The Mandarin

Today, I woke up late. It’s Canada Day – a stat holiday that affords me to sleep in. I am not a nationalist. I do not dress in white and red and yell, “Go Canada!” at any event. I am well familiar with the onslaught of passionate critique at my position. Especially since I am a first generation immigrant, I expect the you-should-be-so-grateful discourse. I am not.

Why should I be grateful when my family and I have more than given back what we’ve been “given” to this machinery we call Canada?  Why should I be grateful when I know how these borders are forged and maintained? I did a whole doctoral degree in learning and analyzing just this very thing. So save your admonishments on why I should be grateful. I happily embrace the label of “ingrate” in this context.

Back to my morning. Drinking my coffee, I surveyed my facebook feed, the news, emails, etc. I came across the annual Mandarin’s Canada Day free buffet. Apparently, this happens every year. Wow. I love free food. My hope is that food be given away for free everyday instead of hoarded behind the walls and farms of agribusiness.  Upon deeper investigation, however, I see that the Mandarin has the disclaimer that it’s free for “all” except that it doesn’t include “foreign tourists, landed immigrants, temporary residents and/or illegal aliens.” I have no idea how the Mandarin plans to police this – perhaps assign border enforcers at the door? This exclusion shocked me at first, and then it didn’t. Then it became the catalyst of many thoughts, diverging and converging… and so I am a writer and an academic, and I do what I know how to do – write them down and see what the threads are.

-------------------------------------------

First, I want to talk about the space of the Mandarin. When it first opened, it was like a visit to the carnival. The joy of huge amounts of mountains of food that never depleted was a novelty. The celebration of the masses across the hot tables of fried noodles and chicken balls!  The straddling of worlds between the prairie Chinese Canadian fare of neon red sauce in the urban landscape of chic food emporium was an intriguing position.  I went. Of course, I did even as I scorned the “not real Chinese food”.  Who doesn’t want to be part of the carnival?

But every time I went to the Mandarin – and it didn’t matter which location I went to – I encountered jarring instances that alerted me to the complexity of such contact zones.  Once, I went to the bathroom and saw a bunch of little white girls in party dresses jamming their chocolate éclairs down the sink.  The cleaning staff, an older Chinese woman, entered and screamed. I heard the scream as emerging from the depth of a particular outrage. I’ve heard it before.  She screamed, her face red and tears started to stream.  She cussed the girls in Cantonese and Mandarin, her screams getting louder and louder.  The girls froze, and a stall door slammed open. An older woman, perhaps their grandmother, ran towards the girls and swooped them with her arms, hurrying them out of the washroom, the cream and chocolate still smeared and clogged in the sink. Before she left, I saw that grandmother’s eyes – wide with fear.  I’ve seen this fear before too.  This structural affect of racial encounters is as old as the first day I landed in Canada. I know its intimacies and have lived them many times.  I watch that grandmother flee while I attended to my own grandmother as she sobbed and sunk to the floor of that bathroom.

Very near the surface of the model minority representation of Chinese Canadians, there is a depth of rage and that particular form of madness that comes from a life of micro and macro racial aggression.  This madness of the crazy Chinaman/woman is something feared and therefore carefully managed and contained by white anxiety.  It is incoherent to white Canada. It knows no route and reason. It is only heard and echoed back as the indecipherable other, the exoticism that is too exotic to be digested like fried rice and borders on the crazy. Unchecked, in moments like this in the bathroom where innocent white girls having some fun, the madness emerges and erupts. We eat children. 

So another time I was at the Mandarin, two Spanish-speaking men were at the table next to me. I am not fluent in Spanish, but I understand quite a lot.  Somewhere in the middle of the meal, they started discussing what they thought of Chinese people. Before this, I noticed that they were particularly rude to the server, a middle-aged Chinese man.  They didn’t meet his eyes, waved their hand at him dismissively when he asked what if they needed anything to drink, that kind of thing. But when they started in on the Chinese people conversation, other things emerged.  What do you think of Chinese women? Ah, ugly. FEA, FEA, FEA, one emphasized. They laughed. Generally, they agreed that they hated Chinese people. I looked at them, and they stared back at me, hard.

