“A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian.”

Those are the words Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in response to Donald Trump’s tweets attacking four Congresswomen, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar, telling them to “go back” to where they came from.

“That’s not how we do things in Canada,” Trudeau insisted.

But for this Canadian who is a Canadian who is a Canadian, the lived experience of how we do things doesn’t quite match the Prime Minister’s words.

Despite the utopian rhetoric of the Canadian soundtrack to my life — ‘Multiculturalism! Diversity! Acceptance!’— I’ve always struggled with accepting my national identity.

Yes, we’re not America. We’re supposed to be nice and polite...and have a passing affinity for maple syrup. But for a Chinese-Canadian family in Toronto, acceptance meant burying our culture in hopes that we wouldn’t be seen as aliens.

When my mom arrived in Toronto from Hong Kong in the 70s, a classmate on the first day of Grade 13 asked her “Why don’t you go back to China,” baiting other students to laugh along. Ironically, she chose to attend school here on the assumption of that same soundtrack — that Canadians were tolerant and welcoming people, proud of their multiculturalism. The rude awakening set her back.

Her classmate continued to mock her in the following weeks. When she said ‘sorry,’ he’d repeat her, saying ‘solly,’ in attempts to mock her Chinese accent. She didn’t retaliate. What could she say? Would she fight back, cursing him out in English with her heavy accent? She realized that in multicultural Canada it was better to be forgettable than be othered.

Despite that, she retained a romanticized hope of a better future for my brother and me in North America. So she swallowed sour feelings, and permanently moved to Toronto to raise her two children. She’d frequently remind us that we lived in an accepting country, in the hope that time and progress, real progress, would change our experience.

Twenty years after my mom was told to go back to China, I got my first “go back to where you came from.” It was in the first grade. Students, gawking at my udon lunch, said I was eating worms. “So that’s what you eat from where you’re from,” one said. “Go back there then! It’s gross,” another would chime in. When it wasn’t food, it was hand games with the sing-song phrase “Chinese, Japanese,” while students pulled at their eyes to make them look ‘squinty.’ I eventually joined in and pulled at my own eyes, thinking, as my mom did, that it’s better just to fit in and be forgotten.

I felt the only way to survive during that time was to assimilate, which pushed me away from my Chinese culture. I threw out the food my mom packed me for school. I was embarrassed when she spoke Cantonese in public, and was equally mortified if I felt other people heard her accent while speaking English.

There was no one to talk to who would clarify why I felt so alone in a place that prides itself on inclusion. Why? Because we’d always just hear that soundtrack, drowning everything else out. Canada is inclusive...it just is. No need to go looking for explanations or examples or actions.

Through different support groups, I’ve since found a way to embrace my roots, but it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t affect me. It’s the same reason I have fear of walking on King West alone past 10 p.m. The bros at the bars have told me that “they like Asians too.” When I reject their advances, I am told to go back to where I came from. Standing in line at the grocery store, people point at my traditional old tattoos, asking if they represent my mom. It’s nuanced, everyday, and still, in 2019, being defended by the word multiculturalism.

I spoke to my former co-worker, journalist Fatima Syed, who said the first time she explicitly heard the words, “you belong here” was during her Canadian citizenship ceremony. Reality is much different.

“Every time something like this comes up, Canadians default to the idea that racism cannot exist in this country because we have this belief that our diverse demographic protects us,” she says.

We come from different backgrounds — I was born in Toronto, she immigrated to Canada in 2010, at 18 years old. Yet, we both felt disillusioned by a Canada that held itself high and mighty on being multicultural, without putting action behind it.

I now understand ‘multiculturalism’ as a crutch we use to feel better about ourselves. It’s a word that helps people disassociate from difficult conversations, and denies the lived racism faced by people of colour every day.

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My own experiences have been disturbing and draining. But there are far too many examples of the more extreme racism that has and continues to take a huge toll across Canada.

In the last few years, there’s been an attack at a Quebec mosque that took the lives of six Muslims. There’s the MMIWG report on the genocide of Indigenous women, that was immediately countered on grounds of terminology. The use of the word ‘genocide’ became the talking point instead of all the actions that qualified their treatment as exactly that. Quebec’s Bill 21, which bans public school teachers, police officers, lawyers, and other public servants from wearing hijabs or niqabs at work, passed its first legal test. Far right groups are on the rise, buoyed by a new generation of devotees. Amid the assertions of Trudeau and others, it’s important to remind ourselves of these examples.

Racism exists in Canada. Multiculturalism is just a word and a word alone, a word without nearly enough actions to accompany it.

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