Article body

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a sharp rise in anti-Asian hate crimes across North America. Donald Trump blasted the hashtag #chinesevirus on Twitter, fuelling some of this energy. Angry and fearful people hurled racial insults (some long buried, some newly imagined), they shoved pedestrians who looked Asian to the ground, they graffitied businesses.[1] The way these sentiments spread, all too easily, suggested at least some of this lashing out was born of an enduring disquiet in some quarters about newly arrived residents or long-standing citizens with Asian heritage. Scholars immediately drew parallels with hateful incidents from the past, such as the anti-Asian sentiment of the Second World War when conflict with Japan meant that many people with Asian heritage across North America appeared, from the outside, to be suspect.[2]

The ignorant and hateful anti-Asian racism based on physical appearance, and expressed in various ways in recent years, informs some of the discussion that follows as it inspired the making of a public-facing, virtual exhibit called More Than a Face (https://morethanaface9.wordpress.com), which I will explore in detail. The spike in anti-Asian sentiments also encouraged me to consider the broad, structuring racial dynamics that characterize life across North America, which led people to be alternatively targeted, discriminated against, or embraced, based on their physical appearances. I offer some of my ensuing reflections here, including my thoughts on the simultaneous visibility and invisibility of scholars with Asian heritage (who may or may not describe themselves as Asian Canadian) in the Canadian academy.[3]

In many ways, this piece is about the Canadian academy’s regular inability to see expertise as it lives in relation to community or to see beyond a face or a name. History is somewhat to blame in this regard. After decades of being ignored by academic researchers, ethnic communities in Canada became the focus of considerable and conspicuous attention in the 1970s in the wake of the federal government’s introduction of an official multiculturalism policy in 1971. The Canadian Historical Association, for instance, introduced an ethnic history series in 1979, resulting in the publication of thirty-nine booklets on various communities (with only the most recent booklets focused on cross-cutting themes).[4] The overarching emphasis was on documenting and making known previously ignored histories. This was an important initiative. However, with “inclusion” as the overarching goal, people were often written into national narratives that had only ever treated them as a footnote, if they were noticed at all. Crucially, the structure of the national narrative and what was perceived as knowledge did not fundamentally change as a result of this kind of inclusion. Moreover, in the process, community often became an “intellectual construction” and shorthand for public relevance.[5] The complexity and diversity of many community relationships, and the inherent value of what appeared to many only as “fragmented and incoherent” narratives, was lost.[6]

The notion of “community” and what it means when it comes to academic research has been at the forefront of my thinking in recent years. It is informed most immediately by the strained politics of the Landscapes of Injustice project on the history of Japanese Canadian dispossession where questions about who spoke for whom, who was listened to, and whose work was promoted were hotly contested.[7] It is also informed by my research on sanctuary, which has made it clear that communities are not guaranteed sites of refuge. They can be hostile environments from which people flee, as has been the case for many 2SLGBTQ+ people, to offer but one example.[8]

The tensions between academic research and notions of community, along with the violence of the past few years, propelled me to think about the basic question of what people look like, or how they are perceived, and the conflation of perceived identities with broader community relations. In the context of a marked spike in anti-Asian racism during the pandemic, I became interested in considering the relationship of people to community and within community rather than treating them as one and the same. The process of doing so, through the creation of a virtual exhibit entitled More Than a Face as part of the Active History on Display initiative (https://activehistory.ca/exhibits/), was highly revealing in terms of the stories that people wanted to tell, the constraints of conventional understandings of Asian Canadian history, and the relationship of scholars and storytellers to the various communities with which they are connected. My focus here is therefore on the process of creating the exhibit, and what it revealed. As a prelude to this analysis, I offer reflections on decolonization in the academy, the making of this roundtable, and the fraught nature of Asian Canadian history as a subject of study.

