by Pico Iyer
And Toronto, with a self-consciousness and earnestness less common in more settled places, had decided to seize on this fact of postmodern life to make itself something half-imagined. Paris and London and New York were all highly international, too, of course, but all of them, in their different ways, were too old, too amorphous, or too preoccupied with other matters to adjust very much to their latest immigrants; Toronto, by contrast, with less to lose and a less sharply defined sense of itself, had embarked upon a multicultural experiment with itself as guinea pig. Accepting newcomers from developing countries as readily, it claimed, as from Europe, and spending hundreds of millions of dollars to encourage them to sustain their different heritages, it was daring to dream of a new kind of cosmopolis—not a melting pot, as people in Toronto politely reminded me, but a mosaic.
There were still many problems, inevitably, as Toronto and Vancouver raced into a polylingual future while the villages only forty-five minutes away still lingered, undisturbed, in their white-bread, Protestant, nineteenth-century pasts; and I could catch a sense of alarm as much as of pride in the local paper’s claim that “Toronto is far past the level of diversity that any European country would tolerate.” High Tory clubbishness meant that many parts of the city still remained multiethnic, rather than truly international, and one stubborn legacy of its Old World roots, locals told me, was an intractable sense of class divisions. Yet the fact remained that the most multicultural city in the world, by UN calculations, was also the “Queen City” of a country that had placed first, for five straight years, in the UN’s Human Development Index, which ranks 174 countries for quality of life. And the “most cosmopolitan city on earth,” as a local columnist called it, was also, statistically, the safest city in North America. It all raised the possibility, exhilarating to contemplate, that a city made up of a hundred diasporas could go beyond the cities that we knew.
During my early days in Toronto, I found myself spinning through cultures as if I were sampling World Music rhythms on a hip-hop record. Every day, I’d wake up early, and hand my laundry to the woman from the Caribbean who guarded the front desk of the Hotel Victoria with an upright demeanor worthy of a Beefeater. Then I’d slip around the corner to where two chirpily efficient Chinese girls would have my croissant and tea ready almost before I’d ordered them. I’d stop off in the Mövenpick Marché down the block—run almost entirely by Filipinas (the sisters, perhaps, of the chambermaids in the Victoria)—and buy a copy of the Globe and Mail, which nearly always had news on its front page of Beijing. Then, not untypically, an Afghan would fill me in on the politics of Peshawar as I took a cab uptown, consulting an old-fashioned newspaper that (with its Grub Street column and its “Climatology” section) seemed to belong to Edwardian Delhi.
For a Global Soul like me—for anyone born to several cultures—the challenge in the modern world is to find a city that speaks to as many of our homes as possible. The process of interacting with a place is a little like the rite of a cocktail party, at which, upon being introduced to a stranger, we cast about to find a name, a place, a person we might have in common: a friend is someone who can bring as many of our selves to the table as possible.
In that respect, Toronto felt entirely on my wavelength. It assembled many of the pasts that I knew, from Asia and America and Europe; yet unlike other such outposts of Empire—Adelaide, for example, or Durban—it offered the prospect of uniting all the fragments in a stained-glass whole. Canada could put all the pieces of our lives together, it told me (and others like me), without all the king’s horses and all the king’s men.
For me, the notion of a Commonwealth had never made much sense before, except as a rather random grouping of subjects in the servants’ quarters who had nothing in common except their bosses above. But in Toronto, I began to have a sense of a new, postmodern Commonwealth, to which Empire could come to atone for some of its sins and (as retired power brokers do) to make a kind of peace: a vase that is put together out of broken pieces, as Derek Walcott says, is a memento put together with love. And as I went about the city, I heard how the mayor’s own car had been towed to make way for a Ukrainian festival, and how the cricket teams of India and Pakistan, so violently opposed that they could not play on their own home turf for ten years (for fear of riots), came to Toronto every year and held a five-match Sahara Cup at the Toronto Cricket, Skating and Curling Club. The matches were seen by four thousand excited émigrés in the stands, but broadcast live to 200 million furious partisans at home.
