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In mid-March 2024, as I was writing this introduction, literary scholar and novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen visited the Vancouver campus of the University of British Columbia (UBC), where I work. He was one of six speakers in the 2024 Lind Initiative series organized by my colleagues Christopher B. Patterson and Kimberley Bain with the theme “Pop Politics: Pop Culture and Political Life in the United States. Near the beginning of his talk, Nguyen introduced what he calls “narrative plenitude” and “narrative scarcity.” Narrative plenitude, as he described it on this evening, is when “almost all of the stories are about you.” They are not necessarily about you you, but there are enough of them about your lived experience or communities that “when a story about you comes along that you don’t like because you don’t see yourself in that story, you can simply say ‘it’s just a story’ because there are literally a thousand other stories that you can turn to.”[1]

In contrast, narrative scarcity “is when almost none of the stories are about you.” In such conditions, Nguyen explained, “you don’t have that luxury of calling a story just a story.” Instead, there is intense pressure for it to represent everyone in a diverse community that might get only “one story to tell” to others. For it to be successful, this story must be not only excellent (no room for mediocrity in narrative scarcity), but it must also conform to what is expected and legible — in many cases, a recognizable version of the one traumatic event that has become a kind of metonym for a whole community. “If you deviate” from these parameters, he continued, “you are rapidly silenced or effectively not published; your stories are not heard.” When working in the context of narrative scarcity, in other words, the responsibilities and stakes of storytelling are high. “Faced with these conditions of narrative scarcity,” he said, “the temptation for so-called minority writers or artists is to turn to the logic of representation and inclusion. We want to be represented. We want to have our voices heard. We want to tell our stories. We want to be included.”[2]

While Nguyen’s talk was anchored by a focus on popular culture, literature, politics, and solidarity in the United States, the discussion resonated with how I had been thinking about this roundtable and, more broadly, history-telling with, about, and by Asian Canadian people. In the pieces that follow, Laura Madokoro, Melanie K. Ng, and Sharanjit Kaur Sandhra contend too with issues of narrative, silence, knowledge, representation, and community. Although they do so in different ways and to different ends, they share a concern for how a story is never “just a story” when it comes to the place and representation of people of Asian descent in the larger field of Canadian history. In the face of a particular form of narrative scarcity, the questions are not only what other stories need to be included in Canadian history and its forums. As these pieces make clear, the questions are always also about who tells stories, how, and who hears them and what stories should not be told, when, and why. At the same time, such questions are unpinned by another set, too: what can the tempting inclusion of Asian Canadian history achieve or salve here, for whom, and with what costs and limits? While each piece makes distinct contributions, I read the roundtable as a whole through these questions. Historians have a responsibility for narrative scarcity and a role to play in contesting it, working toward what Jennifer Lee and Karthick Ramakrishnan call “research plenitude” that pushes “back against the one-dimensional narratives” about which Nguyen speaks.[3] This roundtable on Asian Canadian history contributes to such a project. Critically, though, I understand it as a call for a specific kind of history-telling plenitude — one that challenges, refuses, and exceeds the logics of mere inclusion in Canadian history and instead names and works toward dismantling the structures of historical knowledge production that create dynamics of scarcity and plenitude in the first place.

To explain, let me rewind a bit first.

As we all do, I come to this roundtable from a particular personal and professional position that informs my thinking on it. I wrote this introduction on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ Peoples — land that I have occupied since 2012. While the non-Indigenous history of this place is what qiyəplenəxʷ Howard E. Grant calls a mere “blink of an eye,” people from Asia and people of Asian descent have been an integral part of the city of Vancouver since its settler foundations, and continue to be so today.[4] As a Nikkei and white settler here, I am part of this recent story. Born and raised on W̱SÁNEĆ and lək̓ʷəŋən territories on southern Vancouver Island, I am a relative newcomer to Vancouver and the UBC campus at its western edge, but I am also of the third generation on my mother’s side and the second on my father’s side to claim a home here, and it is a formative place in the making of our family. I write from this position, and from my relationships and responsibilities to the Japanese Canadian community that — although in different ways from the Murdoch-Ishiguro family — has also formed through settler histories on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, səlilwətaɬ, lək̓ʷəŋən, and W̱SÁNEĆ territories, and other unceded Indigenous territories across the region.

I also write as an historian whose professional work is propelled and indelibly shaped by this personal, familial, and community positioning in Canada, especially British Columbia. My current work is focused on the politics of history-telling by, about, for, and with people of Asian descent in northern North America, especially Nikkei or Japanese Canadian people. At UBC, I am a faculty member in the Department of History and the current director of Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies (ACAM). ACAM’s community, both at and beyond the university, has particularly challenged and changed my thinking on Asian Canadianness and Asian Canadian history. So, I write too from this place of work and learning cultivated in Asian Canadian studies and communities.

