December 27, 2006 Archives
So, I am looking forward to Dragon Boys, a mini-series on Vancouver's Asian gang scene that is airing on the Ceeb January 7 and 8. For sure, it still plays the same way The Godfather plays for Italian-Americans, but as one of the cast members defends it: still makes for a good story. The part where one of the Canadian-Chinese characters (the RCMP officer, I think) corrects the white woman that a samurai is a Japanese concept is sweet. Will have it marked on my calendar, nonetheless.
I also found it amusing that the premiere screening was organized by SFU's "Canadianized Asian Club", which sounds very much like a tongue-in-cheek name to give one's ethnic club, unless they take it seriously, and where I think that it pushes the categorization of visible minorities very far. The context (Vancouver) surely applies for such compartmentalization, but even at McGill, there were at least three main "Asian" clubs from the time when I was a student (99-04), namely the Chinese one (MCSS), the Taiwanese one (MTSA), and the North American born one (MANABA), as well as a few recent ones that weren't there when I was a student, like the Mainland Chinese one (CSSA - led by a former CTF member, and whose "about us" is the most honest thing I've read in a long time, in that it isn't even trying to be particularly outsider-friendly, as all ethnic societies tend to do at least for show, and probably compliance for student funding), or the Hong Kong one (HKSN - that was totally founded this year), and the presumably defunct ones, like the Chinese Christian one.
Well, my own experience with ethnic societies started with putting a sign-up sheet on a public billboard for an Asian students' society at my old cegep, and ended with someone printing "no to ghettoization" over it. Eventually, it became interesting to know why it was deemed unacceptable there (not only b/c of the message, but b/c noone signed up, except for one or two of my best buddies, for encouragement), and why it is tolerated in other places, by sheer pressure of numbers or by putting sufficient warnings that "we are teh inclusive".