I don’t talk about racist incidents that I witness or are targeted at me much. They detract from the real questions of what conditions sustain these events to occur. It’s not about the racist individuals or the accidental alignment of misunderstandings or over-sensitivities. I am beyond explaining to people. I am tired. It’s tiring enough to live it.

But here it is. I am laying this out for you because it’s important to the trajectory of my thoughts about today, about Chinese-ness, about Canada and this day, and lastly about the Mandarin as a space of contestation, futility, carnival and profound sadness for me.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Did you know that Canada Day is also referred to as Humiliation Day? On July 1, 1923, the government of Canada enacted the Chinese Exclusion Act. From 1885 to that time, we were allowed conditionally to enter through the Head Tax (itself a form of institutionalized racism), but after 1923, we were banned. Families were separated for decades. It wasn’t lifted until 1947 because Chinese Canadian soldiers fought and died in the war, and this was seen as compensation of some kind.  But between this time period, and even now, there are people who won’t celebrate Canada Day/Humiliation Day.  Instead, they remember. Me too. I remember and extend that memory to the present. It’s still humiliation day for many who are not granted the myriad of human rights in this nation. I won’t list them all. The Mandarin already mentioned a few of these groups in their exclusionary policy to the free all-you-can-eat.

(Also, some of the members of these groups are inside the Mandarin even as they are excluded from entering. They are cooking the meals, cleaning the sink of chocolate éclairs and serving your drinks. This is the conditional entry. )

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

It pains me that this space of Chinese-ness, this not-so innocent space of the carnival consumption that allows some to do their postmodern play while fixing some like a specimen to the slide, it pains me. This overt exclusion to the bounty of free eats, the metaphor of the bounty of entitlement, land, sustainable life, is painful. 

I am collecting back these labels, embracing them and spit them back to the Mandarin, to this day, to the state of this nation-state – crazy, ugly, unwilling to let go of the past. Ungrateful.

There is no neat tying of these threads here today. Just an unsettled mess of the tangled and frayed.

Grass: A Short Story

Grass

It all went down in the summer of ’78 when the parents were killing themselves.  Leo Manaro’s mother got up before sunrise one glorious June morning and drank a litre of bleach in their garage.  Two weeks later, it was Carolyn Finley’s father.  He had coached me in softball and was a real brute.  “Winning is everything!” he would scream at us, the line of 10 year-old girls nervously chewing our gum and avoiding eye contact.  Mr. Finley off-ed himself with one of the hunting rifles he displayed in their living room, among all the taxidermied animals that hung on the walls. After Mr. Finley, Manuela Bevis’ mother dropped dead.  No one said the word “suicide”, but we read between the lines. Rumour was she had hung herself.

It was the talk of the neighbourhood.  The adults conversed through the fences as they watered their yards and spoke in hushed tones so the children couldn’t hear.  Their garden hoses forgotten, they flooded large puddles in the grass. They were more interested in the “whys” of the situations while we kids gathered on the streets with our road hockey and baseballs, guessing at the gory details.  Mr. Finley’s brain was supposedly splattered in a million pieces in the basement.  Jimmy Laker said you can’t clean brains out completely – that stuff sticks. 

Nothing like this had yet happened in our quiet Scarborough neighbourhood.  Our street, Winifred, was brand-new, like the rest of the subdivision.  Most of us had moved in at the same time when construction on our houses was completed.  That was just 4 years ago.  What it was before didn’t matter.  It was a place that didn’t have a past, only a wide gaping mouth of a future. The neat grid of streets, the wired fences that divided our properties but didn’t obscure the views into the neighbours’ yards, the young crab apple trees lining our block.  You could almost smell the new car smell.  We began traditions - everyone pitching in money to buy fireworks on Victoria Day, and street barbeques during the August long weekend. We politely shoveled each other’s driveways, hung tasteful Christmas lights and bought Girl Guide cookies. This spate of deaths was baffling to everyone.  It stained our otherwise unblemished record.  It had all been going so well.

