“I wanted to find the history and present-day relationship of racialized peoples to Indigenous nations, but I found only the controlling hand of colonialism as the central spectre in every narrative I came across,” writes Amy Fung in the prologue of her debut book, Before I Was a Critic, I Was a Human Being.
Published in 2019, Before I Was a Critic, I Was a Human Being, is Fung’s first book and what has been described as an “extremely long land acknowledgement.” It’s a collection of nonfiction essays on her experiences as a first generation immigrant and a national art critic in Canada.
From the empty expanses of suburban Edmonton to the cramped galleries of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, Fung examines the “mythologies of multiculturalism” across Canada and how colonialism and white hegemony continue to define Canadian values and society. In other words, “who is truly included and accepted depends on your relative proximity to whiteness,” she says.
Behind the book
Fung is a writer and organizer currently based in Ottawa on unceded Algonquin Anishinaabe territory. Born in Kowloon, Hong Kong, she immigrated with her family to the Treaty 6 territory of Edmonton when she was six years old, before going on to live and work on the unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations of Vancouver and on the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Huron Wendat peoples in Toronto.
She, like almost everyone else she knew in the arts at the time, applied for a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts’ New Chapter program — a grant program celebrating Canada’s 150th anniversary — to fund her book. Although Fung was against the idea of celebrating 150 years of Canadian colonial history, she also wanted the funding to work on her new project.
“The art world thinks it’s really progressive and political but here we are, clamoring towards this pile of money that’s celebrating Canadian colonial occupation,” said Fung. “But let’s face it, almost everyone in the arts community is precarious and we need money to work and to live.”
She tells me her original idea for the book was to do a series of interviews across the country, but she thought that interviews would be too forced and unnatural. Instead, she shifted to writing personal, intimate essays based on her experiences in and out of the Canadian art world. Her mother is a reoccurring figure throughout the book, and she acknowledges in her writing that her life in Canada was due to her mom’s own sacrifices. Fung felt like she was in an “unique position” to reflect on the Canadian experience, being someone not from here, but of here, and being someone who actively having worked and traveled across the country for over the past fifteen years.
Writing and researching Before I Was a Critic, I Was a Human Being was an 18-month-long process which Fung described as “all over the place.” She worked under a series of self-imposed deadlines that coincided with invitations to read new chapters in progress as she was working on her book.
“If I was reading in Calgary, I was writing the Alberta story, if I was reading in B.C, I was writing the B.C stories, if I received an invitation east, I was writing the east coast stories,” she said.
The multicultural myth
A core theme that Fung revisits throughout the collection is how racialized immigration perpetuates colonialism into the twenty-first century.
“Unless you’re Indigenous, you’re an immigrant,” she said. “I don’t care how many generations you are. You migrated here to a white settler colony country.”
In her book, she writes that there is “a lot of listening and unlearning that most settlers, newly immigrated or not, have to do in this generation and the ones still yet to come.” The question of how we can support Indigenous rights and knowledge without it being “controlled and commodified by the empire” is a central inquiry throughout the book.
Fung doesn’t believe in multiculturalism, which she sees as a “liberal project” aimed at managing diversity for the benefit of whiteness. Whether it’s the art world or academia which are “extremely white” in terms of institutional power, Fung said she has felt both “not seen and utilized” for various purposes.
“But I know I’m neither excluded or fully included,” she said. “I fully acknowledge that in the art world, I do have a certain level of visibility and power through various positions I’ve held and publications I write for. I just don’t see what the point of it all is anymore to keep pushing back against a wall of whiteness.”
In her book, she reflects on being invited to sit on a jury for the first culturally diverse arts grants pilot in Edmonton in the late 2000s. She realized that she had been asked to participate “only because of [her] ethnic last name rather than [her] credentials as an art professional.” When she asked if she was eligible for the grants, they told her she was “too Canadian” to qualify.
Fung surmised that Canada, as a country, is “self-conscious” and so most of the “power” she holds is because she writes for international publications about Canadian artists.
“And that is of value to them. What I have to say, my opinion, in a Canadian magazine or even peer to peer, it doesn’t seem to matter to them so long as their galleries or spaces look tolerant and inclusive,” she said.
To be racialized in Canada is to be “whatever’s conveniently supporting the dominant narrative” Fung reflects in the epilogue. She writes that as she travelled and worked across the country, she experienced fluctuating levels of racialization, “but its reality always remained.”
“I never knew when or where this difference would be named, and how it was going to be used to categorize me, my intentions, my thoughts, wants, desires as somehow lesser than real,” she writes.
Racism and complicity
In one of the opening anecdotes of Before I Was a Critic, I Was a Human Being, Fung recalls returning to visit a contemporary Indigenous art exhibition at the Art Gallery of Alberta a few days after its opening and witnessing a front-desk attendant harass a young Indigenous man who was asking questions and trying to get into the exhibition. The young man ended up leaving and the attendant gave Fung a “conspiring look of exasperation and relief” that in that moment, made Fung feel “closer to whiteness than not.”
“I was completely complicit and didn’t think twice about entering a space that could cover its walls with images of contemporary Indigenous perspectives, but exclude their physical bodies from entering and experiencing. In that moment, I felt like a real Canadian,” she writes.
