Am I Old Enough to Write a Memoir?
The question that I dread the most is a simple one. I would be confronted with it whenever I hailed a cab during my years in China. As soon as I hopped inside, the driver would utter “Where are you from?”
Normally this would be a straightforward question, but not for me.
“It’s complicated.” I answered, before telling him that I had been born in Toronto, Canada.
“Oh, you are Dr. Bethune’s compatriot,” the driver would generally answer, referring to the Canadian battlefield surgeon in the Chinese Communist army during the Sino-Japanese War in the late 1930s. “So, you are also a friend of China.” I always found this reply quite amusing.
While it is true that I am Canadian by birth, I have never self-identified as Canadian.
I am an offspring of globalization. My European parents met at an Italian language class in Brussels, Belgium. Shortly after their marriage, they relocated to North America. They briefly lived in the American Midwest before heading to Toronto, where I was born. While I was still in diapers, my nomadic parents decided to flee the inhospitable Canadian winters and migrated to São Paulo, Brazil.
My daily routine in primary school felt like cruising through three different countries. I began the day speaking French with my parents. At the breakfast table, my mother always reminded me how “we Europeans” should never place our elbows on the table. After breakfast, I headed to the American school, where I learned to recite Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and enjoyed pumpkin pie during Thanksgiving. When the clock struck 3 p.m., it was time to hang out with my Brazilian friends. Although I never really considered myself a soccer fan, I found my friends’ heated ramblings on their favorite players highly entertaining. At nightfall, I returned home. After finishing my homework, I rewarded myself by reading Tintin comic strips and savoring a slice of Apfelstrudel (apple pastry) that my mother regularly bought at a local German delicatessen.
As a child immersed in such a multicultural environment, I always felt more comfortable as an outsider. Whenever I spoke, my sentences were a cocktail of French, English, and Portuguese words chaotically stringed together. While I eventually outgrew this habit as a teenager, up to this day I still have a slight but perceptible foreign accent in all three languages. I also never embraced a cultural or national identity. But that was never a problem in a cosmopolitan city like São Paulo, home to a wide plethora of immigrants, from Italians to Japanese. In my eyes, São Paulo was the tropical version of New York City.
It was São Paulo that sparked my interest in East Asian history. The city boasts the largest overseas Japanese community in the world. Between 1908 and the early 1970s, successive waves of Japanese immigrants poured into the country. While the majority established themselves in southeastern Brazil (especially in São Paulo), Japanese communities can be found scattered throughout the country. As a college student at the University of São Paulo, I ventured through the Amazon basin to interview those Japanese who had tried their luck in the region. I listened to the stories of immigrants who had arrived in the Amazon to plant cacao as early as the 1930s.
This research project further enticed my desire to specialize in East Asia. When I graduated from college in 1997, I bought a one-way ticket to China and bid farewell to Brazil after two decades. I coincidentally landed in Beijing on the eve of the Chinese New Year in early February. I still remember being enveloped by the freezing wind as I walked off the plane into the decrepit Soviet-style airport terminal. As the cab drove to my hotel, the smell of burning coal seeped through the windows. I watched the cab slowly make its way through the hutongs, narrow alleys lined with traditional courtyards close to the city center. Little did I know that two weeks later, Deng Xiaoping, China’s leader who opened the country to foreign investment, would pass away.
I witnessed fast-paced changes in Beijing. Bulldozers razed the hutongs in the city center to erect glass and steel buildings that showcased Chinese “modernity.” The bland Maoist suits turned into a relic of a bygone era as Beijingers started earning enough money to dress more “fashionably.” BMWs angrily blew their horns on the clogged second-ring road that encircled the capital. Unexpected events during this period also shook the country’s psyche. Protests erupted nationwide after NATO’s “accidental” bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999. I watched as angry Chinese students threw stones and ink bottles at the American Embassy in Beijing, ushering a period of grassroots nationalist protests. Three years later, I survived the SARS pandemic.
The early 2000s were marked by experimentation. During those years, it was still possible to stroll through Tiananmen Square without passing through metal detectors. As a history student at Beijing University, I engaged in lively discussions about Tibet and Taiwan with my Chinese classmates and professors (an experience unimaginable today). One of my professors even referred to the government-sanctioned interpretation of history as “rubbish” and urged his students to adopt a more critical view rather than simply parrot the official Party line. Just before graduation, I managed to land a gig as a journalist for a Chinese newspaper. During my brief career in journalism, I interviewed the late soccer-legend-turned-Viagra-spokesman Pelé on the Great Wall; encountered Chinese who were not shy about expressing their views on the country’s social ills; and devised creative ways to tiptoe around government censorship. By the time I left China permanently to ease my way into academia in the U.S., the politically relaxed atmosphere that I had encountered there had gradually dissipated. It would eventually be replaced by current President Xi Jinping’s hollow “Chinese dream” slogan and his tight-fisted approach to politics.
My experiences in China during the first decade of this century shaped my views on the country and, most importantly, allowed me to mature as an academic and a journalist. Today, as a university professor, I frequently weave these experiences into my lectures. Many of my students (and fellow colleagues) have urged me to write a memoir about my recollections of China. I have, however, resisted the temptation of putting my experiences on paper since I have always regarded penning a memoir as a practice by people reaching the final chapter of their lives. Although I am inching toward my 50th birthday, I keep convincing myself that I am still too young to write a memoir. That’s why for now I will use this space to occasionally post reflections of my life experiences, and it will be my first attempt toward that endeavor.