The kids watched their parents carefully, taking note of unusual things just in case theirs was next.  Sometimes, we reported back to each other. Cindy Taylor told us that her father, who cared a lot about how he looked, went to work at the car dealership with a wrinkled white shirt underneath his blue blazer and forgot to shave.  Did this mean something?  Stephanie Papadakis said her mother forgot to put garlic in their moussaka last night.  Was that the beginning of the end?  We were gripped with terror and excitement – both.  My parents were their regular selves.  I couldn’t detect a thing which bored me silly.  My dad didn’t talk to me much, waving me away from him like I was a fly while he watched the news.  My mother told me to stop staring at her because I made her nervous.  It was like I said, regular.  About the deaths, my mother said, “There’s more than meets the eye.” She liked English sayings.  She felt they were profound and great conversation closures. 

It was around this time that my dad met Larry Lems, the school bully.  Larry had come to our door one day and asked my dad if he could mow the lawn for him or do any odd job.  I ran upstairs to my room like a scared rabbit at the sound of his voice.  At school, we all knew to give him a wide berth.  Larry tortured kids.  He called us by all sorts of names depending on what bothered him about us the most.  Manuela was Fatso, Damian was Retard, Carolyn was UglyFace, Jane was Negro, Jimmy was Faggot, Seema was Paki, Linda was MotorMouth, Leo was WOP, Albert was Chink 1, and I was Chink 2.  He stole our lunches, pushed us over if we were in his way, and challenged all the boys to fights after school.  He nearly always won.  Needless to say, Larry didn’t have friends. 

So I was horrified when my dad actually gave Larry the job. He even let Larry use his prized 1974, 21 inch, Model 7263 Lawn Boy with the 2-stroke engine. He never let me or my mom touch that thing because he claimed we didn’t understand the power of the machine.  The Lawn Boy was my father’s true baby.  He purchased it from Sears the first summer we were in the house.  He was pretty lazy about actually mowing the lawn, but he liked to maintain it.  The engine was well-oiled and the blades were kept as sharp as Ginzu knives.  Larry used it to cut the grass and even weeded the gardens for a dollar.  All day, he worked.  Our backyard was a jungle of neglect but by late afternoon, it was pristine.  The shorn grass looked neat and inviting.  The flower gardens were free of the choking dandelions and clover.  It was as if the whole backyard heaved a sigh of relief.  When my dad went out to talk to him, I braced myself for the name-calling.  My dad had a lot of nervous ticks.  His left eye twitched, his arms sporadically shot up in the air, he often elbowed himself in the ribs three times in intervals.  All this plus the fact that my dad was also a chink added up to choice meat for Larry Lems.  But it never came.  I peered at them from my bedroom window above.  My dad with his arms akimbo surveyed Larry’s work, nodding with approval.  Larry, swigging the can of Pepsi that my dad had given him, was actually smiling.  He looked different.  It occurred to me that I had never seen him smile before.

From that day on, Larry came over often.  I still scrambled away at the first sign of him.  My dad found him odd jobs to do and gave him a dollar or two each time. He even showed Larry how he sharpened the blades on his Lawn Boy.  Larry paid close attention as my dad squirted oil on the bolts and gently removed the blades.  He then taught Larry how to hold the blades at the exact angle they needed to be for the grinder to scrape at the edge. Larry actually looked like a kid, and not some middle-aged serial killer.  My father also seemed to enjoy this time with Larry, giving him a lot more attention than I ever remembered getting. 

I wasn’t sure if I was more motivated by jealousy or fear of death, but I tried to forbid my dad from letting Larry come over.  I told him what a bully he was, how he terrorized all the kids at school, how he hit a teacher once with closed fists.  My dad didn’t listen.  Instead, he told me that people needed chances to show who they really were.  I didn’t buy it.  I screamed and cried, slammed doors – to no avail.  My father wouldn’t budge while my mother just said, “Those who live in glass houses shouldn’t cast stones.” I had no idea what she meant.

I heard dad tell mom once that he had seen long welts across Larry’s back when Larry lifted his shirt to wipe his face of sweat.  And there were bruises, purple like plums on his arms and legs.  My mother shook her head in disbelief, the way she did whenever those commercials of starving children in Africa came on. 

One day, I gathered enough courage to venture downstairs when Larry was over.  He was in our kitchen, bent over a birdhouse that my dad had bought with his Canadian Tire money, but never got around to putting together.  My dad was beside him, reading the instructions aloud.  When I popped in, Larry lifted his head and said, “Hi, June.” Just like that.  Like a normal human being.  Not “Hey, Chink number 2.  What chinky thing are you doing today?”  It surprised me that he even knew my name.  I said, “Hallo.”  My dad gave me a told-you-so kind of grin.