One night, I had dinner with a young Canadian writer called Guy (“named,” he said, with a touch of self-mockery I was coming to see as indigenous, “by English-speaking parents who dreamed of a beautiful bicultural future”), and he told me that many people felt that Toronto was much closer to Sydney or Singapore than to Detroit. Guy himself had lived in the Australia of his father’s youth, the New Zealand of his mother’s family, and the England that was the putative home of all of us; but he’d returned to Toronto as a place where the different empires (British, American, International) cohabited in a more familiar way, perhaps.
And I, suddenly, for the first time in twenty years, recalled how close I had come to being a Canadian myself, as our family gathered around the dinner table in distant Oxford and discussed whether we should move to Manitoba or Winnipeg (the names themselves sending icy winds shuddering through the English spring); the first time I ever set foot in Canada, I was ten years old, visiting the World Expo in Montreal, and carrying a mock passport from pavilion to pavilion to be stamped by nations whose names I’d never heard before. In those days, sitting in the backseat with my portable Scrabble set, I’d have noticed that all the letters that make up the name Toronto (though the same is true, of course, of Seattle or Atlanta) are the least valuable on the board. But put them all together—as it’s easy to do, because they’re all so common—and you collect a fifty-point bonus.
One Sunday in Toronto I went up to Bloor Street, at the center of town, and, taken by the sound of hymns from a nearby church, I wandered into the Toronto Korean United Church, as it was now called (it had once been the Bloor Street United Church, a sign outside explained). Inside, a tall, pale woman in clerical vestments was talking mildly, but with conviction, about the need to resuscitate the place of women in the Bible, and rescue the book from its “patriarchal” provenance. None of the faces along the pews was Korean, but a picture of Minister Sung Chul Lee watched over us all, with a scroll beside him in Hangul.
Walking out—having been greeted and welcomed by the minister—I noticed that I could also visit, along the same block, in the heart of downtown, a Baha’i Centre, a Covenant Christian Church, a Jewish Community Centre, or (more relevantly, perhaps) a Communiquéd Language Training Centre Interamerica. Instead, I passed onto a side street and came upon a large yellow building with golden deer seated on its roof and prayer flags fluttering above a wall-sized picture of the Dalai Lama. Inside this Tibetan Buddhist Centre, I learned, a Bhikkuni was offering a Dharma discourse on “Refuge”—she’d been born in Kenora, Ontario, I read, and grown up with a great passion for Jesus; but then she’d trained as a gestalt psychotherapist and now she was a member of the Ontario Multi-faith Council of Spiritual and Religious Care.
Such a clamor of faiths, on one busy block, raised questions about how much real unity was possible, or even desirable; and the city’s patchwork quilt of Little Indias, Little Maltas, and Greektowns prompted some to see it as no more than a World Expo writ large, demeaning ethnicities by turning them into theme-park curiosities. Yet for me there was a sense of excitement in being in a place where people were discussing, semipermanently, the nature of community, and Founding Fathers were quite literally drafting a multicultural Constitution.
I was learning new words in Toronto, I realized, among people on every side trying to come to terms with foreignness: a “landed immigrant,” I found out, was a newcomer who has yet to become a citizen, and an “allophone” was a Quebecker whose first
language was neither English nor French. “Barrel children” were Third World kids whose parents, living away from them in North America, sent them barrels of supplies to support them, and a “middle power” was what Canada called itself, as a country old enough to have a sense of limits yet young enough to be still carded.
And though people still talked about the shocking threats to their complacency—when Air India flight 182 had been bombed out of the air in 1985, the assumption was that the attack was partially funded by Sikhs in Canada, anxious to get back at Hindus in India (and the prime minister of the day sent his condolences to Rajiv Gandhi, although 90 percent of the “Indians” on the plane were now Canadians)—there was still an intoxicating sense of possibility.
