ACAM Dialogues Episode 04: An Interview with Jamie Liew (Hosted by Isa S. You, feat. Jamie Liew)
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ISA: The Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies Program would like to acknowledge that this podcast was recorded on the traditional, unceded, ancestral homelands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), and Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations. We hope that as we continue to facilitate these conversations about Asian diasporic communities, we also engage in critical dialogue about what it means to be uninvited guests and settlers on these lands.
Welcome to episode 4 of the Asian Canadian and Asian Migration studies (ACAM) podcast My name is Isa You. I’m the Multimedia Production Assistant at ACAM and I’ll be your host for this episode. We hope that this interview series can be a way to continue building connections between ACAM students, staff, faculty and community partners, while also providing our community members with a platform to share similar work they’ve been doing in their community during this time.
My guest for this episode is Jamie Chai Yun Liew, who is a writer, lawyer, law professor and podcaster on Migration Conversations. Her debut novel Dandelion is coming out in April and so I had a call with her to chat about legal writing vs. creative writing, diasporic fusion foods, and ghost stories of Southeast Asia.
ISA: Thank you so much for joining me today. To start, do you mind introducing yourself to our listeners?
JAMIE: Sure. My name is Jamie Chai Yun Liew, and I am a professor, a lawyer, a podcaster, as well as a debut author.
ISA: And as the Asian Canadian and Asian migration studies program, we’re always interested in hearing about people’s own experiences of migration. So could you tell us a bit more about your and your family’s migration story?
JAMIE: Yeah, I would love to. My family came to Canada in the 70s. My dad was born in a country called Brunei, and he was born stateless without any citizenship whatsoever. For those of you who aren’t familiar, it means that someone who is stateless really has no legal identity. They don’t have citizenship and don’t have a home country to claim as their own. And so my father lived a very precarious existence until his 20s, when he immigrated to Canada. And after he immigrated, he sponsored my mother, and several of his siblings, so I have family all over the world, but a lot of them migrated as stateless persons to Canada. And that’s the reason why I was born in Canada.
ISA: In what ways do you think that history has influenced your work, both your lawyer work, and also your writing?
JAMIE: I would say it has a humongous influence on both my legal academic and creative writing work. I have to say that, you know, early in my career, I was focused more on human rights, legal issues, and then more on migrant and immigrant immigration, legal issues. And, you know, listening to my father’s story I had always when I was younger, I thought it was very unusual or uncommon. And as I started working as a lawyer, and as an academic, I discovered that it was more common than I understood it to be, and that there was a growing community of persons advocating, researching, and talking about this issue. And so this is an issue that’s not unique to people in Asia, for example, there are millions of stateless people around the world, including within Canada. And so I started to focus more of my academic work with other scholars like Dr. Amanda Cheong, who’s also at UBC, and other scholars in Southeast Asia, because, you know, my father was from that region of the world. And there are a lot of stateless populations there. Having said that, I also study the issue of statelessness, and the way that the law creates statelessness in Canada as well. So I think it is an issue that is interesting, not just from my own personal perspective, but also because of the ways in which it is reproduced all the time. I find, for example, in Canada, that the ways in which people are made to be foreign or made to be non-citizens are, you know, done and not only in legal venues, but government registrars, in public discourse and the way that people talk about racialized and other migrant populations. And so, you know, I feel like I have started in earnest in this research a number of years ago but I wouldn’t say I know a lot about the different strands or different aspects of it, which is what my future research hopefully with others on this topic will bring.
ISA: And for readers, can you give us a synopsis of your new release, Dandelion?
JAMIE: Yeah, so Dandelion was born out of some of the academic and legal work I was doing around 2018. I was fortunate enough to be on sabbatical and to dive deeply into some field work on investigating legal barriers of statelessness in Malaysia in particular. And while I was speaking to persons about their own statelessness, or with persons who have overcome statelessness became citizens. I also spoke to members of my own family, including my father. And it occurred to me that there was a lot of themes and conversations that I wanted to talk about and explore more, but I couldn’t really do it in the confines of academic writing, per se. And so I started exploring this a little bit more in my creative writing pursuits. And I have to say, I’m not trained in creative writing. I read a lot, but I had always, I guess I dreamed of writing my own novel one day and I was fortunate enough to have time to explore what I would like that process. And I really did, I really enjoyed the pursuit of creative writing and the freedom it gave me to talk about some of the questions and issues and themes that I couldn’t fully flesh out in my academic or legal pursuits. So Dandelion is a story about a young woman in Canada who becomes a new mother. She reflects on her mother’s departure from her life when she’s 11 years old and revisits her mother’s experiences as a migrant mother in Canada. And then her questions and search for her mother take her to Southeast Asia, to confront why her mother disappeared from her life and to try to uncover the mystery of what her mother was, or is today.
