Please tread on me
The Canadian literature scene's love of "diversity" looks more like a thinly veiled fetish for reassurance - that immigrants will remain quiet, and long-suffering
The last reading in my creative writing course at the University of Toronto was a story about a Filipina nanny, called “The Caregiver’s Instruction Manual”:
You must constantly have a load of laundry going when Ma’am and Sir are home for these three reasons:
1 - So that they will see that you are hardworking and therefore a good investment.
2 - So that you will always have a reason to exit a room.
3 - So that you will have a quiet place to cry.
From Reuniting With Strangers by Jennilee Austria-Bonifacio, p. 32
The story proceeds with requisite amounts of immigrant angst, and handwringing, and dutiful pining for milquetoast suburban trappings, of which the most desirable middle-class status symbol is, inexplicably, a white husband:
Why am I the employee and not the employer? Did I do something wrong other than be born in the wrong country? You could have had the white husband and the mestizo children and the high-paying office job and the BMW and the luxurious winter coats that are dry-clean only and the closet full of stilettos with red soles and the perfect English and French accents that you could switch between so effortlessly, but here you are, nothing but a yaya, ripped apart from your husband and children because, despite the nagging, sinking feeling in your chest, you so badly want them to live like Ma’am one day.
One does have to start wondering whether the true purpose of a story like this is really to showcase the so-called Filipina experience in Canada, or whether it is to provide reassurance to the Heather’s Pick browsers at Indigo that they’re doing life right by virtue of their office jobs, or the Louboutins that they got on sale at Holt Renfrew. The extent to which this story frames the trappings of Canadian middle-class life as unquestionably desirable is simply astounding, and the only thing more astounding is how the “protagonist” just lays down and takes whatever abuse comes her way:
You will burst into tears and she will not console you. She will climb the stairs to your room and talk above your head to Sir as she announces loudly, “Adora, François and I both agree that this isn’t working out,” and you cannot defend yourself because you know that it’s true.
This is why I recommend that you call her “Ma’am” from the beginning.
Because Ma’am will never treat you like family.
I was trying to articulate my dislike of this story to a writer friend of mine: she explained my frustration by quoting what poet Sawako Nakayasu calls a “failure of the imagination”. Good literature is meant to stretch our understanding of what is possible: bad literature has a tendency to simply reinforce it. It doesn’t take an enormous leap of imagination to understand that a person who is hired to take care of someone else’s children in a foreign land would perhaps feel alienated, sad, homesick, and trapped. The ending “plot twist” reveals that the protagonist’s employer, “Ma’am”, is actually her whitewashed, self-hating, Canadian-born Filipina cousin, but even this is not terribly novel: walk down any street in downtown Toronto, and see how many blocks you can make it before encountering a self-loathing Asian1.
One could imagine many ways, in fact, for her to defend herself. She could chew her cousin out for her ridiculous internal contradictions and watch her crumble under the weight of her own hypocrisy. She could seduce the husband out of sheer spite. She could dust the laundry in anthrax. She could slash the tires on the BMW and disappear into the night. She could table-flip and set the house and all its bloody Louboutins on fire. I’m not saying that any of these options would necessarily make for a better story; what I’m saying is that the idea that she “cannot defend herself” is not at all self-evident, and very much an artistic choice.
It’s problematic when such an artistic choice is lauded by Canadian critics as an example of fine literature, because I’m tired of seeing immigrants depicted as quiet and long-suffering. Give me a selfish narcissist with zero sense of propriety. Give me a borderline, unstable, psychopathic bitch that you’re both thrilled and terrified to fall asleep next to at night. Give me some main character energy: I want hysterics, I want women who set things on fire, I want men who throw punches and steal wives, Karamazov-style2.
I can’t help but notice that in the name of so-called diversity in Canadian literature, there is a strange, persistent brand of quiet, non-threatening suffering. Someone’s child is bullied at school for having a weird-smelling lunch, and we must weep. Someone feels profoundly alienated while working at Tim Hortons, and we must hang our heads in guilt while sipping our ice cap. Someone is micro-aggressed at work, and we must collectively feel a moment of disgust and indignation that such things are still happening “in 2025”. To read most “diverse” Canadian literature is to do one of two things: either to step into the shoes of the concerned onlooker, and to pat yourself on the back for being so empathetic; or to feel utterly bewildered at the so-called “representation” being celebrated in front of you, when you’re not quite sure what, exactly, is being represented. Suffering? A quiet resignation? An acceptance of the way things are?
I read an article recently in Toronto Life that I liked for surprising reasons. It was the story of a Chinese-Canadian immigrant being a total jerk in cottage country, while demonstrating just how hollow this narrative of the “oppressed immigrant” can ring. “Calvin” buys a cottage in Tiny Township as an investment property, and proceeds to rent it out to all manner of partiers and strangers. He tells Toronto Life that he is fulfilling “an immigrant dream”, and hopes to pass it onto his children one day. (At the rate that he rents it out, this is clearly a half-truth at most.) The neighbours respond by reporting bylaw violations, citing noise and garbage complaints, and even go as far as to hire a private investigator. Calvin pulls the race card, claiming that his neighbours are being good old fashioned racist NIMBYs who are trying to gatekeep the neighbourhood’s cultural and ethnic fabric, when it’s clear that Calvin is simply being a bad neighbour. He’s an absentee landlord who has little concern for how his rental business is impacting this quiet enclave of Georgian Bay, so even if race is a factor, he is at least 50% of the problem, by virtue of just being plain inconsiderate.
And in being so, he has inadvertently demonstrated the most Canadian dream of all: that anyone, even an immigrant, can exercise the right to pursue their own selfish aims, with complete disregard for the fabric of the community, while wrapping it in a thin political lie that somehow paints them out to be the victim, and the only good guy. We’ll know that we’ve truly arrived as a progressive society when our dislike of such an individual is no longer borne of xenophobia, but because of the simple and irrefutable fact that they’re an asshole. That would be true inclusivity.
Week 8 (of my bid to write one essay a week, for the rest of the year.)
Yours truly doesn’t count: after all, I was once informed by several strapping German lads in Berlin that I am, in fact, a white tech bro
Speaking of which, The Family Chao by Lan Samantha Chang is exactly this: Dostoyevsky-style bombast, layered onto a Chinese restaurant in Wisconsin. Everyone is batshit crazy, nobody does what they are supposed to, nobody makes any sacrifices, everyone is kind of a selfish shit. It’s fantastic.