Summer holidays came.  It was an especially humid one.  While our parents vacated the neighbourhood to their 9-to-5 jobs, we filled the days with running through the sprinkler, daily trips to Chuck’s Smoke Shop for freezies and Lolas, hanging out in each other’s basements watching Love Boat and Fantasy Island and staying cool.  Once in a while, games of Truth, Dare, Double Dare, Promise to Repeat would break out.  I spent 5 minutes in a closet with Damian Jones in a dare once.  We kissed a few times and his soggy mouth tasted like tuna fish melts.  He even reached into my John Travolta T-shirt to cop a feel of my mosquito bite-sized breasts, but we didn’t tell anybody that part.  I kneed him in the groin for that.  The haze of days lulled us into forgetting the suicides ever happened.  We relaxed into the summer heat like a comfortable, swaying hammock. 

Larry didn’t come over as much.  He told my dad that he spent a lot of time with his mother in Mississauga during the summers.  His parents were divorced.  Everyone in the neighbourhood could guess that Mr. Lems was a drunk.  There were days he would come out of his house topless, raging about the damned squirrels on the roof waking him up.  Once, he spent the entire morning shooting at them with a BB gun.  No one knew much about his mother, but the women on the block agreed that no one could blame her for leaving that. They only blamed her that she had left Larry too. We all knew that Larry probably didn’t have it so good.  But still.  He didn’t have to be such a bully. 

One day, my dad found his lawn mower missing.  He knew where to check first.  My dad didn’t return until the sun was already down.  When he did, he was rolling the Lawn Boy up the driveway.  My mother and I watched him from the front door.  All it took was a slight nod to my mother to confirm that Larry had indeed taken it.  My mother sighed and said, “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” He pushed past us inside.  We followed him to the living room where he slumped into the lazy boy.  In the light, my dad looked real tired.  He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hands. 

“That Mr. Lems is a rough man,” he began.  It seemed that Larry denied everything until his father dragged him to the garage and found the lawn mower stored behind some lumber.  My dad watched helplessly as Mr. Lems called Larry all kinds of names that children shouldn’t even ever hear.  He would have given him a whooping except that my dad was there.  I guess my dad took them inside and tried to work something out.  Mr. Lems wouldn’t hear of anything less than some kind of corporal punishment and even invited my dad to give Larry a slap.  No way, no way, my dad had said.  He suggested that Larry come over and work for him for free as punishment.  Mr. Lems thought that was too easy but agreed.  It took a long time, my dad said, on account that he wanted to make sure Mr. Lems, who reeked of Jack Daniels, was calm before he left.  Larry Lems was apparently sobbing, and pleading for his life.  Empty bottles and fast food wrappers filled the place, my dad told us.  “Poor kid,” he repeated over and over again. 

The next week, Larry did come over.  The problem was he didn’t come over to help with the backyard.  It was a Sunday afternoon, and we were scaling fish in the sink.  The silvery bits flashed in the air like rain. We had just gone fishing up near Lindsay and gotten lucky with some big-mouthed bass.  My dad heard some sound coming from the garage and went through the backyard door to check.  He found Larry by the lawnmower. Larry startled when he saw my dad.

“Stay away from me you fucking chink!” he screamed. My dad froze.  “Stay out of my life, or I swear I’m going to kill you and your whole fucking chink family.” Larry was crying, tears and snot streaming down his face.  He then turned and ran out of the garage and down the street, his knapsack dangling beside him.  My dad gazed down the road.  He then examined the Lawn Boy and discovered the blades had been removed.  I observed the whole scene from the backyard.  It made me feel like throwing up. 

Four days later, Mr. Lems was dead.  He was found in his living room in a huge pool of blood.  Apparently, he slashed his wrists.  His neighbour Mr. Farley found him when he thought he smelled something gone bad. No one came to the door when he rang, and he found the door unlocked.  Damian Farley reported back to us kids what his father saw.  The place was filthy, full of garbage and bottles.  Mr. Lems was lying on a couch, and the TV was still on. It was officially ruled another suicide although the cuts in his wrists looked more like deep, clumsy gashes that an ax would have accomplished rather than what someone would do to kill themselves.  Plus the police couldn’t find what he used to do that damage to himself.  “I don’t know,” Damian repeated his father, “I ain’t an expert but I watch Quincy.”  Larry was nowhere to be found.  His mother surfaced later and told the cops that Larry hadn’t been near the scene because he had been with her in Mississauga.  We never saw him again.