ISA: And you were also the winner of the Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award from the Asian Canadian Writers Workshop. So can you tell us a bit more about how you got involved in that?
JAMIE: I have to say that was completely by luck. So I had completed or nearly completed a draft, the very first draft of dandelion, and I mentioned it to someone at a community event in Chinatown, Robert Yip. And he mentioned to me that he knew Wayson Choy, an Asian Canadian author. And at the time, I was pretty excited that he knew and I told him I was attending an academic conference in Toronto. He said, Well, let me introduce you to Wayson and Paul Yee, another author in Toronto. And he said, I think it would be good for you to meet them, given that you’ve just finished writing, you know, a novel. So they graciously met me for dim sum and told me about the Asian Canadian Writers Workshop and their award for emerging writers. And I kind of brought it up on my phone, and realised that the deadline was two weeks away, and quickly finished writing the end of the novel and submitted it and the rest is history. So I have to say that the Asian Canadian Writers Workshop is a wonderful network of authors around the country and those that support Asian writers. And I was fortunate enough to just mention it, the fact that I was writing something, to a fellow Chinese Canadian in my community who was connected and who led me down the path to submitting my work there. And I think, you know, I would be remiss if I didn’t say that I’m grateful to those in my community who supported me in that way, and to the many authors before me, who have really elevated at the literary scene with our stories that enables us to be able to tell them today with some attention being paid to it.
ISA: For sure. And I’m curious what was the process of researching this book like?
JAMIE: So I didn’t research for this book in mind. I was doing research on statelessness and the legal barriers, and I discovered that I couldn’t really talk about why people were stateless, just in a legal framework, it was very confining and restrictive. So I have since extended my research to talk about the occurrences of it and how people experience it, but also in the way that people are gaslit in their experience of statelessness, a lot of stateless people have genuine, deep and effective links with the countries that they live in, and are sometimes told that they’re not citizens, despite the fact that they have been born in that country have family there. And not only family, but generations of family that live there have some sort of employment or other kinds of connections with the communities there. And I found that you know, in a lot of post colonial, British post colonial contexts, we see these kinds of same kinds of legal tools being used and disseminated through public discourse about how people are foreigners, how people are not citizens, how people don’t belong, despite the fact that they have these genuine and deep connections, ties bonds with the country that they live in, long term residents and things like that. And so I explore that in my academic work more now, aside from just the legal and technical legal barriers, but I also tried to explore that a little bit in Dandelion in discussing, who is it that we perceive and treat as outsiders as foreigners? And why is it that we don’t talk about people as part of our community, or the kinds of kinship that exists already as the default mechanism and the ways in which we interact with one another?
ISA: And you earlier mentioned the idea that laws can also create statelessness, could you expand a bit more on that?
JAMIE: Yeah, I find in my own research, again, you know, mainly confined to post British colonial states, that the occurrence of statelessness is one born out of law, right. So it is the legal status of citizenship that people desire, that people rely on in order to seek or obtain the necessities of life, like the ability to go to school, to access health care, to obtain a job or something as benign as getting a cell phone or a bank account. But it is, you know, these colonial legal structures that have created the rules by which who are citizens. And sometimes I find that it’s not only the physical text, on paper, that affects the chances of person being considered a citizen. But it’s the interactions in the ways in which people apply for citizenship, the interactions they have at the registar, the interactions that they have in public with, you know, the ways in which people perceive themselves. And I think we’ve seen a lot of this, for example, in our community, with the pandemic, where there’s been an increase in anti Asian, hate and violence. And these kinds of things are damaging to the ways in which people may receive services, that may not seem legal, that may seem a right, as of course, like going to the registrar to apply for a driver’s license. In many countries in the world, sometimes you have to apply for citizenship at these registrars and people are denied simply on the basis of the way they look, because they’re not part of a dominant racial category. And similarly, in Canada, you know, I think there are very good arguments to be made about how the legal system treats racialized persons differently in their access of, for example, Charter rights or their access of rights to obtain immigration status. And our laws are certainly vestiges are relics of a colonial time in which there’s a categorization or preferential treatment based on race. So I think, you know, there’s a lot to be said on that. But all this to say is that I think law plays an important role in shaping public discourse or understanding about who belongs and who should be treated differently based on their right to belong in a certain space. And certainly, I mean, there’s a lot to be said about the fact that, you know, I write predominantly from, you know, the unceded and surrendered territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe people. And so to have this conversation on top of that, as well, I think it’s important to recognize.