“I think you’ll find there’s a more sophisticated level of discussion on the subject here than you’ll find anywhere else in the world,” a Muslim from South India told me over lunch as he dazzled me with discussions of the permutations of multiculturalism (from Prometheus to Procrustes). As if to bear that out, he told me how his own children (already fluent in English, Urdu, and Tamil) were going through French lycée here; and how, during the Gulf War, he’d been able to follow the unseen battles through reading the responses of Kuwaitis and Israelis and Iranians and Iraqis, all gathered on the “Letters” page of the Toronto Star. I felt as if I were seeing one of the grand inflatable spheres I’d come across in the gift shop of the Royal Ontario Museum—“Globals,” as they were nicely called—being turned around and around to catch new scintillations of light.
One bright spring morning in Toronto, I rented a car with “second-generation air bags” (the only second-generation things in the whole city, I was tempted to believe) and drove out to Scarborough to visit what I took to be a typical local school. There is no inner city as such in the metropolitan area, which means that poorer recent immigrants are generally to be found in housing blocks all across the “megacity,” their malls liquid with the flowing loops of Singhalese or signs for such quintessentially Torontonian places as Global Pet Foods. L’Amoreaux Collegiate had fewer than a thousand students in all, I was told, but seventy-six different languages could be heard along its hallways, and more than 70 percent of its students spoke a mother tongue other than English. One of the most popular courses in the school, in fact, was English as a Foreign Language.
I walked into the Market Square, which is the central gathering place of L’Amoreaux—bright green and orange and yellow hives converge there—and I felt as if I were in an Olympic Village. Head scarves and bangles and saris surrounded me, salwar kameez and tokens whose importance I couldn’t gauge. On one side of the hall, lanky West Indian boys were sitting against a wall, long arms wrapped around their tall, dark girls; closer to the center sat a flock of Sri Lankan girls, chattering in a cloud of colorful silks and exotic scents. A teacher was calling out some name on the public-address system that I’m sure nobody could make out, and the pictures of class officers along the walls told a startling story of an all-white student body splintering dramatically, in the last few years, into the colors of a prism.
Around me, among the dozens of students milling around, I could make out only three white faces; they belonged to the most recent immigrants, I learned, mostly from Eastern Europe. These days, it was the Caucasians who were most in need of help with English.
A school in Toronto, at the end of the millennium, I quickly found, was nothing like a school as I’d conceived of it; the largest percentage of the students here was from Sri Lanka, and most of them lived with uncles or distant relatives, their parents having sent them away from home to escape its civil war; the second largest group probably came from Hong Kong, and they lived, often, in expensive condos, by themselves, protecting the escape hatches their nervous parents had acquired (on allowances of two thousand dollars a month). “I remember once going into school on the day of a blizzard,” a teacher told me, “when all our classes were canceled, and I got a call from a parent. ‘Oh, yes,’ I said. ‘You must be worried about the snowstorm.’ ‘Snowstorm?’ he said, and I realized he was calling from Hong Kong!”
On a typical day in L’Amoreaux’s Market Square, someone was observing African Heritage Month by offering mehndi (or traditional decoration of hands) at lunchtime, and someone else was giving a talk on Eid-ul-Fitr. Many students and teachers were dressed in red, in honor of the Chinese New Year, and a video was showing Toronto’s first-place finish in the Dragon Boat Races in Hong Kong. I thought back to my own high school in England—entirely male, all dressed in black, fluent in the Apostles’ Creed, and assuming that everyone came from the same small section of society—and I realized that I’d never learned what mehndi meant; I knew about Eid only from a four-year-old girl in London, who’d passed on to me what she’d learned in nursery school. The teacher with the Irish name who was showing me around seemed to know much more about Tamil customs than I, with my Tamil surname, did.
“Do you make any concessions to ethnic food?” I asked, as we went into the lunch hall.
