What I understood this year, was that white folks have it real easy, and judging by the class" enthusiasm, Toronto seems to be the only great multicultural city in Canada, or the world for that matter. To counter these false notions, I chose to compare and contrast my somewhat difficult experiences being an English kid in Montreal (which is I assure you all, a very, very multicultural city), with those of my Vietnamese elementary and high school buddy Dac Khoa's. Despite our different family lives and customs, we essentially got the same raw deals from the pressures the French kids imposed on us. I will outline how despite our different nationalities and customs, racism is just as bad for one group as for another, even if the other is commonly known as the "dominant (looking) culture". .
Dac is a 20 year-old only child, born in Vietnam, who moved to Montreal when he was seven. "Here's the proof," he says as he rolls up his sleeve, showing me the scar from his malaria shot. It looks as if they stuck a needle that was a centimeter in diameter into his shoulder. "All us real immigrants have it." His family was very wealthy in Vietnam, where they had four mansions. However, the communist government seized three of them, with a fourth imminent seizure. It was then that they decided to move to Quebec. Dac says they chose the French-speaking province because the family already knew some of the language due to France's occupation of Vietnam during the war. He came with his parents, one set of grandparents, an aunt and an uncle. Dac only spoke Vietnamese in his home, and learned a lot of English from television.
I come from a mother who is second generation in Canada, 100% Irish blood. She grew up in the Laurentians in Quebec. My father is third generation Ukrainian, born in Manitoba, raised in Toronto. I was born and raised in Montreal, and I"m now a tender 19 years of age. I always lived in a very French neighborhood, where for the first few years of my life my only friend was a Colombian kid.