The next day, my dad packed up the Lawn Boy and drove it to the dump.  When he came back, he sat out in the backyard gazing into nothing, for a long, long time.  My mother and I joined him, pulling up lawn chairs beside him.  I wanted to say something to him.  But I was only a kid and I didn’t have these kinds of conversations with my parents. It was dusk, and the sweet scent of the grass enveloped us.  The white roses gleamed in the half-light, and crickets began to chirp. We heard distant voices of neighbours having a barbeque. I looked across the fences to the expanse of green that was our neighbourhood. It looked like it went on forever. My mother combed her fingers through my hair and murmured softly, “As beautiful as the day is long.”

Isn't it ironic?

No, I am not echoing Alannis Morrisette here.  I am referring to the funny way that the universe works to stop you in your tracks by giving you some plum just when you are eating handfuls of dirt.  Ha ha, you got me, universe.

So, I started the blog series on my life as a McPhD because I was trying to regain some semblance of a ground to stand on.  June 25th marked the 5th year anniversary of my defense and fearing its approach, I began to string some words together to review what had happened in this period and find some humour (because I was sick of lying in my bed and crying at my ceiling while my tears speckled my pillows.  Very dramatic, I know)  and grace (since humiliation is the hallmark of a McPhD's life, a recuperation of some self-dignity was in order).  I was pleased to know that other people actually read these fragments, and found them interesting.  A lot of people even told me that they could relate.  Wow.  Connection.  In the isolating despair of the McPhD hustle, it is gold to find others to share the dance with.  Thank you!

Now, back to the irony.  I got a job. It's true. Just when I was ready to throw in the towel and blog recklessly about every academic institution that have ever vexed me or my friends, one of them hired me.  Mind you, I have not been hired as faculty, so hold the applause.  I've been hired in administration.  But! I am getting paid in real money that gets deposited into my bank account on a bi-monthly basis. I am finally, regular people.  I even get to line up at the bus stop with all the other nine-fivers at 8:30 am and 5 pm between Mondays and Fridays in my appropriate office ensemble.  This, for now, is enough.  No, it's actually ample.  The chocolate frosting on this cake is that I even get to hold on to my sessional teaching with this institution so that I don't lose my standing. (In this particular school, you spend a maximum of 5 years as sessional and you're out.  But more on that later.)

This means a few things for this blog.  I am committed to finishing the McPhD series.  I must.  There's just too much left to say, so keep reading.  Apologies for the lag between posts, but I was too busy caressing my new desk and new file cabinets and new computer keyboard and new ergonomic chair in my new office to do anything else. 

Last, but not least, University of Venus will be posting the first excerpt from this series next week.  YES!! This both frightens and thrills me - like all really good things.  I better get writing, eh? 

The Colour-Coding of Higher Ed

            The first few weeks of teaching at the college were rough, I will not lie.  Along with the Children and Youth worker program students, I had three classes in the Social Service Worker Program.  All of the classes were on academic writing. As part of the application process, all students have to take an English proficiency test.  There are 4 options that students can be streamed into as an outcome: exemption from writing classes, mandatory class in advanced writing, mandatory basic class with requirements to take the advanced class after completion, and mandatory basic ESL with requirements to complete advanced class.  If you are funnelled into the writing classes, you must pay extra – above the program tuition.  Makes you wish you had paid more attention in high school English class, eh?

                The actual skills level of the classes ranged widely.  Some of them were able to write at an undergrad university level, so why the hell were they assigned into these classes?  No clue.  Then there were some students who didn’t know how to write a complete sentence.  The ESL students had a better grasp of grammar than the “native” English speakers.  And the native speakers could have benefitted from ESL.  Hm.  It was a bit mind-boggling.  Besides from teaching multi-level classes, I got my first real taste of the “reluctant learner”.  In one class, before I would even begin my lesson, inevitably, someone would ask me, “Are we getting let out early today?”  If you need anything to deflate your already frail ego, this was the place and position to be.  I don’t mind telling you that these students terrified me.  Completely freaked me out, and I am talking stomach cramp starting two hours before class kind of freaked out.  

