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.

A Real Job

There is a lot more to say about the store.   Nupur and I have often talked about how we would make really good reality TV.  As Nupur puts it, we are waaay more interesting than those “Cupcake Girls”.   But alas, I started this blog series to talk about living the McPhD life, so I’ll get to those (mis)adventures first.

            It became quickly apparent that the store was not going to be securing us a stable income until year 3, at the very least.  We had a loan to pay off, inventory to buy, a customer base to build.  While my partner, Andrew had a full-time job as an elementary school teacher, we had expenses and a student loan to pay off.  Besides, my shelf life as a “new graduate” was near expiry, and I really felt I needed to get out in the field.  In the beginning of my academic job search, I would try for REAL jobs.  Real jobs in this context mean tenure-track positions – that gilded cage where the institution puts new faculty in a gerbil wheel and turns up the speed full blast.  Throw in a full teaching load, demand departmental service, and put the fear of god and hell in them to publish or perish come time for tenure review.  Tenure-track scholars have a handful of years to build a portfolio of all their accomplishments, like a prized scrapbook from the most hard-ass boot camp you have ever attended.  Their relationships suffer, they start to reminisce about their impoverished years as a grad student as the good old days, and in the middle of grinding out yet another research paper which they hope will be peer reviewed by a semi-reputable journal that maybe 3 people will ever read in their life times, they will suddenly be caught in an existentialist angst and ask themselves, “what is this life about, anyway?”  

            (Esteemed tenured friends, you can correct me if I am wrong.  Since I’ve never been on the track, I can only glean from observing your lives.  ROFLMAO, as the kids say these days)

            All that said, when the rare posting appeared that kinda, sorta look like something that I could apply for, I heard angels sing as clouds parted and rays of sunshine beamed on me.  Right away, I would start spinning my work into whatever they wanted it to be.  Cultural geography?  Sure!  Gender and queer studies?  You bet!  Do the moonwalk on a handstand?  Absolutely!  I would send off my CV, gorgeous cover letters that I would labour on for weeks, hit up my supervisor and committee for letters of ref and...wait.  And wait.  And wait some more.  Most often, if you are not short-listed, you do not hear anything back.  You are gum on their shoe, and not even a fat wad of it that bugs them, but just the trace of gum that they don’t even notice.  It started to get embarrassing when I had to ask my peeps for references for the 534th time.  I imagined them in their offices, in the middle of their very legit and important research that was going to change how the WORLD thought about EVERYTHING, and ding, there would be my measly plea for yet another reference letter. 

By the time I received insider information that one job I had applied for at a Toronto university had received over 250 applications and the 10^th job I had applied for had been cancelled due to "budget changes", the giant boulder of reality finally sunk in. I realized there were Humanities and Social Science Ph.Ds everywhere, sort of  like the walking dead. They were lined up in front of me at the Tim Horton's.  They were beside me shoe-shopping for their kids' shoes at Payless.  They were crying at some sad foreign film two rows down in a half-empty theatre in the middle of the afternoon. At my local baby/parent drop-in, I met two more.  We bounced our babies and whispered like a secret society while the other parents joined in on yet another round of Itsy Bitsy Spider at circle time. 

 (This doesn’t even include all the PhDs who are driving the cabs, phoning me from call centres, serving me coffee at said Tim Horton’s and cleaning the ivory towers.  These folks make up a special group that are granted settlement in Canada particularly because of their higher education, but quickly stripped of their credentials upon landing. Those fellow scholars from Asia, Africa, Latin America, are the McPhDs of all McPhDs.)