ISA: How does the process of novel writing compared to your legal and academic work processes?
JAMIE: So that’s a really great question, I would say. That is quite different. They both have different restrictions and freedoms to it. One thing I do want to say is that I think my legal and academic training was great in getting words on a page. So that training allowed me to practice the ethic of just writing. And especially, you know, as a lawyer, you have deadlines to meet, to get, you know, a factum or a legal submission into a court or to other venues or to counsel and things like that. And so you don’t have the luxury of time, or procrastination in those kinds of high stress environments. And that really trained me to work quickly or to write really quickly, and to worry about the refining at a later stage just to get something on a page, and then to work out the kinks later. Similarly, I would say, in both my academic and legal settings, it trained me to receive feedback and very harsh, negative feedback, gracefully. I think, you know, it’s important to understand writing is a process that doesn’t just happen once it’s all about revisions, and revisiting your writing, and taking seriously the feedback that people get. So I say, I find it very similar in that regard. But then I find it different in the sense that there’s different things that people look for. You know, in legal and academic writing, there’s rules about citations, rules about what things you use as sources. And then I find it absolutely gratifying not to have to do that in creative writing. But I also want to be true to the context and the sometimes historical mentions that I make in my novel. So you know, attention has to be paid. But I do find creative writing to be a very liberating experience compared to the kind of writing that I do for my bread and butter, so to speak.
ISA: Can you tell me more about your thoughts on language and translation, as you wrote, this book translation comes up within the story, as well as within the text, when you have characters speak Chinese and have accents. So can you tell me more about that?
JAMIE: Yeah, I’m really glad you asked for that. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. And even I just received, you know, an advance review copy of my book. And I do have a few regrets here and there about how I translated too much, and how maybe I should have left it to the reader to discover more. And the flow of it, you know, how much does the translation break up the flow of the storytelling or the narrative that I want it to depict? And I struggle with that because I, I do want it to be accessible to everybody. And I do recognize that some people write just for their communities. And I certainly do write for my community. But I also want my writing to expose things that our community experiences that other people may not understand fully. I want them to see what we experienced. I want them to understand the trials, challenges, but also the beautiful things that we do. I think my book does a few things about language and interrogates it. And I don’t know if other people will see it this way. But you know, I write in a colonizing language. And my parents’ migration story is a product of migration from one colony to another. You know, I think that the influence of British colonization in their home countries and in Canada, forced them to prioritize the English language in my upbringing. And I have a lament in that, in the way that I insert some Chinese characters, but also my mother tongue Hokkien in there. And, you know, I tried to interrogate the fact that the little I know of my own mother tongue is resembled in the little pieces that are in there in contradistinction to the English in there. And as well, I also kind of pay homage to, you know, the fact that I don’t speak a dominant Chinese language. You know, that’s why I deliberately use Hokkien or Hakka words in there. I have often found that that is also kind of an interesting tension within our own communities that Mandarin and Cantonese are prioritized, and that people understand our community with Mandarin or Cantonese lenses. And so in this book, I try to uplift or provide more awareness about the diversity within our own communities and the diversity of languages], and how some of these languages are struggling to survive in, in many places in the world. So yeah, I struggle with that. And I think, I hope that tension is present when people read the book, because I continue to struggle with the fact that my children are learning two colonizing languages in school English and French, and that their own mother tongue, so to speak from my husband and mine, my own cultural backgrounds are not as prioritized, they’re not as present in their lives, and I have a little bit of a lament with that reality.