                I started out too nice.  Should have been bad-ass.  I endured a fair amount of teeth-sucking, and texting, and phone-answering in the middle of my classes.  Oh, I let them out early – sometimes 2 hours early (in 3 hour classes) because I could only tread water in the rapids for so long before drowning.  Every week, I tackled it from another angle, trying to make it fun, more engaging.  My Wednesday class was the worse of the bunch while my ESL class was a joy.  I only had 4 ESL students who were paying double the tuition fee as international students and were not going to fuck up.

 

                But.  And this is the really important part.

                Let me give you a better visual to these classes.  In my Social Service Worker program classes, 99.9% of my students were young women of colour.  Aside from the ESL class, all of them came from the burbs.  As I got to know them better – and I did because I dropped the Dr. Leung fancy pants academic facade and became the Scarborough girl that I also am – I realized that for many, many of them, they were in this program because they knew the “system”.  They and their families were products of social services of all kinds – foster care, social financial assistance, subsidized housing, the police, etc.  Their case workers were as frequent visitors to their homes as family and friends.  Now before you start hearing the opening chords to “Gangsters in Paradise”, the theme music to Michelle Pfeiffer’s  film “Dangerous Minds”, please stop.  It wasn’t like that.

                I stopped trying to teach writing as an essential skill to upgrading one’s potential to garner a livelihood.  It is that, but this was not the right approach.  The way that made it work was this: I started teaching them how to beat yet another system that stood between them and something marginally better than what they had.  These women did not “choose” to be social service workers because they had an aching need to “help people”.  They were smarter than that.  They were there because that’s mostly what they knew, what was accessible to them, what was perhaps reachable.  

                One of my students, C, a particularly “reluctant learner” came up to me after class, throwing a graded assignment on the table and cussing.  She had received a failing grade on a “reflection paper”.  Perplexed, I wondered how anyone could fail at sharing their opinion.  In these programs, there were a lot of touchy feely exercises.  Lots of bad 80s flashback circle discussions where people are encouraged to divulge their inner most secrets and cry about them, or in this case, write about them.  I hated them, but never revealed this to my students.  Instead, I just helped put in correct punctuations, re-work run-on sentences, start new paragraphs, etc.

I skimmed C’s paper and found the grammar, sentence and paragraph structures perfect.  I looked at the notes in the margin, the red-penned authority of her teacher and felt like kicking something.  “You don’t express what you FEEL.  These are thoughts, not feelings.”  The same gist of comments coloured the whole paper.  I looked at C, who was already talking about “cutting” this instructor, and I really couldn’t blame her.  

“What does she want??” C screamed. 

I had a really soft spot for C.  She was 19, Black, a single mother to a 1 year old daughter.  She had been in foster care since she was 11 because a family member had sexually abused her.  Her daughter was cared for by an elderly woman in her building while she attended college full time.  Her biggest fear, she disclosed to me was that CAS would try to take her baby away again because someone in the building had called on her before.  These were just some of the facts of C’s life.  What you also need to know is that C was smarter than most people I have ever met – this includes the PhDs, the MDs and all the rest of the alphabet.  She was also one of my loudest teeth suckers, but man, I didn’t blame her after I got to know her.  She didn’t need grammar since her writing was just fine.  She had been racially profiled into this class.  I knew it, and she knew it. 

What did her affective state have to do with her success as a student in this program?  And more importantly, why was she being punished for not “feeling” enough? Why should C indulge this instructor or this program’s fetish for the sad victim story?  These young women did not sign up for therapy.  They signed up to get a piece of paper that would give them some legitimacy in this world.  They were paying through the eyeteeth for a two-year program that many of them could have taught because they actually LIVED through the systems they were studying.  They could tell you how it’s supposed to work, and the hundred ways that it doesn’t.  They could rhyme off any given form you are supposed to fill out to feed the bureaucracy of the ever-eroding safety net.  Why should they have to share their pain too?  Especially to strangers and this institution that were only proving to be yet another wall to scale and escape.