This broader personal and professional context informs how I approach this introduction, but most specifically, I write as a recent arrival to the roundtable, the authors having invited me to do so as their pieces moved through the final stages toward publication. I have not played a formative role in the roundtable’s conception or development, nor do I speak for the contributors or seek to provide a fulsome historiographical analysis. Rather, I see my role here as offering summative reflections and openings that emerge as I think through the roundtable’s distinct pieces and shared interventions.

The origins of the roundtable itself rest with the editors of the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association. As explained in the initial invitation to contribute, they hoped it could serve to “expand and deepen [the journal’s] coverage of Asian Canadian history” as part of an “effort to forge a diverse and inclusive understanding of Canadian history.”[5] While its specific shape developed as the authors contributed their input, expertise, and work, the cumulative result is a collection of three pieces that are marked by significant diversity in form and focus. On one level, we might understand the connecting thread to be “Asian Canadian history” — a field that might, on the surface, appear self-evident in its parameters, defined by a topical focus on people of Asian descent in northern North America. Over the past century, this journal has published a small number of important articles on the topic, but its overall engagement has been spotty and limited. If read in this light, the roundtable does indeed offer new contributions to the scholarship, which also expands the journal’s attention to Asian Canadian history in general. Each piece rightly does so in its own way.

Ng examines the history of paper families, investigating Chinese migrants’ strategies of “passing” as legally admissible to Canada and immigration agents’ strategies to identify and control them in the context of exclusionary anti-Chinese immigration laws between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. In doing so, she identifies a core methodological and ethical challenge of this work: it is, at its heart, a study of secrets, “people who do not wish to be found,” and inaccessible state records. Understanding such secrecy as “a particular kind of knowledge,” she makes a compelling case for how we can ethically and meaningfully examine “why these secrets were produced, how they were kept, and what they achieved,” without exposing what, and who, they were intended to hide, protect, and care for.

Taking the Gur Sikh Temple, National Historic Site, and Sikh Heritage Museum in Abbotsford, British Columbia, as a central focus, Sandhra examines the relationship between Sikh Canadian histories, academic and public knowledge production, archives, museums, and community. In doing so, her piece maintains that Canadian historiography has done a profound disservice to Sikh Canadian history and community. While the scholarship, she contends, tends to orient Sikh Canadian history and its significance only to whiteness, critical attention to relations among Asian Canadian communities can illuminate different and necessary histories of solidarity and resistance in multiple forms. By taking up this call, she shows, we can disorient dominant narratives and challenge their narrow parameters, which limit not only our historical understanding but also the possibilities of solidarity today.

Exploring her work on a virtual exhibit entitled More Than a Face, Madokoro develops a discussion of academic research on Asian Canadian history. Weaving together the exhibit, personal “interludes,” and reflections on the historiography in the context of our present moment, she shows that current academic approaches to “community” can impose categories that obscure the complexity of identity and lived experience in ways that foreclose important “stories that people [want] to tell” and constrain historical understanding. By sustaining a binary between “academic” and “community,” they also risk eliding the ways in which scholars themselves are positioned in and relate to communities. This serves as a potent reminder that the personal is not just political but also professional in ways that indelibly shape historians’ work and demand critical care.

Individually and together, these pieces contribute to ongoing conversations among historians whose work, both within and beyond the academy, focuses on Asian and Asian Canadian people in northern North America. Building from insights and questions gleaned from the archives of Chinese paper families, histories of the Gur Sikh Temple, and personal stories prompted by the More Than a Face exhibit, they all point to a need for more, and different, histories of diverse people of Asian descent in Canada. At the same time, as I reflect on the roundtable as a whole, it is clear to me that these pieces are about far more than an additive approach that simply includes more Asian people, voices, and stories in Canadian history and its forums. Instead, read together, I see these pieces as working to challenge the very structures of Canadian history and historical knowledge production into which we might be offered inclusion. At its heart, this roundtable is less about what we learn from a topical focus on Asian Canadian communities and more about the questions and interventions that become possible when we disorient and think beyond expected narrative forms and silos. While there are many such contributions, I gesture here to several points that I think are particularly significant.

