopher Cheung
You know how there’s that doomsayer at the beginning of every disaster movie that nobody listens to? The character who looks up at the sky and tells the clueless protagonist that there’s a storm coming?
For me, that guy was my landlord, Mr. Luk.
I ran into him on the sidewalk outside our house in south Vancouver suburbia one day, and there he was wearing a blue medical mask. When I asked him about it, he said he was on the hunt for more.
“If you see any for sale, especially the N95s, please let me know!” he told me in Cantonese. “We’re going to see a second SARS.”
At the time, our nation’s Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam said, “I don’t think there’s any reason for us to panic or be overly concerned.” But for many Asian Canadians, especially those like Mr. Luk from Hong Kong, haunted by the memory of SARS, the news of a coronavirus spreading in China was enough for them to start battening down the hatches on this side of the Pacific.
My grandmother, who spends much of her waking life on WeChat and WhatsApp, began forwarding me warnings about covid-19 from her friends. I ignored them as I did the many videos of dancing cartoon animals she sends my way.
But then my friends cancelled their March wedding, as guests would be flying in from East Asia. My barber, a Hongkonger, told me not to visit her without a mask. My local soy shop put up plexiglass, and the staff, in hairnets, carefully scooped my tofu with gloved hands.
It was hard for me to feel the fear when Mr. Luk foretold the pandemic. I’m Chinese, but Canadian-born, and had never lived overseas.
The panic hit home for me in February when the rapture appeared to hit our region’s Chinese gathering places. Shoppers vanished from the Chinese malls of Richmond, a majority-Chinese suburb south of Vancouver. Gone were the dedicated regulars at diners, food courts, and dim sum restaurants. At my local supermarket, rice and instant noodles were cleared from the shelves.
At my Cantonese-speaking church, individually wrapped Lord’s Suppers were ordered for us. During communion, the sanctuary echoed with the sound of slippery hands applying Purell and the crackling of plastic as we unsealed our wafers and grape juice. The cleansing body and blood of Christ — even cleaner than before. It was the last communion we’d share before moving gatherings online.
I was impressed how organized this all was without any direction from any of our local health authorities. No one here yet was telling them to stay home or physically distance, but they knew to do it anyway. It was almost as if Chinese Vancouverites were ready for this pandemic with Plexiglas, disinfectants, and face shields waiting in storage, their version of Cold War fallout shelters. Putting on a mask was nothing political, as commonplace as putting on pants; unlike those who refused them, kicking and screaming about their freedoms.
My journalist friend Ian, who headed the South China Morning Post’s quarantine team during SARS in Hong Kong, has a good way of explaining the response: it’s simply a “gut reaction” based on “cultural memory.”
Almost everyone I knew who had loved ones in East Asia and was experiencing the pandemic overseas in real time was shocked that stricter measures weren’t being implemented in bc. When the province finally declared a state of emergency on March 17, they were in disbelief that it took so long.
I was proud to be part of a community that demonstrated how to fight covid-19 and thought that other Canadians would be eager to pick up tips. But there were some people who, instead of commending Chinese Canadians for the initiative, blamed them for the pandemic.
I never thought my landlord would be the one to warn me of the worldwide invasion of an invisible alien enemy. I also never thought that it would also waken another threat: violent racism.
We were always told that we were better than the us in this regard. As they say, Canada is not a melting pot that assimilates, but a colourful mosaic or tossed salad of cultures.
When an Asian American family, including two toddlers, was stabbed at a Texas grocery store by a man who blamed them for spreading covid-19, I thought nothing like that would ever happen here.1
In Canada, one of the first cases of anti-Asian racism was on January 26. A CTV reporter in Toronto tweeted a photo of himself with his Asian barber, who was wearing a mask. “Hopefully ALL I got today was a haircut. #CoronaOutbreak #Coronavirustoronto,” he wrote.2
As painful as it was to hear — especially since the barber shared that he had offered masks for anyone who wanted one to keep them safe — this was the kind of racism I thought would follow covid-19 in Canada, the racism of ignorant jerks.
But as it turned out, not a week went by during the pandemic’s first months without a new case of racism making the headlines, with East Asians or East Asian-looking people cursed at, spat on, and punched. As a child of immigrants in one of the most diverse cities in the country, I was shocked. Never before have my friends and I felt such a spotlight on us because of our descent.
Harmonious multiculturalism might be baked into the Canadian brand, but it’s not as old as our persistent legacy of racism.
Years before covid-19, I had relatives who wore masks at family dinners if they had a cold, out of concern they might pass it on to someone else.
It’s sad that this item that many Asian Canadians wear out of concern for their neighbours is a bullseye for physical and verbal attacks. My female friends were worried most of all. One friend’s father started driving her home after visits so that she wouldn’t have to take the train. Another was in agony over whether she should wear a mask on the bus: risk covid or unwanted attention?
It was often mostly women and the elderly who were targeted by racists. A pregnant woman who was grocery shopping with a mask on in downtown Vancouver was told to “go back to China.”3 A few weeks later, a mother and daughter, Canadians who emigrated from Hong Kong, were singled out for their masks while strolling in Richmond. Two white men in a car shouted at them, “Hey you! You fucking chink ... go back to your country! Look at you with your masks, you’re what’s wrong with society.”4 A woman named Dakota Holmes was punched, knocked down, and told to “go back to Asia” and “you don’t belong here” — painfully ironic as she is Indigenous.5 A ninety-two-year-old Chinese man with dementia was shoved out the door of a convenience store, causing him to fall backwards and hit his head on the concrete sidewalk. The attacker shouted racist remarks at him related to covid-19.6
Dr. Yinxuan Huang, a sociologist at the University of Manchester believes “maska-phobia” is at work.7 According to Huang, one of the things that masks symbolize in the west is the inability of someone who is considered a minority to integrate with the host culture.
