The Meaning of Chow

By Kelli Korducki

“I'm not male. Not white. Want to start there?”

This was how, in an April Twitter chat, Olivia Chow fielded a question from Toronto Star reporter Daniel Dale on how she might politically distinguish herself from the Miller years. A non-answer on the policy level, Chow's response touched on questions that had been bubbling since well before she announced her candidacy.

From the moment city chatter settled into election mode—roughly sometime between Crackgate and early 2014—there was speculation over whether Chow could rally the Chinese communities in Scarborough and North York to tip the vote in her favour. As Ethnic Aisle contributor Simon Yau pointed out in Toronto Life, Ford's fiscal conservativism can be an appealing sell for practical-minded Chinese immigrants like his parents, who prioritize hard work and self-sufficiency over expanding municipal services through tax hikes. But Yau explained his parents weren't necessarily opposed to voting for Chow: “She's Chinese,” he noted, “and that may be enough.” Maybe something as simple as ethnic solidarity would bring a definitive end to any hope of Ford More Years.

And so we have Chow: the only not-male, not-white frontrunner for the mayoralty. As of the most recent polls, it looks increasingly likely that she'll be bested in this race by the very male, and quintessentially white John Tory.

The scare-quoted “ethnic vote” is something we've touched on here at the Ethnic Aisle, in the context of white candidates clumsily trumpeting inclusivity in exchange for ballots. But the meaning of the term changes when the candidate in question is herself an ethnic minority, for whom being “down” with ethnic communities is perhaps more than an obligatory performance.

While Chow hasn't explicitly positioned herself as a minority candidate (how that would even take shape is anybody's guess), her first major campaign fundraiser was held at a dim sum banquet in Scarborough, where Chinese community leaders sung her praises to a receptive crowd using both Cantonese and Mandarin. Chow also adopted Toronto's newly introduced 437 area code in order to secure a triple-eight number sequence in her campaign's official phone number; in Chinese culture, the number eight, and triple eights especially, are seen as arbiters of good fortune.

And yet there has been little talk of Chow potentially becoming Toronto's first non-white mayor, or what that would signify for the ethnically diverse city she would represent. In the meantime, the “anyone but Ford” cabal is evacuating her camp faster than if a hurricane personally knocked on every one of their front doors. Maybe she's too progressive or not progressive enough; maybe it's a question of charisma. Or, maybe—and here we can all share a communal wince—it's “not-white, not-male” that's the sticking point. Slurs have been hurled (“Go back to China!” at a recent debate by a Ford-supporting heckler); her accented English hasn’t gone undiscussed. Still, there's no real way of knowing whether Chow's ethnicity has helped or hindered her mayoral campaign. We can only presume that it's done both, and almost certainly one more than the other, but we're left to gut feelings and educated guesses to determine which—and, well, neither one of these research methods is exactly scientific.

What we do know is that the past four years—the past Ford years—have been a boon to bigotry. We're well beyond the point of pretending the mayor has any possibility of redeeming himself from his demonstrated misogyny, his racism, his homophobia. These behaviours have left a starker stain on the Ford mayoralty than his obstinacy or self-destructive appetites.

Worse than the unflattering light they've cast on our entire city, the past four years have been shot through with the kind of hatefulness that's viscerally painful to confront head-on. Whether or not we were complicit in Ford's election, we were all unwittingly signed up for his reality show in 2010. It's easier to avert the collective gaze than to dwell on the magnitude of Ford's ignorance, and the stranger-than-fiction plot points of his reign have done a good job of distracting from its ugliness.

Chow is the anti-Ford, and not only because she occupies a space on the opposite end of the political spectrum. The reality is much grimmer: as a woman of colour, she is the embodiment of all that our mayor disregards. Her sheer personhood defies the politician a majority of voters selected to represent our city four years ago. That's a tough pill to chew, and an even tougher one to swallow.  

The Angst of the Halfie

By Kelli Korducki

Yesterday, I had brief but angst-ridden Twitter exchange with two friends regarding the inner turmoil of being a half-breed. We were prompted by the re-tweet of a Thought Catalog piece bluntly titled, “How to be Racially Ambiguous,” but, at least personally, this is a discussion that replays itself internally at least once per day.