Decolonization as Context

For the past few decades, various academic disciplines and institutions have sought to become more equitable, diverse, and inclusive. The “EDI” acronym is now regularly referenced. Most often, EDI initiatives have involved targeted hires that make the academy appear more diverse with little attention to the structures that reinforce conventional — and often colonial — ways of being and doing. Still, in recent years, efforts to decolonize Canadian universities have become increasingly pronounced with dedicated funding streams to support such efforts. At places including Toronto Metropolitan University and McGill University, this work has involved research and documentation into the history of the institutions’ founders and/or original namesakes.[9] Funding bodies and other organizations such as the Canadian Historical Association, and relatedly, the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association (JCHA), have undertaken parallel projects to showcase a diversity of perspectives.[10]

This is critical and important work, which is leading to important shifts. Yet radical and profound change remains elusive. This JCHA roundtable, for instance, results from the journal’s notion that it should do something on Asian Canadian history following its initiative on “Rethinking History in Canada” to commemorate the journal’s centennial, which featured a roundtable at the annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association in 2022 and a special issue in the spring of 2023. The journal commissioned seven pieces on subjects ranging from colonialism to gender, inviting authors to reflect on how these issues had appeared historically in the journal’s pages. Crucially, there was no mention of Asian Canadian history other than in James Walker’s piece on “‘Race’ and Racism.”[11]

The journal recognized there were omissions.[12] Indeed, as I understand it, the challenge the journal confronted was that there simply was not enough space in a single issue to address all the topics and themes that had been omitted, ignored, or presented in limited ways over the course of the journal’s history. As Allan Downey showed in his analysis of how Indigenous history has appeared in the pages of this journal, there have been a significant number of articles related to this subject over the course of the JCHA’s publication. However, only in recent years have articles foregrounded Indigenous sovereignty and Indigenous epistemologies.[13] As Downey’s research suggests, the issue is not just with how many articles are published or how many perspectives are represented but rather with the substance of the contributions. This parallels Laura Ishiguro’s observations in the introduction to this roundtable about the ways in which scarcity and abundance exist in tandem and the implications of this dynamic for our understanding of particular subjects.

Related to the question of representation and substance are the ways in which initiatives around diversity have unfolded historically. One of the challenges that people have observed with efforts to decolonize and Indigenize the Canadian academy is that the hard work of transforming the rhetoric of inclusion and diversity into a lived reality largely falls to the very people who have been historically marginalized, overlooked, or excluded within the institutions and organizations that constitute this intellectual landscape. This has been especially pronounced with regard to efforts to shift conventional ways of knowing and doing and of acknowledging and incorporating distinctive epistemologies and priorities.[14] People have a lot to gain from this work, given historic and enduring discrimination in the academy, but as with all change, it takes a toll. The fights have been hard-fought, taxing, and unrelenting, especially in the context of the increasingly entrenched neo-liberal university.[15] New questions are therefore emerging about what is gained, and what is lost, by taking on this work in the first instance. Universities, for instance, can report on EDI achievements, but what of the substantive experiences of those most targeted, affected, and involved in this work?

On Asian Canadian History

I confess that when I first received the invitation from the JCHA to participate in a roundtable on Asian Canadian history, I was torn. I was intrigued by the idea of a roundtable but had never thought of my work as “Asian Canadian history.” Rather, it has always been situated squarely in the fields of refugee studies and refugee history.

My sense is that Asian Canadian history as a defined field was, and remains, rather nebulous. Unlike in the United States, where the field of Asian American studies has long been resourced (in part because of state funding for area studies during the Cold War) and advanced by considerable activist work, the field of Asian Canadian studies has struggled to find firm footing. So too with Asian Canadian history. In recent years, there have been major efforts to consolidate and advance research in Asian Canadian studies, but it has not been a priority for academic funding, which continues to privilege research on discrete communities. More importantly, as Sharanjit Kaur Sandhra observes in her contribution to this forum, engaged leaders and activists have often focused on their respective histories, competing for scarce resources. Only with a measure of security has advocacy translated across community divides, bringing with it the possibility of interesting collaborations from a sense of shared interests and priorities. Similarly, academic projects are increasingly turning to shared histories and complex interactions, most notably in the context of understanding the evolving settler colonial project in Canada.[16]

Given my ambivalent relationship to the subject of Asian Canadian history, I was also unsure when I received the invitation to participate in the roundtable about whether I was being asked to participate as a researcher or as someone with Japanese Canadian heritage. My earlier work was about Chinese refugees in the Cold War, and this may have led to the invitation, but as I have noted elsewhere, this work was an explicit intervention in the field of refugee studies.[17] I did wonder if I might have been invited because of my name. I have long understood that my Japanese heritage lends itself to the claiming of some kind of Asian Canadian connection, but as this article will explore, many people — myself included — can be deeply ambivalent about the notion of “Asian Canadian” as a lived identity.