First, rather than taking Asian Canadian history as a given field or bounded topic defined by self-evident subject matter, the roundtable interrogates, troubles, resists, and reconfigures the category of “Asian Canadian” itself.[6] This term, of course, has its own history — a product of the Asian Canadian movement of the late twentieth century.[7] In the present, people of Asian descent have widely varied understandings of, relations to, and uses of this term (and, indeed, many do not use it for themselves). There is a parallel diversity in historical research and analysis. Ng defines her focus more specifically, “Asian Canadian” being less useful as an analytical lens for her specific evidence, but rather something that can bring her work into conversation with others. This can be powerful and generative. The category can craft or claim shared senses of identity and struggle, bringing both people and research into critical relation, without necessarily eliding their differences. However, as Madokoro underscores, it can also be a label applied or denied to people without attention to their own senses of identity, community, history, or belonging. This can come at personal costs and costs to historical understanding. If we let it stand as a blanket term, then we will miss the diversity and significant relations among people to which Sandhra calls on us to attend. It may be a useful shorthand and a powerful tool, in other words, but “Asian Canadian” cannot be taken for granted. Rather than understanding these pieces as all about a shared topic or given category, the roundtable should instead prompt questions about how they relate — in assumed or actual, given or chosen ways — to each other, and to any such larger field.

These pieces also work together to interrogate and reconfigure prevailing narratives about people of Asian descent in Canadian history. What even is “Asian Canadian history”? There are, of course, many possible responses to this. However, there is one set of answers that dominates prevailing representations of Asian people in the broader context of Canadian history. In general, Asian Canadian histories told outside of the communities and siloed subfields in question tend to be oriented toward identifying and explaining racism (once commonly called “anti-Asian sentiment,” but in the last four years, increasingly “[anti-]Asian hate”). More specifically, Asian Canadian people usually appear as significant in wider narratives of Canadian history in reference to singular events that represent a boiling-over point or illustrative example of racism. They are often framed as passive-voice histories, focused on showing the attitudes, actions, and impacts of the state or non-Asian people, though there has been increasing attention to community resilience in the face of white supremacy too. These narratives then typically conclude with a sense of resolution or eventual acceptance, whether through the repeal of racist laws and the promise of multiculturalism or the issuing of formal apologies, at which point Asian Canadian people tend to disappear from broader narratives of Canada — the measure of their historical significance defined by the racism they were forced to experience.

Or, at least, this narrative pattern stands if we consider “Asian Canadian history” in general. If we recognize the diversity within this umbrella category, the story is more uneven. For some communities that might be identified as Asian Canadian, their place in Canadian historiography does not yet even qualify as narrative scarcity, but rather is total absence. Other communities have a limited presence in the scholarship or public history, sometimes appearing briefly in broad narratives and often not. For a very small number, representation is more a matter of concentrated hypervisibility — an expected, conventional place in Canadian history-telling. We might understand this as both scarcity and density, a powerful gravitational pull toward certain historical moments that tend to reduce communities to the one event that best represents the worst of racism against them. Most often, in broad Canadian histories, these are the head tax and Chinese Exclusion Act, the Komagata Maru, and the internment of Japanese Canadian people, perhaps with added reference to refugees from Vietnam or, increasingly but still rarely, mention of Filipinx people.

I am, of course, generalizing. There is critical historical research, within and beyond the academy, that exceeds the bounds of this characterization in a range of ways to which I am not doing justice here. While Asian Canadian historians and Asian Canadian studies scholars have long named and explored these issues, however, the broad pattern still remains the most common answer to what — and who — constitutes “Asian Canadian history” as it is recognized as legible, significant, and interesting in national narratives. This vision of Asian Canadian history is then reflected and reinforced in school curricula, textbooks, survey courses, and other public and academic forums. In other words, this is a remarkably powerful, if narrow, answer to the question of what constitutes Asian Canadian history, and one that involves Canadian historians in general. In this light, the roundtable might be read as a particular effort to make legible longstanding conversations about “Asian Canadian history” and why it matters for Canadian history-telling.

The dominance of this conventional narrative is one of the ways in which the meanings and uses of “Asian Canadian” matter in structuring historical knowledge and significance. As a Nikkei historian, I am particularly conscious of it in terms of the gravitational pull toward East Asian Canadian histories in general, and more specifically to particular understandings of Chinese and Japanese Canadian history. Do not get me wrong; the historical topics that already tend to register in national narratives do matter. Histories of Japanese Canadian people in the 1940s are significant on many levels, for instance, and we need to attend to them in critical and diverse ways. However, if we allow internment to serve as a sole metonym for “the community” and its histories, our understandings of Nikkei and Canadian pasts and people are profoundly impoverished.[8] Similarly, as Ng’s piece shows, we are far from done with understanding the significant and complex histories of Chinese migration and exclusionary laws in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, let alone the methodological possibilities and ethical imperatives that this work should open up for all historians. At the same time, though, these constrained narratives cannot continue to define community and stand in for the whole of Asian Canadian history. Reducing Sikh Canadian history (or, indeed, all of “South Asian” Canadian history) to a singular event is insufficient, while, as Sandhra shows, expanding beyond silos generates new possibilities, both past and present.[9] Picking up on Madokoro’s provocation, we might attend instead to “Asian Canadian history” as a starting question rather than an answer, exploring what else we might come to understand if we consider how people have understood themselves, their communities, and the stories they have to tell.

