Dear Asian Canadian,

Anti-Asian feeling is our century-old bond.

Your childhood was like mine, you were unwanted in the game of tag or soccer or the birthday party. So you brought food to share, dolls to show, carefully hand-written invitations for other kids to please come to your sleepover, but eventually you got the message and gave up. You don’t find out until adult life that another kid had spread rumours about your dirty family, which explains a lot. Instead, at age eight, you played with the other east asian kid, even if he was a boy and your French teacher delighted the class by forever christening you “Mr. and Mrs. Ho-ho.”

But of course your childhood wasn’t actually like mine. Even if you are Chinese, like me, we are utterly different. Your Lunar New Year celebrations are so unlike mine that we’d argue over the right things to say and do and eat. We use different words for “grandmother” and our dad’s childhood stories have nothing in common. Contrary to Canadian imagination, there are no similarities between our math grades or our cooking ingredients or our child-rearing philosophies. Our family’s homes smell completely foreign even to each other.

I’m writing to you because of what we do share: identical experiences of Canadian anti-asian white supremacy. This utterly unique thing defines the fictional slant of our eyes and amber of our skins and hygiene of our households. We don’t identify as Asian, we are identified as Asian. Even this language happened without our permission — I was an “oriental” child, a “eurasian” teenager, an “east asian” adult. You and I have nothing in common, but Canadian sinophobia gives us everything in common. This is the multicultural reality, we didn’t spring from the womb with a distinct cuisine and dancing style — but as we were handed from our mother’s body to a Canadian nurse, her homogenizing gaze made us indistinguishable.

This unites our million backgrounds and centuries of stories. Centuries — because anti-Asian feeling is an old Canadian tradition. One hundred and nineteen years ago Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier’s administration conducted an extensive survey asking Canadians if Chinese and Japanese immigrants should be allowed to stay in this country. At this stage, Canada was 35 years old and this was its second anti-Chinese Royal Commission. You probably know the outcome, Chinese were banned, Japanese were too minor a threat. But you probably don’t know the specific language that determined the decision, and this is my gift to you. Aside from the old-timey style, these are the same words we’ve always heard or suspected or felt crawling under our skin, even expressed in tactfully polite restraint. The sentiments in this 1902 document are as intimately familiar as our childhood wallpaper. I don’t mean “gift” in a cynical way; these exclusionary tactics still define us, they are our common bond.

They come from southern China, drawn from the poorer classes reared in poverty where a few cents a day represent the earnings which most suffice for a family; accustomed to crowd together in small tenements or huts, close, unhealthy and filthy; with customs, habits and modes of life fixed and unalterable, resulting from an ancient civilization, with no desire to conform to western ideas. They form, on their arrival, a community within a community, separate and apart, a foreign substance within, but not of our body politic, with no love for our laws and institutions; a people that will not assimilate or become an integral part of our race and nation. With their habits of overcrowding, and an utter disregard of all sanitary laws, they are a continued menace to health. From a moral and social point of view, living as they do without home life, schools or churches, and so nearly approaching a servile class, their effect upon the rest of the community is bad. They pay no fair proportion of the taxes of the country. They keep out immigrants who would become permanent citizens, and create conditions inimical to labour and dangerous to the industrial peace of the community where they come. They spend little of their earnings in the country and trade chiefly with their own people. They fill the places that ought to be occupied by permanent citizens, many of whom leave the country on their account. They are unfit for full citizenship, and are permitted to take no part in municipal or provincial government. Upon this point there was entire unanimity. They are not and will not become citizens in any sense of the term as we understand it. They are so nearly allied to a service class that they are obnoxious to a free community and dangerous to the state (p. 278).

“Orientalism serves as the anchor for war,” writes critical race scholar Andrea Smith. The global North justifies the logics of slavery and genocide by nursing a constant fear of aliens, foreign threat, on the precipice of war. The fact that the U.S. President labelled a global pandemic “Kung-flu” during an embittered Chinese-American trade deal is no coincidence. Anti-asian racism is carefully folded up every citizen’s sleeve, ready at any moment to report for duty and rationalize attack. Racism is a weapon that no State has real incentive to fight.

Anti-asian feeling is a convenient demographic management technique, deployed through rhetorics of white citizenry– whose state we endanger, whose fragile health we menace. White English and French vigour justify expansive projects into Indigenous land, exploitative work conditions in third world mines and factories, and indentured Black and Indigenous labour in incarceration as the arms and legs of security, safety, education and military power. In this way you and I are defined by anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, anti-Asian White privilege, artfully interlaced.

We were promised a community within a community. Now I want to claim it. I want to hear your identical experiences — your playground Mandys and Katies, your sadistic Monsieur Jacobs, your solitary corner of the gravel recess yard, your stories that match mine. Our bond dates back to the Guangdong labourers of the 1800s, all of us expert in an oriental flavour of Canadian white supremacy.