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Diaspora relations


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Guest jigsaw_puzzled_singh
20 hours ago, puzzled said:

We had some Canadian relatives stay over for a few days when they were coming back from India and they just kept on going on about how everything is so small here lol  the houses, roads etc  

Another thing is they were very loud! Maybe it was just there accent lol 

Ha ?. That happens all the time. They really don't mean anything by it and by and large Canadians, including Sikh Canadians really are super nice and friendly people, but Punjabis in Canada do have great difficulty in understanding concepts such as city life, old and heritage etc. They're conditioned into thinking that the wide open spaces of the outer suburbs in which 90% of them live is the height of sophistication and indicative of prosperity. Their parents left the wide open villages of Punjab and they themselves were born and bred in the wide open spaces of the outer suburbs. Forgive them......They just don't understand city life. 

We have Canadian family staying with all the time and before they even arrive we know they are going to complain about the size of the hallway, size of the room, size of the bedroom, size of the bed and the obligatory complaint about having a separate hot and cold faucet on one of the sinks. But, last year, one of them came up with a complaint we'd not heard before. She complained about how "backward" we were for having such a low water level in our toilets. She said Canadians have water levels to the top of the basin in their toilets so that potentially deadly toxic gas from our waste does not inflitrate the air and kill us. Now.....you know me...I'm always looking for an excuse to give a lecture and this girl handed it to me on a plate. :) I explained to her how, whilst yes it was true that the high water level in Canadian toilets means toilets in Canada very rarely smell, the Canadian system was just the american syphoning system whereby there is a just a 2 inch trap at the bottom and those toilets are prone to clogging and use at least double the amount of water that we in Europe use. Our wash-down system, I explained, has at least a 4 to 6 inch trap, uses very little water in comparison and never clogs. I explained to her how, with water becoming an ever decreasing commodity in the world, the canadian toilet system was not only an ecological disaster but something that can not be sustained in the long-run. As such, she might as well get used to our toilets because it's the system Canada is going to have to one day adopt anyway when water becomes even more scarce. 

It's very rare in life to be given the opportunity to release information you had in your head about toilets....so i thank her for that. But to be able to do it twice in a year or so is a dream come true.....so I thank you for that  :)  And here endeth my toilet lecture.

 

 

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On 7/24/2018 at 10:12 AM, Guest jigsaw_puzzled_singh said:

Hi Premi.

I'm really glad it interests you because in so many ways it mirrors our own history and how we perceive ourselves versus how others perceive us in the sense that we could stand on the rooftops and shout all day about how we Sikhs and Punjabis are totally different to and have a different history in the west to the man that comes from Bombay, Madras, Karachi or Calcutta but whatever we say will fly over the heads of white people and Chinese people because to them we are all the same people. I'll refer to the 'mirror image' in what I'm about to say below:

We've all seen movies, photographs and read things about the early Chinese in the late 1800s in places such as California and British Columbia - building railroads and Chinatowns etc. Although China, just like India, is a massive country, nearly all of those Chinese pioneer immigrants were Hoisan speaklers from a tiny stretch of villages in Guandong province. i.e. The Hoisan speakers laid the foundation of the Chinese diaspora but after the Cantonese / Mandarin influx since the 70's and 80's they have been marginalised and their sacrifices forgotten.  (Mirror Image: Although India is a massive country nearly all of the early Indian pioneers in places such as California and British Columbia in the late 1800s were Doabi speakers from a tiny stretch of villages in districts Jalandhar and Hoshiarpur. However, since others from other areas and all over India have arrived since the 1980's their sacrifices have been forgotten and they have been marginalised.)

The next big phase of Chinese immigrants to North America were Cantonese speakers in the 70's, 80's and 90's. They came in such large numbers that the Hoisan language was virtually pushed out. The next big phase of Chinese immigrants since the 2000s has been Mandarin speakers and because their language enjoys an elevated status they have pretty much sidelined Cantonese. The bitterness, however, remains in the sense that the Chinese diaspora are the vanguards of the old Chinese traditions and dialects whilst mainland China itself steams ahead with what it calls 'modernity'. The new Chinese will however appropriate the blood, sweat and tears of the original Guandong immigrants and use their history in the west as their own history and sacrifices.(Mirror Image: Indians from other areas in Punjab, Gujarat, Bombay, Tamil Nadu have in the last 30 years poured into North America and have appropriated the blood, sweat and tears of the original Doabi pioneers and used their history as their own collective Indian history in the west.

So you see when it comes to the Chinese vote in Vancouver (other places too but especially Vancouver where the Chinese are so numerous) there is a mixture of resentment against each other coupled with a natural diaspora desire to cling on to and protect old ways and languages in the face of the massive advance of Mandarin in China itself. Diasporas always do that wherever they are in the world. I think the Canadian Defence Minister Harjit Singh Sajjan is a good way of illustrating what I mean when I originally talked about fragmented politics and filling voids. Harjit represents a Vancouver constituency that was, in the 1970's, 80's and 90's the Southall of Canada. It was THE Sikh area of Vancouver. Since the early 2000s however, with many Sikhs moving out of Vancouver and into  neighbouring cities such as Surrey, a relatively small Sikh population still remains but power in numbers is with the Chinese. The Chinese however are too busy disliking each other because of regional / dialect differences so they won't vote for each other in an election. This creates a situation for a Sikh to fill the void and this scenario is repeated in areas all over British Columbia.

What an interesting post/reply. Thank you!!!

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On 7/24/2018 at 2:36 PM, puzzled said:

We had some Canadian relatives stay over for a few days when they were coming back from India and they just kept on going on about how everything is so small here lol  the houses, roads etc  

Another thing is they were very loud! Maybe it was just there accent lol 

They were using their seven village voices ... probabaly how they get heard in their mausoleum like huge houses...

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