Lee became David when he was fifteen.
His mother phoned his high school counselor and asked her to change the official name on his profile. “Because you need to fit in, and to fit in you need a white name. ‘David’ is a white name,” she said. ‘Anglicized’ or ‘westernized’ was what she meant, but white was what she saw.
Isn’t Lee a perfectly normal English name? Sure. But only in retrospect.
And of course, their conversation was in Korean. But if it were written in Korean nobody would be able to read their story, it’s not like those stories where French or Spanish or Italian dialogues are embedded in English narratives to make them more real or more refined or more local. Readers knew French or Spanish or Italian; readers didn’t know Kor—well, you understand.
Couldn’t you write their conversation in some sort of broken English? Sure. But that’d be a lie, because they didn’t speak English at home, however broken it might’ve been.
* * *
Unlike the sob story immigrant boys love to tell Canadian girls on quiet park benches, fitting in wasn’t all that tough for David. He learned how to speak English, learned how to play hockey, learned how to bounce a quarter into a cup with eighty-percent accuracy, and learned how to shoot tequila with lime and salt. He learned that saying “eh” is a regional habit, not a national motif, and that a pitcher of Canadian is a man’s drink that no man wants to drink.
Do native Canadians bother to write about these things? Or are they just born knowing them? Did they know that they know? Who cares. Only an immigrant would. Only an immigrant would jot them down in his little notebook titled “How to be a Canadian”.
What a F.O.B. (Fresh Off the Boat, Fob!)
Living in Parkdale, David learned that the world is in fact black-and-white. There’s no room for you if you’re yellow. Yellow isn’t the colour of your skin, but the apology for the colour of your skin. So you could be yellow and still be fine, but if you’re yellow - tsk. You can bang your head hard to “Back in Black,” or rock your body to “California Love,” but don’t ever let on that you’re yellow. Don’t look down, don’t look around. Don’t be tight, don’t hesitate. Those are giveaways for being yellow. Just move rhythmically against her body, make short but piercing eye contact and smile nonchalantly.
First Place
Hart House Literary Contest