I had no good answers for C.  I had already been rebuffed time and time again by the other instructors to just stick to what I was supposed to do – teach them how to write.  Not what to write.  One instructor even told her students that I wasn’t teaching them the proper way to write a Sociology essay because all their theses were “too political”.  Scuse me?  (I googled this instructor, by the way, and found out that she only had a Masters, but somehow knew way more about Sociology than me)  Why not just teach them something else, you might ask? One of the core subjects that actually had content.  I couldn’t get anything else at this college except teaching writing.  The few jobs I applied for, I wasn’t even interviewed.  Not high enough on the union totem.  I know instructors who spent years living term to term not knowing if they were going to get re-hired, and I was just Johnny-Come-Lately.  Isn’t that a hoot?

I told C to lie if she had to.  Lie about her feelings.  Give them whatever they wanted and pass.  Then get out with her soul intact.  I even hugged her, and I don’t ever hug students.  She seemed like she could use one, and so did I.  Something to remind each other that we were human first and foremost and not just the cast to fill in the spaces between the cinder blocks in this here institution – the role of the cash cow student and the precarious worker. 

I threw out my lesson plans on writing formal essays, and I just asked them to write.  Anything.  I received bouquets of personal essays.  Their pieces were funny, tragic, resilient, stirring, hopeful and hopeless.  Approximately 80% of them disclosed stories of sexual violence.  Many wrote about poverty, marginalization, racism, misogyny.  A lot of them were holding on by a thread, but it was a strong thread.  I didn’t ask them to tell me how they “felt”, but they did, and I am beyond honoured that they trusted me. I only wished I had been able to give them more.

I didn’t pull a Sidney Poitier and uplift them so that they could take their lower rung positions in the neo-liberal rat race or lie to them that it would get better.  I didn’t pretend that the diploma they would receive at the end of this would even guarantee them work.  But I also didn’t disrespect their life choices of entering this school and wanting to join this field of work.   I didn’t disbelieve their dreams of being professionals and having stable incomes, housing, families of their own.  I wasn’t a saviour. For a short while, I was hopefully, a friend.   

In Case of Emergency

The only jobs I have ever gotten in academe have been mostly by accident.  Like the time when I got my first post as a lecturer because the professor broke her leg.  Or the time I got a coveted position because another professor decided that she had had enough of academic life and split home to Alberta less than 24 hours of making that decision. 

I am the hired gun, the last resort, the one who they ask when they need a course syllabus developed in less than two weeks, and who will do all my own photocopying and never go over my limit.  I also have friends EVERYWHERE who are always quick to name me as a competent fill-in and available at the drop of a hat.  (Thank you. I love you all.)

Multiple Organics opened in June 2008, and I started teaching 4 courses at a community college in September. (I will never name names of academic institutions in this blog, from fear of never being hired again!)  I got this gig because someone else had pulled the plug on them just a week before classes were to begin.  Just when I thought I had nothing lined up for the fall, I got a bonanza of 4 classes.  Yay!  It was teaching academic writing and nothing juicy in my area, but what the hell?  It was work and PAID work.  My wage was $84/hour for a 12 hour week.  No funds were allotted for prep, admin work, grading, meeting students, answering their emails ,etc.  (I believe in naming wages because transparency is important, and kudos must be given to the student activists in the unions who continue to fight for fairer conditions.)

Before this, I had never taught college level before.  All my teaching experience was in the crème de la crème of universities in Ontario, where undergrads can only get in with A averages.  This doesn’t mean that there aren’t slackers in the cohort, or that this is truly the brightest bunch in Canada, but these places imply that you are among the best of the best, and if you want parchment bearing its brand at the end of your stay, you better do as you’re told.  There is currency in which schools you attend.  Just look at Maclean’s asinine university ranking every year.  The ranking/branding of academic institutions translate into more administration, more corporate funding to particular faculties, and more enforcement (subtle and otherwise) for compliance and docility in the student and faculty bodies.  This is how the ivy-leaguers and wanna-be ivy-leaguers of Canada see it: they don’t need you.  And you should be bloody grateful for breathing their heady air.  So behave or get out.  (Hey, that’s just my take after hours of fieldwork as both student and teaching staff.)

