Something strange happened to me in late June. I was travelling with a friend, when an email arrived in my inbox. I first noticed it in the afternoon, after we returned from a hike in the Cheakamus River valley. I’d developed a blister on my foot, and I often think the little red notification bubbles on iPhone app icons on your home screen look like blisters: you want to scratch and pop them, but you should resist. The title of the email, “Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada – Communication to Client,” wasn’t promising. If I opened the email, I’d no doubt find I had more documents to prepare, forms to sign, or photographs to take. Even if I put off responding to it, intruding thoughts of the tasks waiting to be done would take the edge of enjoyment off my holiday.
Let me circle back first. When I was in Singapore in November, I applied for Singapore citizenship again, and, as before, and my application was rejected: more quickly, this time, despite letters of support that I’d enclosed from people who knew what I’d contributed to the country. As I age, I think it’s unlikely that I will become more eligible for Singapore citizenship, and there are other factors that count against me. In the government’s desire to maintain the exact ethnic population ratios from that moment of anguish in August 1965, there isn’t much space for “Others.” When I returned to Canada, then, I applied for Canadian citizenship, largely for pragmatic reasons. Having Canadian citizenship, paradoxically, meant that I could spend more time in Singapore, since I’ll have no residence requirements in Canada. From everything I’d been told, my application would take more than a year. For the first month, it seemed as though events were following this script. I was stuck in that mire of paperwork that people who live transnational and migrant lives know only too well. Immigration Canada needed a certificate from the Singapore Police Force to indicate that I hadn’t committed a crime during my residence in the city-state. As a non-citizen, though, I first had to appeal to the SPF to be allowed to apply for such a certificate. When I received permission, I had to have my fingerprints taken by a registered agency in Vancouver and couriered to the SPF at Cantonment Complex. I then had to wait for the police certificate by return of mail, scan it, and upload it. The online Canadian citizenship application portal is, unlike most official Singapore sites, very clunky, and a month later it still didn’t indicate that the document had been received. I wrote a couple of emails about this to the authorities, which received confusing replies that seem to have been written by a very early and buggy version of Chat GPT. Par for the course, I thought. This was just the beginning of the process.
But of course, in my hotel room, I couldn’t resist opening the email. I read the first line: “You are invited to your Canadian Citizenship Ceremony by video.” The ceremony was scheduled for July 9th, only two weeks away. As I post this now, I’ve gone through the ceremony, and have applied for an received my blue passport. Last month, I wrote about England, the first and now the least important of the three countries in which I have spent most of my life, and which have some kind of claim to be my home. I planned to write about Canada this month, but my suddenly becoming Canadian has made me more deeply reflective about my place here.
Let me circle back again. As a child and a young adult, Canada didn’t loom very strongly in my consciousness. I can’t remember having a Canadian friend, even at university. Somewhere, I’d absorbed many of the common stereotypes about the country: vast tracts of forest, Mounties, snow and cold. I saw Canadians largely positively: they were the UN peacekeepers, the UN blue helmet troops that kept warring factions apart, shot by both sides. And they had a beautiful modern flag that seemed to symbolize a new nation without colonial baggage, a maple leaf between two seas. In China, in the 1980s, I taught for a year as a Foreign Expert at Hunan Normal University in Changsha. I was at the beginning of my career, newly graduate with an MA from the University of Florida. One of my fellow teachers, Edward Berry from the University of Victoria, was on sabbatical, and reaching the end of his working life. He talked to me about the University of British Columbia, and the beauty of its campus, covered in pine trees, on a promontory reaching out into the sea. And UBC came up again in conversation in Taiwan, with a German friend who had visited Vancouver.
Back in the UK, applying for doctoral programmes in the United States, I also put in an application to UBC. I was accepted with a generous scholarship, and so in August 1989 I made may way to Vancouver, flying Ward Air to Hamilton, getting a bus to Toronto Central Station, and then taking a long train journey across the Canadian Shield, prairies and then the Rockies to Vancouver. I stayed there for the five years of my doctorate, interleaved by residencies in Hong Kong and then Taiwan. I enjoyed the community of students in the graduate programme, and the beauty and slowness of the West Coast. I audited Mandarin classes, and volunteered on the helpline at AIDS Vancouver (now Ribbon Community). I lived in a shared house in which a changing cast of Canadian and international students came and went. Yet the place never quite felt like home. My life was moving forward. When I flew to Singapore in August 1994, I thought I might come back to visit, but not to stay: it would be another of those cities or towns that I’d lived in in my twenties – London, Gainesville, Changsha, Haslemere, Tainan – that I’d leave behind and never return to. Yet I’ve maintained the connection, largely with Vancouver rather than with Canada as a whole, through visits, sabbaticals, leaves of absence, and, most recently, through my returning to school again. Canada has been good to me. I and my partner have gone through phases of thinking we might belong – an application for permanent residence twenty years ago, a two-year residence when I took a leave of absence from NUS to confront the depression that was consuming my life, and more recently our efforts to settle here again. Yet I’ve never quite put down roots. Singapore has been where the heart is. And now, suddenly, I’m Canadian, with a certificate of citizenship and a blue passport.