ISA: I feel like I definitely noticed that sort of tension as I was reading, and also with the concept of Chinese or Chineseness. And there was one scene where Swee Hua gets mad at Alfred for his testimony in court, and feeling like that he should defend his own people. So can you tell me more about this idea of the Chinese as a people?
JAMIE: Yeah, I think that is also a tension that’s present in my life, I find it really interesting that some people, first of all, I’ve had interesting conversations with people who might not know a lot about Chinese people or migration. The first thing they always asked me is like, Oh, your parents are not from China. So you’re not Chinese. So people don’t understand that. The Chinese diaspora is not only diverse, but that all a lot of us don’t hearken from mainland China, that our ancestors might but you know, we have a wide population or diaspora that has migrated to many places in the world, and might find a whole host of, you know, a number of different places as their home country or their, their back home, as our parents would say, for example, you know, with Southeast Asia has a large Chinese diaspora. There’s a large Chinese diaspora in India and the Caribbean, and obviously, North America. So I do find it interesting when people situate their understanding of China as a focus on mainland China, first of all. Second of all, I do find that there is an interesting divide amongst Chinese people about mainland China, its imperialist and colonizing role in the world. Its, I would say, dismal and abhorrent human rights record, versus, you know, the need for Chinese people to protect their language, cultural identity. And sometimes it gets conflated. And I do find that people in my community and even people within my own family have differing viewpoints about how we talk about China and Chinese people and culture. And I think Swee Hua, which is, you know, one of the main characters and story and Ah Loy, her husband represent that tension. So Swee Hua has a very deep connection with the Chinese identity and feels a lot of kinship with Mainland China and her husband, Ah Loy, while recognizing himself as Chinese, adheres more to democratic aspirations of people and ensuring that people find a home where they feel that they can belong. So find that, you know, I don’t know if I was successful, but I did try to extricate that tension within our community, but within families today that might be having discussions about for example, when, you know, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor were in detention, I think there’s a lot of discussion or community about how Canada should have responded and how we talk about this as Chinese people and those tensions are a little bit more nuanced and complicated than I think people realize.
ISA: But even within Chineseness, there are also dividing factors in some ways, such as class, and gender, which feature in the book. So can you tell me more about navigating that while still trying to… or still being conscious of potential stereotypes around our cultures, but also understanding that, you know, there is classism? There is a lot of misogyny entrenched in the culture.
JAMIE: Yeah, thank you for asking that. I think one of the things that happens when you’re trying to tell a story sometimes is well, let me back it up. First is that I think, you know, some people sometimes essentialize Chinese people in Canada, for example, a lot of women might be assumed to be demeure. Less outspoken, less opinionated, hard working, you know, we kind of wear that veneer of the model minority myth, right? And I guess with Swee Hua in the book, I tried to depict her as a complicated character that wears all kinds of stereotypical tropes, but also challenges it in her behavior and her actions. I read this wonderful book called Ornamentalism. And, you know, I tried to depict Swee Hua as an ornament in certain places in the book, you know, she is depicted as beautiful as, in some ways to me, she kind of resembles a songbird. She’s, you know, beautiful, sings, is vibrant. People are drawn to her. And this is kind of a sexualized trope that some people place on Asian women that they’re there to entertain for the pleasure of other people to consume. But at the same time, you know, when you read this story, I hope people also see her bravery. Her resistance, her critique on accepting gratefulness to be somewhere just because it is. That just because you were allowed to, to arrive in a foreign country, and I, you know, and I wanted her to be that dichotomous kind of figure, that kind of conflictual figure for people to look beyond the, I guess, the beautiful facade that she might present and look at the tensions in which she tried to survive in a very hostile environment, her own understanding of herself, that she was hostile towards the way that people saw her. And also didn’t want to, to live with that or to just accept it as a reality that she should be simply grateful. Right. So, you know, I don’t know if I was successful in doing that. But that’s something I toyed with in the book to kind of complicate things to say that we’re not the stereotypes that you think we are that we might resemble some of the tropes of the characteristics of it, but we’re complicated in our own existence. And, you know, the other aspect I also wanted to portray, you know, that our own community is fraught with challenges with misogyny, with how we gender women, you know, and there’s characters in the book that are of the same community, arguably, but treat each other with very classist and misogynistic ways. And I wanted people to understand that, you know, we’re a community that has faults as well that we’re complicated, nuanced, and we’re not. But that we shouldn’t be, you know, seen as the same, so to speak, right, that different people come with different educational employment and lived experiences that define the ways in which we might perceive and interact with one another.