            So, completely freaked out, I started to furiously apply for the sessional and contract positions, scatter-gunning my CV everywhere. Sessional positions are pay by course positions.  They range from $6, 000 to $10, 000 a course depending on the university.  Don't ask me to break this down into an hourly wage because I only did it once, and it put me well below a living wage.  At the college level, salary is calculated per hour, per class hours (there is no accounting for prep, administration, grading, etc). According to a recent US stat, tenure-track, the proportion of tenure-track/sessional ratio is now at 35% to 65%.  I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I heard a recent NPR show about the ever-rising number of PhDs on food stamps.  Sessionals do not get benefits or funding for research.  On some occasions, I've even wondered whether I would get a library card.  For reals.

If you're really lucky and secure a handful of sessional courses, you will likely burn out while teaching a bunch of undergrads who will facebook and text all class long about the vastly more important things in life like creating a new cat meme instead of listening to the lecture you have spent two months preparing.  Since you will be drained, and unfunded for your research, the likelihood of producing published articles will grow slimmer, making your chances of securing “the Job” even less likely.  And so goes the vicious cycle of the contingent University lecturer.  

The Toronto market is especially super-saturated.  Everybody wants to stay in Toronto.  I know some people in my cohort who spread out far and wide across the country and beyond to better their chances, but with a child, a mortgage, families nearby, I wouldn’t be able to re-locate.  But I did widen my geography.  I set my limits to the southern Ontario circuit, deciding that I would commute to wherever the Greyhound could go in less than 2 hours.  This would approximately add 4 or 5 universities to my net.  

 More waiting.  If they don’t send out replies for tenure-track jobs, they especially ignore you for sessional positions.  So you are less than that trace of gum on their shoe, you are just the slightest skid mark on the bottom of their sole.  Maybe a smidge of an ant gut that they didn't realize they murdered on the way from the parking lot to their corner offices high above the proletariat. Now, I suppose I should be fairer to “them”.  “They” are the overworked, tenure-track and tenured gerbils in the gilded cages mentioned above, their own rat race set in motion by policies and institutions that are creating a sweatshop of knowledge production. 

            Still, when I do get the odd rejection letter, I am grateful to the school for at least showing some common courtesy by acknowledging that I exist.  And trying.   Because lords and lordesses, I am trying.

                 

We aren't in grad school anymore, Toto!

So I told Nupur about this blog, and she said I needed to back up a bit and write about the two months we spent getting the store ready to open.  For two women who had been living in nerdworld for a long time, the leap to working with tradesmen (emphasis on the “men”), material (“real” material as in tiles, paint, electrical, shelves, fridges, sinks, counters, etc. as opposed to the esoteric material of critical sociologists), and the public (a.k.a. the masses, the multitudes, the “faces of the other”), was jarring, to say the least.  

For the better part of a decade, Nupur and I were immersed in libraries, building fortresses of books around us and mingling only with other theory-heads in that intense and unhealthy way that only grad students can understand.  Our particular clique of nerds communicated in a short-hand language that was both obnoxious (to other people) and charming (to us). We weren’t as insufferable as some academics.  For instance, we didn’t pepper our conversations with French cinema and Crit Lit references or mention important theorists by their first names like we had just Starbucked them the other day.  

Still, our day-to-day parlance was shaped around the contours of our work.  When confronted with the dilemma of whether to shampoo AND condition, we would wonder, “What would Foucault do?”  (He would actually forego both since he was bald) When bored, we resorted to games of mental endurance with inebriated rounds of “Who’d you do?  Lenny Kravitz or Paul Gilroy?” (Well, d’uh!) The highlight of our social life was hitting the wine and cheese events that followed the lectures of visiting scholars. The bigger the scholar, the bigger the cheese.  This didn’t apply to wine.  Although, the bigger the scholar, the less likely you will get boxed wine.   But again, these rules are contingent on which faculty is hosting the event, when in the budget cycle the talk was happening, yadda yadda yadda, so perhaps you should ignore all the above examples as God’s truth...