“Oh, we have kosher, halal, all those kind of things,” she said. “But the universal language, I think, is french fries.”
After lunch, I went into the library, where the poster along the wall that said canada the great was hardly visible for the more scenic shots of Colombo, Mogadishu, and Hong Kong. The library had just requested sixty new books, I saw on a list, most of them at the request of students, and very few of them were ones I had heard of (Drew and the Homeboy Question, The Roller Birds of Ranpur, An Anthology of Somali Poetry). The Chinese students all loved Dickens, the librarian told me, because they’d “done” him already in Cantonese; but it was students of all races who’d requested Black Indians and Black Jesus and Other Stories, The Black Canadians and Black Women for Beginners.
Even the problems here belonged to a different universe from the one I’d inherited, and I could see why the staff (seventy-five of the seventy-six pictured were white) had to call in detectives and “liaisons” from a variety of immigrant communities to lead workshops on “Multicultural Youth at Risk.” Not long before, one of the school’s most promising graduates had been gunned down in a nearby mall, apparently by one of the many Tamil Tiger groups that ran guns and drugs out of pizza parlors here and occasionally tried to recruit in the school; sometimes a Sri Lankan girl came up to her, a teacher said, and reported that a boy had called out to her, “Do you want to go out on Saturday?” She’d been taught—strictly taught—never to speak to a male other than her future husband.
Fathers, in fact, had been known to pull their daughters out of the school—and to face down school authorities with all-male posses—after they’d found out that their girls had gone out on dates (not, generally, with boys from other ethnic groups, but, more disruptively, with boys from their own groups of a different social level). And often, I was told, children couldn’t come to class because they had to accompany their parents to a loan officer or an immigration lawyer—as the only English speakers in the household, they’d had to become the effective bosses in dealing with foreign officialdom.
Often the same girls who’d been taught never to answer a question in public could tell you every last detail of how a guerrilla ambush worked, or how you got your own back when your father was killed by a neighbor’s gang.
For a certain kind of independent-minded kid, I thought, the reigning gospel at a place like L’Amoreaux could be so insistent (MULTICULTURAL/ANTI-BIAS, advertised the bookstore that supplied the library; next week the teachers would be attending a Multicultural Health and Wellness Symposium organized by the Multicultural and Equity Education Committee) that they might find themselves fervent uniculturalists. And the mothers called Sunshine coming in to address Gender Equity and Leadership Panels, the workshops on “implementing antiracist strategies in the classroom” belonged to worlds I couldn’t follow. Yet when I thought back to my own high school again—where even Catholics and Jews were so exceptional that they were given special exemptions from cha
pel (there were fewer than 20, I think, among 1,250 of us)—I realized that someone like me was speaking a language as outdated in Toronto as the ancient Greek principal parts we used to recite in our pajamas.
The kids in the cafeteria, I’d noticed, were all conspicuously locked into their own ethnic groups—the Jamaican boys playing dominoes at one table while the Chinese students observed what looked to be a “Chinese-only” code at another, the “Indians” breaking down into their own elaborate quilt of Hindu and Muslim and Singhalese and Bangladeshi. But at least many of them knew the words to the National Negro Hymn, sung out in assembly, and had the chance to enter an essay competition on “Ways to Invite Strong Multicultural Relations at L’Am” (essays were accepted in Chinese). And when, in future years, they heard neighbors cry, “Kung Hei Fat Choy,” they might just possibly remember that this was how the principal had greeted them as she’d handed out Chinese New Year candies.
Just before leaving the school, I went into the staff room to give my thanks, and the teachers made sure I came away with a copy of the oversized, Technicolor calendar the school puts out every year, featuring students from sixteen different ethnic groups (from Peru, Iran, “First Nation” tribes) posing in their local dress and offering recipes for indigenous dishes. It was the perfect thing, the teachers said, to take back to insular Japan.
