Year of the Pig

Why is it so good to have your back scratched? You get an itch, you try to perform amazing feats of physical what-not to scratch it and then you get someone else to do it. Then your whole back starts itching, but what bliss to have it scratched. Like a pig in clover.

Anyway, Happy Chinese New Year. We celebrated Chinese New Year last night with colleagues of Kevin's and I was given some strange insights.

During the afternoon I had covered lunch in Richmond town centre, the Nature Park had a stand with other heritage sites from the city. We had a beaver pelt and a muskrat skin out and we answered questions, smiled, engaged people in conversation. All kinds of people. I feel that Canadians are much more interested in Natural History than I'm used to back home, they seem to engage with it more easily, but then maybe we just are surrounded by more of it here. And maybe I'm just in a situation now where that is my milieu.

The party started early, around 17.30. Kevin gets frustrated by my lack of progress in my own cultural integration. I find it hard. To me, 17.30 is early. Dinner at 18.00 is early. Whatever.

A Chinese colleague got a lift with us. She asked me whether I liked Vancouver and I said yes, I loved both Vancouver and Richmond. She seemed very surprised.
'But there are so many Chinese people in Richmond,' she said. I said that this didn't really worry me. She said that people didn't like to live near Chinese people and would sell their houses. I suppose that's not an unknown phenomenon for anyone who has lived through the 70s in Britain, except for Chinese insert black people and Asians.
Later she told us that even many Chinese people avoided our city because there were so many other Chinese.

When we were at the party, one white Canadian had lived in Japan. He said that they were very open about their racism and that he had been told many times that he couldn't be employed because he was white. I didn't think to pursue whether he was actually entitled to work there, but it seemed to me that it was an outrageous thing. The West heavily sanctioned South Africa over Apartheid.
'I didn't mind,' he said, he loved Japan, 'it allowed Japan to stay Japanese.'

The friends we were visiting are a couple with a young baby. The husband is Indian, the wife Chinese.
'X-H's mother is coming over in the summer to look after the baby when X-H goes back to work,' said our other friend on the way home, 'but she isn't very happy about X-H marrying an Indian.'
Again, stunned. So much multi-culturalism causing so much trouble. But it'll all quieten down eventually. The Indian husband's family are wonderful people, who could not come to love them?

Racism's a pig.