But back to the store.  We rented an empty space measuring approximately 650 square feet on the ground floor with the same dimensions in the basement.  To get it ready, we had to build all the shelves, re-wire the electrical, put in new flooring, install lighting, purchase equipment, and a million other tiny details in between.  100% of the people who we worked with in order to pull this thing off, were men.  Old men, young men, White men, Black men, Asian men, nice men, mean men, indifferent men.  Misogynists, feminists, capitalist pigs, burnt-out labourers, artists, anarchists, hipsters – you name it, we came across them.  

A particular low point: We went to the lumber yard to buy 40 two by fours for our carpenter who didn’t have a vehicle.  All the workers refused to help Nupur and I load the wood in her minivan because they didn’t want to take responsibility in case the sheets fell off and killed somebody (their words).  They didn’t mind standing around and watching though.  As Nupur and I grunted, got slivers and bruises, and swore a bloody streak up and down the minivan, a dozen men stood around us with arms crossed and stone faces.  Remember, I had just given birth, and what they call my “pelvic floor” was not having its best moment, especially while hefting heavy lumber around.  I am sure I peed a bit, but under the circumstances, I really didn’t care if anyone noticed.  We shoved a sheet in, and another slipped out.  We tried piling them on top, but the ropes wouldn’t tie tight enough for them to stay still.  I’m not sure what those guys expected us to do.  Perhaps break down in tears, pleading with them in our littlest girl voices for help.  Actually, I was positive that that’s what they expected.  These are the reasons we didn’t:  1) we didn’t own little girl voices because we were 40 year old grown feminists more apt to kickass than to cry, and 2) I would sooner schlep each piece of lumber on my own shoulders across Dundas piece by piece like a crazed Jesus than ask these a-holes for further assistance.  After 2 hours of this (yes, 2 HOURS), the manager finally stepped in and called them to help.  They got the lumber secured in 10 minutes flat, and we finally drove off the lot.  I muttered “fuck” beneath my breath a hundred times and couldn’t wait to change my pants. 

Then, an unexpected experience:  We contacted a lighting company to help us figure out what we needed.  By this point in the process, we were dressed to work – old jeans, stained t-shirts, hair all fucked up.  In strode two men who were dressed like they were going to a wine bar on a second date.  The flattered us, even flirted a bit.  It’s a haze around what was actually said and done, but like all good players, they had finesse. There were moments that I thought the four of us would break into a hot and heavy salsa right there in our dingy, dirty storefront.  I started to regret that I hadn’t applied eyeliner that morning.  Don’t get me wrong.  While I loved, loved, loved my partner (oh, Andrew, you know I do!) and didn’t have the desire to change my FB status to “open relationship”, it’d been a long time since some young guy in nice clothes paid me any attention. When Nupur and I were sufficiently charmed, these players laid it on us.  They whipped out their plan – a detailed depiction of the floor plan we had described on the phone, overlaid with their ideas for lighting.  They included LED spotlights that would make the colour of the produce POP.  Apples would take on a thousand hues of red, each leaf of lettuce defined, the curve of a banana accentuated.  They would look like candy, enticing all the people on the street to march like zombies into our store, dazzled by the array of our wares.  The men swept their arms across the room, describing the soft glow that would bathe the store so that it would always look like mid-morning in the Caribbean.  Light!  Who knew?  We were elated, giddy, spun.  Until Nupur, always the more pragmatic and useful one between us, asked, “how much?”  They hemmed and hawed, trying valiantly to bring us back to the transformative magic of light. How much?  she demanded.  They slipped us an invoice.  10 k.  These are the things that make you go “hmmm”.  Suddenly, I felt dirty.  

While we couldn’t afford the Caribbean morning or the POP, Nupur and I agreed that it wasn’t a total waste of time.  We felt like we had just been on a double date, and as dates go, we’d both been on much, much worse.