ISA: Yeah, for sure, the complexity of Swee Hua definitely came through for me, and it made the twist at the ending, and also her ending, really heart wrenching. Like, do you feel like it’s a tragedy? Or that she might be a tragic figure in the book?
JAMIE: Oh, that’s, that’s a good question. I haven’t thought about that, to be honest. Um, I do find it to be a tragedy, but I think she is also, you know, a figure where I view Swee Hua as not wanting anyone’s pity. Like, I think she wouldn’t have wanted people to feel sorry for her. And I think, in some ways she might have viewed the ending of the book as more defiance and just, you know, and disappointment. And and I think it also resembles the fact that she herself is a flawed character. I mean, she herself has not very, she has views that I myself would not agree with, right. And I think that her ending resembles one of a flawed character, a tragic figure, but also one that is brave and defiant, do you know what I mean, that’s how I view her. It would be interesting to hear how other people view her. But I think also, that it also I wanted people to understand the repercussions causing consequences of the ways in which we structure the world, right. The fact that her identity was so tied to the way in which states identify who are kin who are citizens, that I think has a huge impact on the ways in which people live with themselves and are able to survive or be long.
[Spoiler alert, please jump over the next 2 and a half minutes if you don’t want to be spoiled.]
ISA: Yeah, and actually, that got me thinking about this kind of idea, especially prominent in Chinese tellings of history and Chinese literature of 红颜薄命, which is like beautiful women die tragically. And I think on one hand, it is a trope that is in some ways used, I think to punish women who kind of explore outside the conference confines of what is expected of them? But at the same time, you know, is death necessarily the most tragic thing? The tragic ending? Because everyone dies, I guess. But deaths of women especially are given heavier meanings within Chinese literature. So that’s something to think about.
JAMIE: Yeah, I actually thought thank you for bringing that up. That is interesting. I did recognize that I might have been feeding into this kind of trope. But I hope that in the way that I wrote it, it wasn’t simply, you know, the fragility that was seen. And one of the things I did deliberately I mean, Swee Hua, literally means beautiful flower, you know, her whole name or her identity at the beginning, the way that people see her as beautiful and fragile. I think I wanted to present that but also to present her own. I guess. I kind of view her as a bit of a willful disobedient being as well, right? What you know, feminist Sara Ahmed would say, as a killjoy, like she just wouldn’t go along with what is expected of her, you know, and in that way, I do find that her death means that she wasn’t willing to accept or go along, you know, and that she was to the end defiant and disobedient and not willing to, and not willing to please other people not willing to stay just to you know, assuage people’s expectations of her. So, yeah. We should probably be getting the podcast, put a spoiler alert at the beginning. I’m glad we’re talking this is really interesting.
ISA: Yeah, for sure. And I definitely think that you were successful and crafting these very complex, and sometimes contradictory characters, the way humans naturally are, for example, Lily grapples with internalised racism within the novel, which I know can be a very common experience, but also a touchy and difficult subject to navigate when we write. So how did you go about writing that?