What was the transition like? I’d chose, again for pragmatic reasons, an online ceremony, scheduled for 9 a.m. Pacific Time. I had everything set up, logged in well ahead of time, and then I waited and waited for twenty minutes at my work desk, growing increasingly anxious, before I was let into the zoom room. There were others with me. A South Asian man and woman, young, sitting at a desk with a small Canadian flag held between them. A woman of East Asian heritage who blithely groomed herself in front of her phone, and then yawned, unaware that we could all see her. A man with a moustache sat rigidly in the centre of a room, in a formal armchair, with two women flanking him like temple lions. I could hear scuffles, and half-heard talk from unmuted microphones. As someone new entered the room, with their microphone unmuted, they’d briefly fill my screen. A young woman with a scarf over her hair, and another, maple leaf scarf around her neck. A young man in thin-rimmed glasses and a business suit talking in Chinese at a business desk, multitasking, shouting “不用了，不用了” at an invisible phone and then suddenly looking up, realising he had not muted his computer, and reaching out a hand to a waiting mouse. Each of us in turn was taken into a breakout room where a clerk asked me to show identification documents, my Maple Card and British Passport, which I struggled to hold up to the camera. I then had to use a pair of scissors to cut up my Maple Card, the card that indicated my PR status. There was something particularly painful about this for me. Just for a moment, I had neither PR nor citizenship. I showed the pieces to the clerk, and then reassembled the pieces, my face still recognisable, on the desk.
I was let into another room that gradually filled up, and then the ceremony started. It was facilitated by a clerk from the Burnaby office, young, tanned, eager as a cheerleader, her clothing and her background a sea of red. The presiding judge was older, whiter, thinner-faced and more serious. We watched a video of Canada that hit all the stereotypical images – Canada Place in Vancouver to Peggy’s Cove, with the Prairies, Quebec, moose, polar bears, wheat, mountains, and forests in between – and yet paradoxically was still moving. There was a second video, on the country’s indigenous peoples, that somehow managed to mention some of the harms of the past while still celebrating the future. We took the oath of citizenship which, bizarrely, involved pledging allegiance to King Charles the Third, to whom I’d never pledged allegiance as a British citizen. We said it in English first, and then, much more hesitantly for many of my fellow citizens in the room, in French, our right hands raised. There was a talk from the judge about our responsibilities as citizens. We sang O Canada, thankfully with our mics muted, in a bilingual version I didn’t know, but which, in French, made disturbing colonial references to the sword and the cross. Justin Trudeau appeared in a video telling us our responsibilities as citizens. And then, suddenly, it was all over: the judge remained on screen for a minute so we could take a selfie with her. The room closed, we thanked each other, and all went back to the business of form-filling for our citizenship papers and passports.
In one sense, nothing has changed. Summer continues in the West End, the foliage dry now after weeks without rain. Despite the effort in the ceremony, Canada as a story seems difficult to tell. The old story of European settlement, development, taming the wild and extraction has gone, and the new story of multicultural mosaic in contrast to the American melting pot that for a time seemed able to replace it, is also full of holes. The more you dig into the past, the more the bones of the dead emerge. On Canada Day we went on our first visit to the new Chinese Canadian Museum on Pender Street. There was a display centred around compulsory registration for the Chinese Exclusion Act, which came into force on July 1, 1923, a little over a century ago. July 1st was not simply Canada Day, then, but also Humiliation Day, the day on which the Act came into effect. Yet perhaps there’s a strength here, too, an ability to tell complicated stories rather than bury them. So for me, this month, there’s perhaps a sensation of rooting and of settling. I’ve been reading M.G. Vassanji’s book of essays Nowhere, Exactly, building on his own experience as a Canadian by citizenship, African (Kenyan and Tanzanian) by birth and upbringing, and Indian by ancestry, and in particular his meditations on “nowhere artists,” writing in Canada without larger recognition. Reading Vassanji belatedly gives me a sense of how little I know even of Canadian literary and cultural history, but there’s also a sense that some knowledge will come not through reading or learning but simply by quietly existing. I think it was Althusser who said that you come to believe not through rational conviction but through the rituals of prayer, through thousands of repeated acts of kneeling.
And then, just when I begin to think that the story of my life is coming together, there’s another tug. My re-entry permit as a Singapore Permanent Resident, which most people have renewed in a few days, regularly take me several weeks. During these times I write emails to ICA in Singapore. I receive replies from them that are robotic, that do not answer the questions I ask, much like those I received from Immigration Canada. I’m stonewalled. Months pass, and I work the few contacts I have at ICA, and book a ticket to fly back to Singapore just before the permit expires. And then one day, without warning, a little red blister in my mailbox, an email entitled “ICA Notification: eREP Application Outcome.’ For now, I have a resting place, a temporary sense of home.