Some personal background: I grew up having to check off a box inscribing my ethnic identity to the Milwaukee Public Schools’ quota-minded database every time I took a standardized test. I was told, by my parents, that the appropriate bubble for my No.2 lead smudge was “Hispanic,” so that’s where I put it. And that’s where it felt right, really. After all, hadn’t I grown up sharing a residence with a pair of non-English speaking refugee grandparents? Hadn’t I been subjected to toddler-era questioning, by my mother, over whether I was “Gringa o Salvadoreña?” wherein responses other than the latter would result in tickle torture to the brink of tears?

I grew up in a truly bi-cultural setting, with two bilingual parents who worked (and continue to work) in a largely Spanish speaking, Latin-American immigrant environment. But I also grew up white. I came out the spitting image of my Polish/German-American father, and I wonder how different my life would have been if the opposite had been true.

Truth is, it’s hard to live in between the lines; at some point you wind up becoming one thing or the other. Boring and cliche as this is bound to sound, society puts you up to it. And despite my parents’ best wishes, I suspect people are more inclined to process me as “white girl with Mestiza mother” (if, in fact, they know of my parentage at all) than “Latina girl” or “mixed-race kid.” Perhaps this is because of my unaccented English, the lack of melanin in my complexion, the fact that I have a name like “Kelli Korducki,” or that I dress more like Aimee Mann circa 1984 than a chola.

I may rock the white priv, but it’s never sat so great.  I grew up speaking Spanish and attending quinces, and dancing merengue and bachata, while simultaneously feeling like I was a stranger in my dominant culture just because I looked more like I stepped off a boat from Poland (thanks, Papa) than my Salvadoran immigrant mother. Growing up, I would hear peoples’ reactions to my mom speaking to me in Spanish–rude stage whispers, in English (which both my mother and I could understand), about how people shouldn’t be allowed in America without being able to speak English–and I would burn inside while my mother dutifully rolled her eyes and moved along. They never assumed I was her daughter, which always stung me.

Back to the Thought Catalog piece. “Why would you want to be just one simple, uncomplicated race when you can make yourself more interesting at parties with your heightened sense of worldliness and traumatic multi-racial identity?” asks Carmen Villafañe. This is totally tongue-in-cheek, by the way. Sure, it’s great having that invisible backback to carry around when convenient, so that you can take people by surprise with your wacky “ethnic” background tales, but sometimes you want to feel your mother’s discrimination. Not because it will give you cool stories and street cred, but because she is your fucking mother. That is half of you. Just as much of you as anything else.

Segue: my best friend in the whole entire world, Carmen, is a blonde, blue-eyed, sunburn-prone curlytop of a babe who is both the hottest Fulbright scholar you will ever wish to have met and, also, a total halfie. African-American dad, white mom. We met in high school and immediately bonded over our shared neurosis, lit love, and half-breed status. Our 10th grade English teacher called us “fake minorities;” we called each other “house slaves.” We made inappropriate jokes over our mixed identities, because that was the only way we knew how to celebrate them. We live an ocean apart now, but I think our halfie status is one of the main reasons we’re still BFFs. No one understands a halfie like another.

So, recent news: a few weeks ago, I caught a Tweet from my younger brother, Casey. “I’m a McNair Scholar!” he announced. Casey is his university’s VP for MEChA, an American Chicano student organization–which means my li’l bro wears his Latino identity a little more prominently than I. The McNair scholarship is a “minority scholarship,” and Casey felt nervous interviewing for it. “I know I’m not the candidate you have in mind for this,” he nervously told them. Needless to say, they gave it to him anyway.

I guess I don’t know how to close this subject, so I’ll just say this: It’s hard to be a halfie, because on the one hand you’re so damn privileged, but on the other, you never know where you belong. I suspect it’s an issue I’ll have to grapple with for my entire life, and my children (provided I have any) will also have to carry on the baggage–because, regardless of our Canadian dwelling, they will be Spanish-English bilingual or not exist at all. And, while my brothers and I will always have the unassumingly white names of “Kelli,” “Casey,” and “Ricky,” we are still the amalgamations of our heritage: “Kelli María,” “Casimir Enrique,” and “Richard Fernando.” We fit outside the box. And, increasingly, so do many others. We halfies are boundfor themainstream, and conversations about race are destined to change for good.