JAMIE: Well, I think it was, frankly, easy because you and I probably experienced it more often than people realise. So in some ways, I found writing this book to be quite cathartic. It was an exercise to express something that I don’t often talk about with people. I don’t know about you, maybe the younger generation is different. I’m aging myself now. But you know, I was always taught to just not bring attention to myself or not to make a big deal of things, not to ruffle too many feathers, so to speak. You know, I mean, I think, you know, I grew up in a household where people were, you know, wanted me to succeed, and, you know, you didn’t raise a stink, so to speak, in case it jeopardized your pathway to success. And so I view this book as a way of opening the bottle, so to speak, to kind of deal with all the things that I’ve had to repress for so long. And, and it’s interesting, because, you know, I do talk about with some of my friends who are racialized, but, you know, on balance a lot of people don’t know that we experienced these things. And so frankly, I did find it to be a cathartic experience to explore these things in the book. And I didn’t find it difficult at all to write, I think, I hope they come across as true, that they come across as realistic. And I hope it comes across as a shock to some people because I think a lot of people don’t realise what it’s like,and I don’t want to minimize the degrees to which they can be felt or impacted by people because I think a lot of people view this as you know, just a minor inconvenience. And I think it is to some of us, you know, sometimes it’s just annoying to have to deal with these kinds of things. But at the same time, the cumulative acts that people experience is tiring, to be honest. Right. And I think it also raises questions about how it impacts different people differently. You know, it can affect a person’s choice. that day in the ways in which they view their ability to take on a new challenge, it can affect people’s mental health illness, it can affect the way in which people make decisions about, you know, how they present themselves and things like that. There’s, it’s like the butterfly effect, you know, a small thing can really change the course of the day or change the course of a conversation of the choice that a person makes. So, I don’t know if I sound like I’m rambling. But I think in some ways, I view the book as a way for me to kind of historically stamp occurrences that happened at a time, you know, the book takes place partly in the past. And I take a lot of licence in recreating a time in the 80s, in a small town in Canada. But also, you know, I hope people see that I’m also kind of documenting occurrences of how people were treated and how people existed. At that time, I kind of see it as historical fiction, light in that sense.
ISA: Yeah, for sure. I think I was a little bit uncomfortable as I started becoming, like aware of the internalised racism that Lily had, but I think it was necessary. Because like, not everyone is able to recognize that. But clearly Lily moves through it and is able to come to peace with her own background and Chineseness.
JAMIE: Yeah, and if I can, you know, I, if I could say more about the internalised racism, I think, you know, if you think about a time in the 80s, a lot of people were grappling with different things. And I think Lily’s a character that grew up with a family that was precariously in an economic precarious situation. And she was always alert and alive to the precarity. Of that, and also, you know, received constant reminders of the precarity her, her father felt as a stateless person previously, right. So I think, you know, the internalised racism is a reflection of the colonising factors in our communities to that we predominantly exist in an English setting and the pressure to assimilate the demands of performing sameness, are the reasons why our communities called a model minority in some respects, right that some people are able to do that. And the only way they can reconcile that is to have these repressed feelings of shame of their identity in their existence. And I hope that people see that she evolves and that sense that she begins to grow and blossom into understanding that she didn’t need to do that in the past, and that she can maybe have a different experience with her own daughter.
ISA: And food as a motif shows up a lot in the book, brut also in just in general, the work surrounding diasporic experiences. So do you think there is a reason for that?
JAMIE: Yeah, I love food personally. I think that food is one of the ways I use it to connect to my own culture, to my family. And one of the few ways in which I feel I can participate in my community. Yeah, no, because I do experience a loss of language and I do experience a distance from the communities that I identify with. So food is one way in which I show, first of all, kinship in the book, and I hope it also evokes how memories are created, right how it ties, for example, a present consumption of a meal to a past connection or how it threads historical identity. And I think food in Southeast Asia in particular is fusion. It’s very different from mainland Chinese food. For example, there’s a lot of influence of Indian Malay cuisine, and there, it’s more spicy. And it is also post colonial because some of the dishes I talk about are purposely curated or placed into the book because they were created due to the colonial migration of different communities in Southeast Asia. So for example, you know char kway teow, which is a very well known flat rice noodle dish in the region, was created as a fatty lunch to fill the bellies of plantation workers in the region were brought over by British colonisers to colonise the land, basically, to work the land for the benefit of Britain. And so I deliberately chose dishes that have this kind of colonising historical aspect, and thread it through, to bring to Canada, but also to kind of bring Lily back to that. It’s like a travelling feast, I would say. And I think the food is not only a marker of the history of the colonising aspects of our lives, but also acts as a vehicle to evoke memories, and evoke reminders of kinship. Especially with Lily, I would say.
ISA: Yeah, and on the flip side, I was thinking about how Lily was uncomfortable with the red egg and ginger party at first, and how she was so enthusiastic about trying perogies. In contrast, I think food is also interesting, because for a lot of people, particularly people, like second generation or third generation. I don’t know, I guess it’s different nowadays. But when we were younger, and I imagine when you were younger, probably, there was a sort of stigma around our foods. So I found that particularly interesting in the book.
