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Landmarks
1 Cover
3 how my yt settler mama met my Chinese immigrant dad
how my yt settler mama met my Chinese immigrant dad
there are different versions of how. I remember my dad telling an exciting story of breaking out of Matsqui Penitentiary in B.C.: scaling the chain-link fence and throwing a jacket over the razor wire at the top so he wouldn’t cut himself as he went over it, hiding out through the night in an itchy haystack in a farmer’s field adjacent to the pen, before running to Medicine Hat, Alberta to seek sanctuary with his stepdad, the only grandpa I ever knew. grandpa Tai ran an antique store right across the street from the Canadian Pacific Railway station and lived in the basement. mom says dad and other prisoners were getting day passes to go pick strawberries in the many berry fields now occupying unceded Matsqui Territory in the Fraser Valley and there was a rumour that these work permits that granted little bits of freedom would be stopped so he ran away while on one. but both stories begin with dad leaving the prison when he wasn’t supposed to and end with dad running to Medicine Hat to hide out at grandpa’s. Medicine Hat, where my mom lived her whole life up to that point. they met at a party
race according to my yt mama/1
when I first heard Cher’s hit song “half-breed” on the radio
I asked my mom what that was and she said that’s you
she was a big fan of 60s/70s Cher who according to my mother
was always glamorous and cool and never
wore the same pair of bell-bottoms twice so
I don’t think mom understood that I would
internalize the lyrics of the chorus when trying
to place myself in the prairies of southern Alberta
where the only people who looked like me
were what racist yt people called halfbreeds:
the Métis, and the mixee children of
destatused Indigenous mamas and yt dads
race according to my yt mama/2
the first time I remember being conscious of the violence of race was
when I happened upon my mom watching Roots
on the screen a young black woman was being whipped
electric with fear I asked why
because she’s black
my mom said, and this uncontextualized response is true but I don’t
think she understood what that meant to not-yt me
Mariah according to my yt mama
when I try to talk to my mom about what it was like
to grow up surrounded by yt people in the prairies
in the 80s though it seemed like the 50s
she tells me in a so-there tone
that Mariah is a mixee and that people love her
I tell my mom that Mariah has talked publicly
about feeling some type of way about
being what she calls biracial
which is why on the early album covers
her hair is obscuring her face
there is a long pause then a I didn’t know that
I wish her first response wasn’t a disavowal of my experience
I wish when I said this to her she didn’t disavow my experience again
by telling me that my sibling didn’t feel shame about being a mixee
my sibling who in adulthood says
you’re more Chinese than me
mood disorder
aiya, the irony of my mental illness
bipolar II matching my biracial blood
me and Mariah
we may not go back like babies with pacifiers
but this is another thing we have in common
dual diagnosis
also called co-occurring disorders, or dual pathology, according to
Wikipedia,