My insistence on explaining both my scholarly and personal response to JCHA’s invitation to participate in a roundtable on Asian Canadian history is intentional as I want to highlight, rather than diminish, the multiple identities that people in the academy carry and the complicated ways in which these identities can be confused and conflated in efforts to advance various objectives around equity, diversity, and inclusion.

In terms of the roundtable, my own sense was that the journal was prioritizing diversity, but that it was a calculated goal in terms of content, one that relied on categories of inclusion rather than the substance of the scholarship in its formulation. Such an approach means that there will never be enough room to include everyone or everything. Rather than calculating inclusion, different approaches are required to ensure that scholars and communities are engaged with the fullness of their expertise and originality in mind. For journals such as the JCHA, such initiatives might include broader thematic initiatives, opportunities for transparent exchange such as responses from readers, and more substantive panel sponsorship as a minimum, ideally based on ideas and priorities outlined from the outset by subject matter experts.

Still, I was intrigued. What if this represented an opportunity to have a conversation about the very notion of Asian Canadian history? One where it was taken as an idea in flux rather than something established? What could I, and others, learn and distill from this process? I should add that in the original incarnation of this roundtable, the idea had been to have a focused study on the evolving notion of Asian Canadian history, a piece that is still much needed and much desired. From the outset therefore, there was a lot of potential for this roundtable. And as the other contributions to this roundtable make clear, there are many varied and important research threads being pursued in the present that are shifting the bounds of what we might consider Asian Canadian history and where it sits in the historiography of Canada more generally. The current political climate also made this a timely conversation.

Ultimately, and not without considerable irony given how I have positioned most of my research to date and the ways in which I have generally sought to refuse my Japanese Canadian heritage in my academic work, I decided to contribute to this roundtable. I did so because working on the public-facing More Than a Face exhibit was an absolutely exhilarating experience. The more I thought about this exhibit and understood that it was saying something fundamental about the relationship between individuals, researchers, and communities, the more I wanted to showcase the insights the storytellers offered. The result is an article that is deeply personal and reflective based on my recent public-facing historical work that is itself a departure from my explicit focus on histories of refuge and displacement to date.

A crucial consideration as I wrote and revised this piece was my determination to be consistent, and to be accountable, both for what I say here and what I have undertaken previously in terms of my academic work. In this way, and if nothing else, I hope the stories contained in the More Than a Face exhibit, alongside these reflections, help advance the much-needed task of fostering relationships within and beyond the Canadian academy, and of doing history differently.

On Community

In the context of the Canadian academy, the term Asian Canadian or the notion of Asian Canadian history are often imposed or deployed in an effort to make tidy what is dynamic and unfixed. These efforts stem in part from the problematic notion of “community” and what it means to do community-based or community-driven research of the sort currently encouraged by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) through its various funding streams. Notably, one of the ways that the academy has sought to diversify is by working more closely with communities. For instance, in 2021, SSHRC ran a competition as part of its Race, Gender and Diversity Initiative in which the goal was “to support community-based and community-led research partnerships with postsecondary institutions that are grounded in the lived experience of underrepresented or disadvantaged groups and that analyze the causes and persistence of systemic racism and discrimination.” Crucially, SSHRC emphasized that “leadership by people from underrepresented or disadvantaged groups in research projects about race, gender and diversity is important to help ensure the research is grounded in the complexities of the lived experiences and histories of diverse groups and individuals, and to inform more rigorous and relevant policy and program design.”[18] While such initiatives are clearly important, it is jarring to note that the underlying assumption is that people from “underrepresented or disadvantaged groups” want to focus uniquely on race, gender and diversity. This may, indeed, be the case. But this kind of boxing in, and the limitations that result from such constrained expectations, even as SSHRC emphasizes the idea of intersectionality (highlighting Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s efforts in this regard), is deeply problematic.