My Life in the Academic Industrial Complex, or My Last 5 Years as a McPhD

 I should have paid heed when I was still in my work clothes of sweats and greasy hair. Everyone told me to plan a career while I was a PhD student. Don’t just think deep thoughts and write about them - frame the work in a career trajectory so that I could launch myself straight through the windows of the ivory tower before the ink on the diploma was even dry. I didn’t listen. I indulged in cerebral calisthenics as its own pursuit, wallowing in the pleasure of acquiring and making knowledge without checking to see if what I had was a marketable commodity. People (non-academics who I called civilians) would ask me what the heck my dissertation was about. I boiled it down to the simplest language I could muster: the representation of race and belonging in national narratives, specifically in sites of memory in Canada. Whaaaaa? I didn’t care. I believed in what I was doing. Nothing exhilarated me quite like scholarly work. It killed me and built me a million times over.


Then I got pregnant around the time of my final rounds with committee. I was 7 months at my defense. Surrounded by supportive faculty and the nicest external ever, I became a doctor, buoyed by those feel-good hormones that come with the last trimester of incubation. My supervisor asked me why now? The baby was going to pulverize my brain into oatmeal mush for at least 2 years. Pshaw, I thought, fantasizing myself reading tomes and writing beautiful journal articles while the baby cooed and smiled at me from his crib. Not so much.

The first few months of mothering were a blur. I didn’t know that the sound of newborns crying resemble hyenas in heat , or that those purple-faced screaming sessions could last for hours. I also did not know that my kid would poop and pee like a leaky boat, and that the sights and smells of his diaper contents would send me into retches so bad that I would fall to the floor gagging. The area of my brain reserved for abstract and analytical thinking shut its heavy curtains on me. Instead, the primal parts ignited in full force – feed the baby, change the baby, rock the baby, repeat. I didn’t regret it. I loved my child waaaaay more than I loved my dissertation, but wow, did life change.

My baby was five months old when I received the resounding “NO” from SSHRC for a post-doc fellowship. I had three other freshly minted doctor friends gathered in my living room, each had already received their polite form letters, and we were all anticipating mine. I intercepted the letter carrier before the slim letter envelope could hit the bottom of my mailbox. I ripped it open, and our thoughts turned to alcohol. There were no jobs opening up anywhere. The neoliberal universities were all turning to sessional and contract workers to fill in their slots to maximize their profits, and the coveted tenure-track job was becoming as elusive as the Holy Grail. When the odd posting did appear, Ph.D.s circled like hungry sharks, armed with arms-length worth of publications and American Ivy-League credentials. What the hell were we going to do? Well, for the moment, one of us had to stay sober for the sake of the baby.

Nupur (one of the SSHRC rejects and a long-time friend) and I got particularly frantic while the other two were resigned to a thimble of rum. Let’s just open a business, I screamed, still shell shocked from sleep deprivation and covered with baby puke. Yeah, she screeched back, her eyes shiny and huge with desperation. The next month, we signed a 5 year lease on a storefront located around the corner from my house, and the month after that, we opened an organic grocery store. We thought of calling it PLAN B Organics, but someone else already had that name. Go figure.

Combined with 6 degrees and some food experience (hers), we launched into the world of entrepreneurial-dom. How hard could it be, I thought? How hard? THIS HARD. I didn’t take to owning a business like a fish to water. It all felt counter-intuitive to me. Thank god, Nupur was savvy in the ways of profit-margins and price points. I scampered around the store like a wagging puppy. Please love us, please love us! The gravity of what we had done only sank in months later, when we had built a steady customer base and were pushing forward with some momentum. Or maybe I was just getting more sleep and coming back to my senses. I blinked at the picture. What were we doing? Were we just glorified cashiers? Did our immigrant parents hope this for us? Bargaining with farmers for the best produce, lugging potatoes and apples up and down stairs, arranging and re-arranging cans on the shelf? Two Asian women, stepping back into the fragmented histories of our people in the new world. What were we going to do next? Open a hand laundry? As a feminist and anti-colonial scholar, it was confusing for me to reconcile all these things. My critical analysis slowly kicked back in service, as I observed what had become my life.