By advancing these points, in other words, the pieces in this roundtable do not only add to or expand engagement with Asian Canadian history. In their approaches to methodology, ethics, public history, community, identity, and lived experience, they also untether “Asian Canadian history” from its expecting moorings, consider its implications for Canadian history and historians in general, and nourish other possibilities for and from the field. In this discipline, what does it look like to do more than take the approach that Asian North American studies scholar Guy Beauregard describes as “academic business as usual — but this time it’s about Asian Canadians”?[10] How can we study knowledge that is not ours to expose? What have people been besides a racial identifier or community label, and what have they done and how they have mattered beyond metonymic singular events? What might we learn by exploring relations among people, or — as historian Lisa Rose Mar has put it elsewhere — “interactions as much as … exclusions”?[11] What might it involve to disorient the significance of Asian Canadian history from whiteness, the nation, or the state? This question reminds me, too, of poet and cultural studies scholar Rita Wong’s provocation that still resonates with urgency: “What happens if we position indigenous people’s struggles instead of normalized whiteness as the reference point through which we come to articulate our subjectivities?”[12] And, in all of this, what can we say, hear, understand, and do if we attend to solidarities, survival strategies, resistances, and relations?

In posing such questions, the roundtable offers a new chapter in a much longer conversation about Asian Canadian history-telling within and without the academy, while underscoring the relevance and importance of this conversation for Canadian historians in general. When I first read the three pieces that follow, I thought of the editorial in the summer 1978 issue of The Asianadian, which made a case for what it called “gut history.” Contrasting this approach with “the history of Asians in Canada … funded by the Secretary of State or done by academics — for ‘academic’ interest,” it argued: “We struggle for more than getting a pat on the head from ‘ethnic’ historians or similar ‘objective’ people” whose work “presents only half of the story.” The editorial called instead for “gut history [that] makes the invisible visible.” This approach can take many forms, from “individual history,” to histories of “groups that are always written about, but not from the perspective of those inside the community.” More broadly, the editorial explained, “gut history bites deep, gets behind the stereotypes and tries to give an account from the inside out.”[13] This editorial illuminates a particular moment in Asian Canadian organizing, cultural production, and historical research in the 1970s, but it was far from the first or last such commentary on the politics of Asian Canadian history, historians, and history-telling.[14]

Indeed, there is now a deep well of work in this area. As novelist and literary scholar Larissa Lai recently noted with reference to Asian Canadian studies, “We may sometimes suffer for visibility, but we are not suffering for critical mass.”[15] Within the discipline of history, the challenge remains, in part, about the narrative expectations and representations that structure and limit the visibility of Asian Canadian histories and historians. Canadian history is poorer for these limits, not just because of a lack of diversity and inclusion, but because taking seriously Asian and Asian Canadian people changes understandings of settler colonialism, Canadian state formation, Canadian society — Canada itself.[16] There is, in other words, already a rich and diverse body of existing work, sometimes within the discipline but often outside of it, that contends not with how Asian Canadians can be folded into Canadian history but with what historian Henry Yu calls our “uncommon past” and what it changes.[17]

Joining this conversation, the authors in this roundtable underscore that “Asian Canadian history” is more than add-and-stir; it is a refiguring and a generative question from which to begin reckoning with stories and approaches that “bite deep” in Canadian history. In the face of narrative scarcity and density in the field, this work and its visibility matters. While I cannot speak for others, I expect that I am not alone in finding some resonance in the temptation described by Viet Thanh Nguyen: “We want to have our voices heard. We want to tell our stories.”[18] But, in the end, this roundtable advocates for a kind of telling and hearing that involves more than including enough to achieve plenitude while leaving intact the logics that produce scarcity. Instead, I read it as an argument to attend to the complexity, diversity, and significance of histories of people of Asian descent in northern North America in ways that reveal and contest the conventional silos, categories, orientations, and narratives that constitute our place in Canadian historiography. It is a meditation on who we are and who we are seen to be, and why the tensions between these matter in historical research. It is a case for how the stories we have to tell can change Canadian history, if only they are registered. It is, ultimately, a call to see more than a face, to hear more than silence, and, sometimes, to say less than we could — at its heart, a reckoning with the ethics, politics, and possibilities of historical knowledge production itself.