Too often, and especially in the rush to secure funding, the idea of “community” has been used out of convenience and inadequately interrogated, perpetuating the earlier practice (born of the 1970s and the early days of official multiculturalism in Canada) where scholarly attention to the idea of community led to efforts to write the history of ethnic communities into larger narratives, with insufficient attention to diversity and dissension within.[19] The expertise and knowledge that lives within various communities has also been ignored in the superficial and uncritical engagement with the notion of community. As Terry Watada, Laura Ishiguro, and Angie Wong have all shown, Japanese Canadians such as Tamio Wakayama were documenting racial injustice and organizing in the community long before academic researchers started addressing these topics.[20] Similarly, as cultural critic Amy Fung is demonstrating in her current doctoral work, community researchers involved with the A Dream of Riches exhibit were critical to the later Japanese Canadian redress movement. Their hard work and their original research led to crucial change, but the expertise and the knowledge production involved in their various efforts has long been ignored or dismissed outright.[21]

Crucially, much of the work on Asian Canadian history, variously defined, continues at the community level, where people continue to negotiate issues of research and community relationships as they relate to Asian Canadian identities and histories in all their multitudes, and in some cases to the academy. The new virtual exhibit We Are Here (https://www.wahvoice.ca) is just the latest incarnation of this work, which also includes the award-winning exhibit A Seat at the Table at the Museum of Vancouver, co-curated by Denise Fong, Viviane Gosselin, and Henry Yu (https://museumofvancouver.ca/a-seat-at-the-table). Many of these efforts, such as the powerful Paper Trails exhibit (https://www.chinesecanadianmuseum.ca/exhibitions/paper-trail-1923-chinese-exclusion-act) curated by Catherine Clement, have taken place in collaboration with, and also beyond, the narrow confines of the university.

For community and academic research projects alike, the very notion of a community can be an uneasy one; it has been (especially in the hands of academic researchers) all too easily flattened. In Voices Rising: Asian Canadian Cultural Activism, author Xioaping Li underscores how there has long been great diversity in terms of the history, culture, and politics of various Asian Canadian communities.[22] This wealth has not always been visible to outsiders. Intergenerational complexities, class, and social differences, as well as differences in priorities have often been ignored. Relatedly, only some people have been listened to or recognized by the academy, leading to misguided ideas about representation, cogency, and power. One lesson from the making of the More Than a Face exhibit is that we, as researchers, need to recalibrate our approach, to understand that people (including scholars) have multiple identities and complex relationships to and with communities. They are not necessarily one and the same. In fact, recognizing the relationships that researchers have with community, as researchers and as community members, represents a critical opportunity to think about what constitutes knowledge and where it sits. It is also an opportunity to consider the role that researchers play in brokering rather than generating knowledge and the implications of this for academic research and community partnerships more broadly.

More Than a Face: The Exhibit

The More Than a Face virtual exhibit launched in April 2024. The exhibit is part of a new initiative by the Active History editorial collective to develop virtual exhibits to complement the public-facing historical work undertaken regularly by the various contributors to the Active History website (https://activehistory.ca). Funded by the Department of Canadian Heritage through a grant proposal developed by Dr. Ed Dunsworth at McGill University, the Active History on Display initiative offers teaching resources and dedicated websites to explore selected historical issues in greater depth. Alongside The Human Cost of Food, which also launched in the spring of 2024 and explores the history and exploitation of migrant labour in Canada (https://activehistory.ca/exhibits/the-human-cost-of-food/), More Than a Face seeks to explore Asian Canadian history from the vantage point of individuals rather than communities (in a way that conjures the notion of “gut history” that Laura Ishiguro describes in her introduction to this roundtable). The exhibit recognizes the powerful way in which state and society have reduced, and continue to cut down, people to their physical appearances or cultural heritage and seeks to challenge these ongoing efforts at diminishment.[23]

As I discuss in further detail below, the exhibit was nurtured from an open-ended question about an object or photograph that was valued in some way by the individual storytellers who contributed to the project. The premise was to avoid explicitly asking people to talk about being Asian Canadian. Rather, the exhibit brought together a group of nine storytellers, all of whom have some kind of Asian heritage and therefore an implicit if not actively claimed connection to the idea of being Asian Canadian. Storytellers were invited to share a story about a photograph or object that they found meaningful. It was an open-ended invitation and one stood very much in contrast to SSHRC’s presumption, for instance, that race, gender, and diversity would be the priorities for discussion. We never asked the storytellers if they described themselves as Asian Canadian, though that concept was woven throughout our conversations. Beyond the initial invitation to participate, the direction of the exhibit was shaped entirely by the stories and storytellers themselves.