JAMIE: Yeah, I think it’s really interesting how our food was at once shunned, and considered disgusting, and now is moving into realms where it’s trendy, it’s, you know, kind of entered the hipster scenes to some extent. And, you know, I tried to play with that a little bit. I don’t think it came across very well. But I think, you know, I, I personally find it really great that a lot more people are being exposed to our foods now. That they’re making it, talking about it, celebrating it, and especially the diversity of it, especially, because I don’t think it was very fun growing up in a time where people thought our food was disgusting, you know, and I think it was just another way for us to feel different, but not only different, but like to feel you know, disparaged by other people in our community, you know, so in some ways, your rights food kind of plays a role in marking how we’ve, you know, our communities and the perceptions of us have changed because of it, it depicts it with the way in our food is treated to.
ISA: Yeah, and I don’t know, I’m just thinking about like, fusion foods, which on one hand, I’m kind of uncomfortable when it becomes something trendy and something that is so tied into profit. But on the other hand, understanding that like, you can’t hold on to tradition, and like the idea of authenticity forever. The Walrus, I’m dragging the Walrus right now, but the Walrus had a piece about like a bunch of people going and trying to find the most authentic Chinese food. I believe it was written by a white person. And the tweet promoting it said the only thing that clings to a shred of authenticity in China is its food. Which was kind of just very honestly racist and uncomfortable. And that article came out I think 2020. So yeah.
JAMIE: I have a lot to say about stuff like that, to be honest. I mean, if you look at where my family’s from in Southeast Asia, all of that food is fusion, you know, and I, I, and I think, you know, I can’t remember the name of the author, but she wrote a book about Chinese food in Canada. She’s a Globe and Mail reporter. Anyway, she wrote a really excellent book interrogating what is authentic Chinese food? And why is it that certain foods are considered authentic and others aren’t. And I guess I would say the same thing within our own Chinese communities, we also kind of turn our noses at certain things when, you know, later on, it becomes accepted that it is authentic. I would say, you know, Southeast Asia is a good example. You know, and I think I depict this a little bit in the book, you know, especially with Lily and her friends, you know, going from one house to the other and what is considered, you know, true Chinese food or, or not. And I would just say that, as long as people are true to where they get their inspiration from, as long as they acknowledge, you know, that the food comes from a certain community, or that they pay homage to the fact that the food is inspired or takes techniques or flavors from that community. I don’t have a problem with that. Right. I think there’s some beautiful dishes out here out from Southeast Asia that would not have occurred, but for the mixing of cultures and the acceptance of techniques and flavors in cooking. Having said that, I do think you’re right, in the sense that when people don’t acknowledge where they get that from and are commercializing it and the people benefiting it are not people necessarily from that community, it’s troubling to see that. And it’s troubling also to see people question, who’s authentic and what’s authentic. And I’m particularly sensitive to that, because I’m from a Chinese community that is not always seen as authentic by other Chinese people. So I don’t think we should use that term authentic, getting more and we should maybe talk about the fact that this is what, you know, this community is currently eating, and it looks really interesting or tastes really interesting. And you know, who’s making it and what kinds of techniques are historically been used or changed or modified to do these kinds of things? You know, so I agree with you. There’s problematic ways in which people are promoting and talking about our food. But I also don’t want to discourage people in continuing to experiment and come up with amazing things that we could be eating.
ISA: Yeah, for sure. So you’ve got a panel? Is that what it’s called? Yeah, you’ve got a panel with Lindsay Wong, titled stories that haunt us coming in April. And I know you didn’t pick that title. But I’m curious, what’s your interpretation of stories that haunt us?
