It’s been a calm month here in Vancouver. We’ve been spared the smoke from the wildfires in the north, in Alberta, and further East. A few weeks ago, when I wrote my last post, we almost seemed to be heading into drought, the grass on English Bay and near Lost Lagoon burned the colour of straw. Then we had a week or two of cooler weather, with some rain, and the foliage grew heavy and green again. I’ve been hiking on the North Shore and up Howe Sound towards Squamish. We also made a trip to Salt Spring Island, in the Salish Sea, just off Vancouver Island, walked through meadows full of wildflowers, and visited the Salt Spring Island Natural Cemetery, a future final resting place if we do settle here permanently. Friends have visited from across the Pacific and nearer at hand. Despite climate change, the conflict in Ukraine, Pierre Poilievre, and a world that seems to be sinking into chaos, there’s a comforting feeling of normalcy. It’s still not too hot, and the summer seems, almost for the first time in years, like one of those regular Vancouver summers from the 1980s and 1990s. Flowers are everywhere. Walk on the beach at English Bay in the evening and there are crowds of sunbathers watching the sunset. Cycle across town and you run into high school graduation ceremonies at the Orpheum, flocks of teenagers in tuxedos, cocktail dresses, and mortarboards spilling out over the road. Head up Nelson Street to the weekly Farmer’s Market and the leaves of the maples and lindens have grown down over the path, so thick that you have to step aside. Crows wake us with the light each morning, this year’s fledglings now adult-sized, following their parents from branch to branch in the linden tree and opening red mouths to caw for food. A few days ago, just as we began a hike, we ran into three fat black ravens, fighting over a twig only a few feet away from us on the top of Cleveland dam, oblivious or more likely uncaring of our presence. The surface of our lives is very peaceful, the long, sundrenched experience of the everyday beautiful enough for us to temporarily forget about those deeper currents stirring beneath us.

In the last couple of weeks, however, I’ve watched a couple of movies that have given me that sense of reaching down to deeper currents in my life that I was unaware of at the time. The first was Ann Hui’s Boat People: I’d seen many of the Hong Kong director’s movies as they came out over the years, from Summer Snow in the 1990s (the more pithy Chinese title, 女人四十is the one I always remember) to, quite recently, Our Time Will Come, but never gone back to her work from the early 1980s, before China and Southeast Asia became so central to my life. In the 1980s, though, I worked with Vietnamese refugees in the United Kingdom first as a volunteer and then as a salaried social worker. I was with a charity called the Ockenden Venture (now Ockenden International), and lived with them in a reception centre for refugees in Haslemere, Surrey. The house we lived in a massive red-brick Victorian pile, built for some Victorian stockbroker a century before, at the end of a long, leafy lane that led from the village through fields up towards the wilds of the Devil’s Punchbowl. It had, I understood, been donated to the charity, and had housed waves of refugees since the original Polish and Latvian girls who had arrived in the 1950s. My co-workers were a motley group — British and European students on gap years, an Englishwoman who had retired from a life in the London theatre, and two Tibetan grandparents struggling to bring up a grandson who no longer quite believed that he was a tulku, an incarnate bodhisattva.

Into the house we welcomed Vietnamese refugees who arrived via camps in Malaysia and elsewhere, mostly teenage boys, sent out by their parents with the hope that the rest of the family might in time join them. I’m still Facebook friends with several of them, now middle-aged and prosperous-looking men. At times in the reception centre they would tell me stories of the voyage, or life in Vietnam before left, but they were often eager to move on with their lives, struggling through school, apprenticeships, and new jobs and negotiating family relationships when their parents and siblings did come, years after their own voyages. Ann Hui’s movie, filmed in China with a largely Cantonese soundtrack, but based on extensive interviews with Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong, stitched together tiny fragments of stories like those told to me into both a cinematic and a historic narrative: the moment when Nhac is blown up by unexplored ordinance left over from the War, for instance, was identical to a story that one of the boys shared with me. In one way, then, the film assembled the jigsaw of memory fragments I listened to into a coherent narrative. Yet it also made me realise how the anger of the young men, which would boil over suddenly in the rooms of that very English mansion, with its parquet floors and mullioned windows, was based on unacknowledged trauma. And how, despite this, and despite our lack of knowledge and training, despite the boys’ pasts that continued to haunt them in the present, we somehow muddled through and just got on with living. The surface of life closed back up very quickly, leaving little clue as to what was hidden beneath.

The second movie I saw came out of a wonderful exhibition we saw at Vancouver Art Gallery, The Children Have to Hear Another Story: Alanis Obomsawin. I’ve lived over ten years in Vancouver in total in my life, but in a patchwork of visits: my doctoral studies at UBC from 1989 to 1994, punctuated by time out in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and then sabbatical semesters or years until we returned here in 2018. In terms of politics and larger social trends, it’s been easy to keep up after internet news became widespread in the late 1990s, but I find in terms of concrete knowledge of cultural figures and historical events my memory has huge gaps. I must have followed the 1995 referendum on Quebec independence from Singapore, for instance, but I did so at a distance: if feels now to me like a historical event I’ve read about in a book. I’m clueless about a lot of Canadian music outside of K.D. Lang and Avril Lavigne. And thus I’m ashamed to say I’d never registered Obomsawin’s name, or her life as a folk singer, graphic artist, filmmaker, and activist. After the exhibition, we watched Obomsawin’s best-known movie, the documentary Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, touching on something I remembered from 1990, as the “Oka Crisis,” but which might also be called the Kanehsatà:ke Resistance. I remembered media coverage of the crisis, in which Mohawk or Kanienʼkehá꞉ka people fought back against an attempt to extend a golf course on their land and were besieged by security forces, just as I entered the second year of my doctorate at UBC. I’d see CBC news of the unfolding action on our old, fuzzy television with its broken remote in my shared rental house, and read articles about in the Globe and Mail and the Vancouver Sun. Obomsawin’s movie consisted mostly of footage from the time of crisis, and the feel of the film was thus quite raw, very different from most contemporary documentaries. In one way I felt I’d been given a window back into my own experience of the past; in another, I realised how much of the context, despite my sympathies for the resistance, I hadn’t known at the time. Watching it, as with Boat People, I again had that sense of double time, of revisiting something I’d experienced far back in my past, in a different life, and viewing it now with much wider understanding.

I’m searching now for the emotion that surfaces when I recall these two times of my life. Regret is too strong: there’s a sense in which I could perhaps have paused, have tried to know more at the time, and perhaps gaining that knowledge would have taken me on a different path from the one I followed, but the path that I did choose or that chose me wasn’t bad. Perhaps it’s more a sense of being becalmed, and of uneasiness, a feeling that the surface of beauty in this city, this temporary peace we’ve won, is very fragile but also hard and persistent. Despite my training, my commitment, I somehow can’t reach down further into the depths: the life of the city is passing by, and I am not quite part of it.