In Grade 2, I was one of the only Asian students in my class. I distinctly remember crying when a white girl made fun of my “flat nose” and told me to go back to China.
My high school, however, was more racially divided. There were specific areas of the school everybody knew were for the Black kids, the brown kids, the Asian kids. When my daughter was born, he and I never discussed whether we would teach her Mandarin or Cantonese. I obviously couldn’t teach her Mandarin and my parents didn’t live in the same city as us. But she could learn Cantonese from her dad and my in-laws.
But my resistance also went deeper. I considered a classroom of predominantly Chinese kids a “false” representation of a Canadian environment. And I thought my daughter would be surrounded by immigrant children who were already fluent in Mandarin, which would make her an outcast.