Fung said it’s not just Edmonton, but everywhere in Canada – Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal– she has seen similar occurrences in and out of the art world, where white people in minor positions of authority harass Indigenous, Black and racialized people to the point where they feel “unwelcome” and “uncertain” about occupying certain spaces and positions commonly reserved for whiteness.
She asserted that Canadians have become inward looking to the point where “we don’t even do anything or say anything unless it directly impacts us.”
Recalling a pre-pandemic incident at an ATM vestibule in Toronto, she described a situation where around at least six people were lined up inside for the machines. A man started harassing and “leering” at two young Asian women, but no one did anything.
Fung ended up telling the man to leave the two girls alone, and in response, he started harassing her.
“And at this point, people are just shuffling through the line to get to the machine so they can get their money and leave. No one says a single thing at me and this guy yelling at each other in this tiny confined space,” she said. “And I think that is very, very Canadian.”
From microaggressions to explicitly racist attacks, Fung continually brings up the collective indifference towards the injustices of racial violence in her book.
“This general apathy towards each other; specifically the Other that is not white, remains an everyday reality in Canadian civility,” she writes in the epilogue. “As a nation-state that is increasingly multicultural in the self-guiding sense of the word rather than the state-controlled/nation-building-project sense, whiteness still remains the default for normality, for respectability, if not acceptability under colonial laws.”
Canada’s legacy of anti-Asian racism
In regards to the heightened violence and racist rhetoric towards Asians in Canada and the United States, Fung said that it’s integral to contextualize the recent violence with the longer history of Asian exclusion in the West.
“There have been race riots and systemic violence against East Asians and South Asians for over 100 years in this country, most of it rooted in B.C and so to ignore that history and say anti-Asian violence is just because of COVID is absolutely being negligent of how easily revokable Asian inclusion has always been,” she said.
Photo credit: Library and Archives Canada
From a 1907 anti-immigration rally against Chinese, Japanese and Korean immigration in Vancouver to the federal Chinese Immigration Act that banned Chinese immigration for 24 years, Fung said that anti-Asian exclusion in the West is “rooted directly in settler colonial law.”
“This is not unique, this is not because of A, B or C. Anti-Asian violence is part of ongoing white supremacy that is also anti-Black and anti-Indigenous. This has always been the state of things,” she said.
With the recent violence against Asians in Canada and the United States, including the shooting in Atlanta, Fung said “it just kept hitting [her] in waves.”
“Learning about the violence in Atlanta through social media is often hearing the worst bits first, because that’s what people want to share,” she said. “All the cruel jokes made at the expense of Asian female sex workers, then the excuses made by the cops, by the alleged shooter himself about how he’s not racist when the fetishization of Asian women is racism, let alone shooting them in cold blood.”
She said it hit her the hardest when it was only days later that the victims’ full names were released and the media and sheriff’s office “couldn’t be bothered to include or spell their full names correctly.”
As for the ongoing attacks on elderly Asian people, Fung said it “boils [her] blood” and makes her “very concerned for [her] own mother’s safety,” as her mother has told her she’d been “yelled at and harassed by ignorant white people on her morning walks in Vancouver.”
“I know she can take care of herself, but if something happens, I honestly don’t think bystanders will step in, as we saw with the video in New York of the security guard choosing to close the door instead of coming to the aid of the older Filipino woman,” she said. “I don’t see that as apathy, but I see that willful ignorance as a hate crime, too.”
With Canadian immigration policy reforming from racial discrimination to a point-based system in the 1960’s, she said Asians have been “economically absorbed faster and [more] aggressively by the state.”
“This supported economic migrants, to fulfill the ‘model minority’ myth to try and fit in as the “good” minority, which was based on a lot of anti-Black rhetoric,” she said. “Asians were never going to be white, but the model minority myth was to move them farther away from Blackness, historically. That was the argument being made, which is a project of white supremacy and it’s not okay, even if it’s been deeply internalized by a lot of Asian immigrants.”
The model minority myth’s protection of Asians is conditional, and that once Asians are seen as a threat, they are easily attacked “because inclusion and tolerance in a white settler society has always been precarious.”
See also: Fighting the model minority myth
“You’re never going to be white,” Fung says rather adamantly over the phone. “And so I think, historically, those allegiances to white supremacy by racial minorities have always been faulty, if not self-destructive.”
At the end of her book, Fung writes that while she doesn’t condone racism against Asians whatsoever, she also believes in “supporting the bigger picture.”
“Specifically, Black and Indigenous voices have never been more resonant and visible in my lifetime than they are today, echoing past movements and momentums and amplifying all who feel fed up and outraged at the ongoing abuses of white supremacy and the injustices of state policies and police brutality supported by and funded through the capitalist patriarchy of colonial law,” she writes.
In Toronto, she saw strong bonds of allyship between organizers of Indigenous resistance movements around missing and murdered Indigenous women and Black Lives Matter-TO – spreading awareness of each other’s events, sharing resources and showing up with bodies, she writes in the epilogue,
“The holding up of each other in a city that may be diverse in appearance, but is still structurally white, is becoming the most unique characteristic of this place and, to some extent, about Canada itself.”
Feature Photo: The Bows