From the outset, it was essential to try to create a platform where storytellers could share their memories and narratives on their own terms. As noted previously, as the academy has become more diverse, scholars are increasingly connected to the various communities whose histories sometimes inform or form their subjects of study. This has led to important discussions about the insider-outsider divide, as well as questions about the power dynamics that underpin these relationships. Crucially, existing inequities mean that that research projects are not always reflective of the assorted interests that make up any given community and the ways in which these might be exacerbated by research projects.[24]

It is quite possible, for instance, for community leaders to completely misrepresent certain issues in order to advance select goals and objectives. Historian Lisa Mar explored this dynamic in her analysis of the response by members of the Chinese Canadian community in Vancouver to being researched by sociologists from the University of Chicago in 1924.[25] Recognizing that they were about to be studied, leaders of the Chinese Benevolent Association organized key messages to “fix knowledge,” ensuring that their own interests in the research findings would also be protected and served. Crucially, in deliberately “flattening” the complexity of their community, participants “steer[ed] the researchers away from their transnational world, precluding discussion of their political power.” While researchers assumed they could obtain “whole knowledge” about the community through translators, certain community leaders had different ideas; notions that would ultimately feed into the erroneous myth of a “model minority” with wide-ranging implications for people within and beyond the community.[26]

Relatedly, as historian Henry Yu has shown, Asian American researchers associated with the Chicago school of sociology, negotiated their community relations to meet the expectations of the US academy in the 1930s and 1940s. Yu notes that for students such as Rose Hum Lee and Paul Siu, their long-term success “depended on how well they distanced themselves from the ethnic aspect of their work.” Yu notes that “their exotic Oriental identity, which initially had made them so valuable to the institutional sociologists, needed to be left behind. If they could not make the move to an objective, detached discourse, they were doomed as scholars.”[27] By contrast, the expectation now is that people will serve as bridges to the communities they may also call home.

Scholars who are racialized by the academy, and society more broadly, regularly encounter assumptions about their areas of research and expertise. The expectation is often that they will research a community to which they are connected; not because they are experts, but because they have connections or relations. This is deeply problematic for it completely disregards the training, knowledge, and experience that people bring to the table, regardless of their community connections. It is also oppressive and limiting. Recently, a PhD student complained of expectations she encountered during an interview that she should be researching South Asian history simply because of her family’s background. She is, in fact, interested in archaeology and critical museum studies. The fact that it was a doctoral student who was subject to these expectations means that not enough has changed within the academy in terms of recognizing the expertise of scholars with a range of backgrounds, including the capacity to formulate original research avenues, sometimes inspired by, but nevertheless distinct from, community ties.[28]

The title of the virtual exhibit we put together says it all: people are “more than a face.” But how to prove this? How to take this simple idea and make it legible?

As noted previously, the exhibit adopted a very straightforward approach: we decided to ask storytellers from a range of geographic, generational, and professional backgrounds to choose an object or photograph and describe why it was meaningful to them. We were curious about what we would learn and whether anyone would mention the idea of being Asian Canadian in their storytelling. How many people would connect their stories to ideas of community? We were excited to find out. And by we, I mean myself and the project team: Danielle Mahon (MA, public history, project manager), Sam Nicholls (MA, public history), and Sarah Hart (PhD candidate, public history), all at Carleton University, located on unceded Algonquin Anishnabek territory.

To begin, we convened an advisory board to help us brainstorm the concept of More Than a Face and identify potential storytellers. We were grateful to have the participation of Dr. Neda Magbouleh (UBC), Dr. Thy Phu (University of Toronto), Dr. Henry Yu (UBC), and Stan Miello (Pacific Canada Heritage Centre). With their assistance, we were able to reach out to a range of storytellers from different backgrounds and with a fair bit of diversity in terms of generational differences, diasporic connections, citizenship status, class, and gender. In the end, the following people participated in the first incarnation of the More Than a Face storytelling project: Hollay Ghadery, Fung Ling Feimo 馬鳳齡, Hayne Wai, Katsumi Kimoto, Hon Lu, Maya (pseudonym), Darlyne Bautista, Hadi Milanloo, and Karmvir Kaur.