JAMIE: Yeah, I have said in many places before that I am a lover of folktales. And I lightly use one distinct folktale through the story of the book. There’s this one story about this ghost called Pontiac, and it’s a very distinct ghost story that’s told throughout Southeast Asia about you know, a woman who is kind of like a vampire ghost like figure with long black hair. And she is, you know, a ghost that is feared by a lot of people in Southeast Asia and especially when I was doing, you know, my fieldwork there, people would send me WhatsApp messages or links to videos of, you know, sightings of Pontianak. And so I became very fascinated with her and use her primarily in my academic research to talk about ghost citizens, how stateless people are like ghost citizens. They are people who have been ghosted by their state, that they feel like they’re citizens, but they’re made invisible by the state. And at the same time, they’re being conferred ghost citizenship of other countries and being called, you know, citizens of the Philippines, Thailand, China, other countries, so I use this as an academic tool. In Dandelion I use Pontianak as a way to add a veneer on the character of Swee Hua. Right? I use this because and I’m gonna riff off Lindsey Wang actually she uses a lot of ghosts in haunting kind of stories in her own work. But she once said to me that you know, ghosts are great way to talk about mental illness in our community, our, or how our families talked about it. Those persons might have, must have been touched by something or affected by something. And that this is their way to explain why people behave the way they did. And I use that lightly in Dandelion that the mental illness and difficulties that Swee Hua experiences are explained by her family as the presence of Pontianak. Right. But also, I use Pontianak as a way to kind of bridge discussions about you know, how things haunt us that migrants come not as empty slates, but they come with a history of where they were from their culture, their language, and how it haunts them, that they might have left something behind. How it might haunt them that they want to be there, but can’t and what could have been, you know, and, and so, you know, those feelings of ghostliness and hauntings are used in that way, I hope in the book, and I’m not sure if it’s conveyed that way. But it does a lot of work, I would say, in addressing these but in a very distinct way for our Asian communities, right, that they can relate to.
ISA: Yeah, for sure. I was just thinking about what is it about stories that feature hauntings or ghosts or these like, things that we call superstitions, that lends itself to telling immigrant stories?
JAMIE: Yeah, and I think it’s because a lot of us grew up with these stories, frankly, I mean, Pontianak was something I feared growing up, you know, my Auntie’s would talk about it. And I was fascinated with it. And even though I grew up in a western educated environment, I still was drawn to the stories, I still had this kind of sense that I wanted to believe in this fantastical world. But at the same time, I also recognize that people use these stories to just like myths, you know, Greek myths, and other cultures use their folktales to depict stories or messages or, you know, lessons, you know, and I think that it’s no different in our culture that we use these stories to tell them as cautionary tales. And especially in this story, I find, you know, for example, Auntie Choo Neo uses Pontianak, as a way to be like, you don’t want to be like her, you, we need a distance from that we want to be away from whatever bad behaviour is going on over there, you know, and we don’t want it to rub off on us, and we don’t want it to taint us so to speak. So I, I think, you know, it is very apropos to migrant communities, because we have a lot of stories like that, that we bring over. And that we can understand and relate to, but also, it’s used as a means to teach, to explain and to find, you know, solace in some ways.
ISA: Okay, last question, what’s coming up next for you?
JAMIE: Oh, that’s a good question. I, you know, had a lot of awesome plans after finding a home for this book at Arsenal, Pulp Press, which I’m so grateful for the pandemic hit. And it’s funny because people think I wrote this during the pandemic, but I didn’t. And I wish I could say that I did a lot of writing during the pandemic, I’ve two young kids at home. It was simply impossible at certain points, especially for those of us in Ontario who had a lot of school closures. So I could say I have started a second novel, I have very vibrant ideas about it. I’m excited about it. I’m excited about finding time for it. But I do struggle in finding time to write and like many writers, especially those of us who don’t rely on it as our bread and butter. I do have a day job and a lot of obligations and I do have a growing family and so I try to carve out time once in a while to devote to it and I am excited. And I do have something that I’m passionate about writing about in my second novel. I don’t know when it will be ready. I did also write a short story So it’s kind of nice to be delving into smaller pieces because it seems more manageable at a time like this when there’s so much going on in the world. But yeah, so all this to say is, I hope that I will have more writing to share with the world one day pending the world’s acceptance of Dandelion.
ISA: And so thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk to me.
JAMIE: Well, thank you for having me. And honestly, thank you for carefully reading the book. It’s really nice. I’m noticing now that as people read the book, it’s really actually nice to talk about it. Because before it was just a world that I was in by myself. And thank you for taking the time to read it and have some very thoughtful questions.
ISA: You just heard an interview with writer, lawyer, law professor and podcaster Jamie Liew. This episode was recorded in advance of the panel, Stories that Haunt Us, with Asian Canadian writers Lindsay Wong (UBC) and Jamie Liew (University of Ottawa) on Tuesday April 5th. Details will be in the show notes.
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Event:
Stories that Haunt Us: A Conversation with Jamie Liew and Lindsay Wong