Accustomed to this climate, I ventured to community college.  I received a textbook and a set curriculum.  They didn’t care how I taught, only that the specified material was covered.  Grammar is lovely.  I love grammar.  However, teaching and learning grammar can be as interesting as watching a dog clean its nether region.  Alas, I was armed and ready.  The classrooms didn’t have a smart board, so I made do with old school transparencies and overhead.  I would mix up my pedagogy – some lecture, some group work, some discussion.  Tried as I might, I couldn’t find any interesting documentaries featuring Stuart Hall or Slavoj Zizek on writing an essay.  

My first class was with first year Child and Youth workers.  They were timid, freshly out of high school, appraising each other and me apprehensively.  I launched into an introductory lecture on the importance of writing skills both in college and in life while they stared back at me without blinking.  Perfect, I thought.  They were enraptured!

10 minutes in, a hand shot up from the back.  Ah!  A question!  What engaged students, I thought. 

“Yes?” I inquired.

A young woman with her face suddenly screwed up like she had just eaten a pickle and didn’t think it would be that sour,  asked, “When you actually say something important, could you let us know, so I can write it down?” 

And we were off. 

The Art of Dealing with Rejection

So I applied for a research job in a non-academic organization about a month ago.  It was a plum – great pay, full benefits, pretty good politics, a long stretch of vacation days, sick days, mental health (!) days, etc.  I worked on the application for weeks, passing it to friends for feedback.  I really thought I had a shot at it.  I even spent all the money in my head.  Repairing the hole in my roof where the water has been streaking down my walls for the last 3 years, a wardrobe of suitable office clothes with complimenting shoes and accessories, maybe even a family vacation somewhere that resembles the rain forest where my son’s idols Diego and Dora live.   

I shouldn’t have let myself go there.  Because.  I didn’t even get shortlisted. 

After I received the thank you, but no thank you letter (unlike academic institutions, they were very prompt with their rejection), I went upstairs and went to bed.  This has been my response to the answer “no” lately.  Drop everything, immediately head upstairs, get in bed and cover myself up with my blanket.  Stay breathing and hopefully, sleep it off.  Sometimes this helps.  Other times, I wake up in a shock of sweat, confused by why I am in bed in the middle of the afternoon.  Then I remember I am doing the rejection sleep again and fall back into bed.  (Note: If you have any out-of-work or underemployed PhDs friends and loved ones, a good gift idea is  really good bedding – fluffy pillows, percale sheets, a warm duvet.  The flinging of one’s body into bed and forming a human cocoon gives a sense of high drama that is called for in situations like this, and props help.)

Anyway, this last rejection really got to me for some reason.  I suppose the NOs added up, took a life of its own and finally piled on top of me like an avalanche.  I was in the fetal position for a couple of days, wondering when my life took this turn.  My son asked me to play tag, and I told him that mama was too sad to play tag.  He gave me that look that 4 year olds give when they don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about and don’t really care, shrugged and ran off to ask daddy and the dogs to play tag instead.  Add mama guilt to the pity party.  

I don’t think I am a pessimist by nature.  I am, in fact, hopeful beyond reason.  Even in grad school, when the concept of hope was thoroughly critiqued as an irrational discourse to have in this moment in history, I was stubbornly unmoved to the side of futility.  But lately, I have been sliding.  Everything looks pretty fucked at the moment with no reprieve.  From tar sands to Afghanistan.  From poverty to the large scale de-personalized violence against peoples, places and things wreaked by states and corporations and state corporations.  And me - not able to do a goddamn thing about any of it because I have no useful place in the world.  Self-importance much?  Depression mixed with self-aggrandizing is a dangerous brew. 

I eventually did get out of bed, mainly because I have to in order to take care of my child, work at the store, and generally keep the rhythm of life moving.  If no one expected me to show up for my life, I may still be under the covers.  Truth.

Rage on!

Yesterday, the students in Quebec reached 100 days of protest.  What began as a student-led protest against the proposed tuition hike has now grown into a wide stand against Bill 78, the latest in attempts to criminalize dissent.  There are still people mystified by the anger, resistance and civil disobedience in Montreal.  You shouldn’t be.  You should be mystified by why it’s not going on everywhere. Rock on in the (not-so-free) world.