I can only imagine how hard it must be for groups with other clothing items that make them viewed as poorly integrated or even barbaric, such as Muslim Canadians with niqabs or Sikh Canadians with turbans. Just last year, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh was told by a man on the street to “cut” his turban off so that he would look more “like a Canadian.”8
Friends and I who are Canadians of colour often talk about the curse of being viewed as not from here because we don’t look white; academics call it “perpetual foreigner syndrome.”
We go through life in our own country running into people who insist on us telling them where we’re really from.
Anti-Asian attitudes might’ve followed covid-19, but every recorded pandemic in history was accompanied by a blame game of its own.
Finger-pointing is inevitable because infections are transmitted through interactions, says Dr. Steven Taylor, a professor of psychiatry at the University of British Columbia. His book, The Psychology of Pandemics, was published last fall, just in time to help us understand what’s going on in our heads with the coronavirus on the loose.
In addition to a biological immune system that helps us fight pathogens, explains Taylor, we also have a behavioural immune system that helps us avoid infection entirely. For example, it might cause us to feel disgust in a dirty environment. It might cause us to feel fear when we’re around unhygienic people or even health workers, leading us to avoid them.
There is also research that says our behavioural immune systems influence our social interactions, leading us to feel negatively towards people who are unfamiliar to us, such as immigrants or foreigners with cultural habits we are unfamiliar with.
“It’s an evolved mechanism,” said Taylor, pointing out that diseases historically came from explorers, “but that doesn’t make racism right.”
Viruses have also long been used as a rationale for legitimizing discrimination.
The Black Death arrived in Europe during a climate of anti-Semitism — the worst pandemic in history made even more fatal by hate. Medieval Christians thought of Jews as wicked for killing Christ, a narrative so pervasive that the Pope himself had to speak out against it.
As a result, Jews were blamed for spreading the disease, despite the fact that fewer of them were dying of the Black Death. Jews removed grain from their homes during Passover, which deterred rats, and also avoided drawing water from wells in crowded communities.9 Nonetheless, Jews were massacred in the thousands across Europe, from Barcelona to Strasbourg, with many attacks organized by Christians, who were harbouring hate long before the plague arrived.
The idea that bad health follows bad people is an old one — think of the plagues on the Pharaoh of Exodus or Agamemnon in the Iliad — and it has persisted throughout the pandemics of history.
In Vancouver, during the Spanish flu, white settlers believed that the Chinese were deserving of an outbreak because they were a perverse people.
On Feb. 6, 1917, the Vancouver Daily World ran an article with the headline, “ORIENTAL POPULATION TAKES WAGES OF SIN.” The population in Chinatown was hard hit by the flu, and the paper blames their moral corruption as well as the “overcrowded conditions in which these people have insisted in living.”
Of course, the settler community was not interested in examining the role of racism in their Chinese neighbours’ health outcomes. At the time, non-whites were forbidden from living in many parts of the city due to restrictions in real estate deeds. Owners could not “sell to, rent to, lease to, or permit or allow to occupy, the said lands and premises, or any part thereof, any person of the Chinese, Japanese or other Asiatic race or to any Indian or Negro.”
The fact that covid-19 first spread in China legitimized a lot of the anti-Chinese discrimination that followed, explains Dr. Huang. For President Trump, who already had tense relations with China, it was the perfect excuse to demonize the nation.
Racists and xenophobes will always find some new issue to act as their Trojan horse, with discrimination smuggled inside.
In July, I watched a video recorded at a Mississauga T&T, Canada’s Asian grocery giant. A white man who refused to wear a mask inside the store lashed out at Chinese staff, holding them responsible for what he called the “Wuhan communist virus.” When he questioned where they were from, a staff member shouted back at him, “I am Canadian.”
We’re coming up on a year of the pandemic’s onset. I recently tuned in to a Cantonese talk show on am 1320, with the hosts swapping stories of angry anti-maskers in public and attempting to unpack their conspiracy theories. One of them shared a story about a friend who had an anti-masker say to him that society was ruined because of “people like you.” The friend responded, “You think I like wearing this? I’m doing this for you!”
It frightens me that the state of politics can suddenly make Canadians of a certain background the centre of discrimination. I felt as though my family and friends woke up one day with targets on their backs. What if my grandmother strolls past someone who decides to blame a global pandemic on her?
Dr. John Paul Catungal of the University of British Columbia’s Social Justice Institute laments that our “self-congratulatory” attitude towards multiculturalism in Canada makes us blind to the racism that still persists. How can we examine racism if we think we’ve matured beyond it as a nation?
If covid-19 has pushed the racists among us to lash out, hopefully it will also push all of us to realize that we still have a lot of work to do on learning to live together. After all, there’s no vaccine against racism. »
sources:
1 https://globalnews.ca/news/6769462/asian-family-attacked-coronavirus-hate-crime/
2 https://nationalpost.com/news/chinese-canadians-facing-hate-racism-for-coronavirus-outbreak-much-like-the-sars-outbreak-in-2003
4 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/richmond-bc-clara-kan-racism-covid-19-1.5565451
5 https://globalnews.ca/news/6954443/coronavirus-racism-woman-punched-vancouver/
6 https://vancouversun.com/news/man-arrested-following-another-anti-asian-racist-attack-in-vancouver
8 https://globalnews.ca/news/5980241/jagmeet-singh-confronted-over-turban-montreal/
9 https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/health/01plague.html; https://books.google.ca/books?id=VPtGVsPv_0sC&pg=PT64&redir_esc=y#v=snippet&q=wells&f=false