The nature of our established connections meant most of the storytellers had academic, literary, or creative backgrounds. We knew early on, therefore, that for future incarnations of the project, it would be desirable to have even more variation in terms of profession and class in particular. It would also be ideal to have even more diversity in terms of how people’s connections with various parts of Asia. In the Canadian context, Asia is often narrowly defined and splintered. It is tidily subdivided into the following regions: East Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. Yet this worldview is not a universal one. As Hadi Milanloo, originally from Iran, put it during the brainstorming workshop, he didn’t know he wasn’t from Asia (in the Canadian sense), until he arrived in Canada. In Iran, people certainly consider themselves to be part of Asia writ large.

As suggested by the above, we gleaned some of the insights for the project from the storytellers during an initial workshop in November 2022 where most of the contributors were in attendance. It was a crucial conversation, one that shaped the contours of the project in key ways. An outstanding feature of the event was the generosity with which people shared their stories. The other was the ease with which people made conceptual connections as they looked (virtually, all this was on Zoom) at the objects and photographs that people had chosen to write about, or speak about in short videos, for their contributions to the site.

Two significant themes emerged: The first was about family and intergenerational connections. The second was about the importance of language.[29]

In the first instance, it became clear from the outset that family was a key factor in how people thought about what was important to them. In Hon Lu’s case, many of his reflections came from thinking about his son and the kind of world the next generation is inheriting. It is a world, Hon speculated, where his son will likely be the subject of curiosity because of his mixed heritage. In Katsumi Kimoto’s case, his reflections centred on family and connections to particular places. Katsumi talked about his parents and grandparents being interned during the Second World War and noted his strong sense of connection in returning to Ucluelet, traditional territory of the Yuułuʔiłʔatḥ, from Vancouver, located on the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ Nations. Katsumi talked about being close to his grandmother, an incredible woman who lived to be a hundred and passed away in the summer of 2023. Hayne Wai also talked about generations, noting with a wry sense of humour that as the eldest storyteller in the group, he had a particular perspective, which meant that he could see and appreciate the work that had been done previously (he reflected on how much he learned from his older brother for instance) and the work that younger generations were doing currently to fight for their vision of a sustainable, inclusive, and dynamic Chinatown in downtown Vancouver.

The second theme circled around language. This theme emerged very subtly at first. Then, all of a sudden, we were hearing a commonality of references as we worked through people’s stories and the ways in which they explained the significance of their photographs and objects. If I remember correctly, it began with Hollay Ghadery, who talked about the deep physicality of the Persian language and the way in which love is expressed in hungry, devouring terms. She talked about this in the context of her love for her children (connecting with the previous points about generational influences), noting that she speaks with them in Persian to express love and in English for other things. Another storyteller immediately picked up on this, remembering that her parents scolded her in Gujarati but generally used English in their home. Here was language, not necessarily as a marker of community, but certainly as an evocation of feelings, and of relationships.

Had we pursued the workshop format further, we might have gotten into a discussion of insider and outsider dynamics, responsibilities, and the implications for research of the sort that Melanie Ng explores in her contribution to this forum in terms of secrecy and respect for knowledge that lives, and needs to remain, within communities. How we conceive of knowledge is a crucial dimension to community research, but we didn’t go very far down that road. In other words, there are surely other key themes and connections to be explored, but we didn’t define these, and we hope visitors and future contributors to the online exhibit will be inspired to do some of this work. There is still lots of space for storytelling, and for evolving perspectives.

Importantly, we saw the value and power that results from building connections and enabling resonance in the initial workshop when the conversations there prompted one storyteller to change the focus of their narrative contribution entirely.[30]

We had initially approached Fung Ling Feimo 馬鳳齡 about participating in the project after seeing her story on the Pacific Canada Heritage Centre’s exhibit From Far and Wide: Pacific Canada Stories (https://www.pchc-mom.ca/from-far-wide-virtual-storytelling-project). For that exhibit, Fung Ling had offered the tale of her family’s migration from British Hong Kong to Montreal. We were drawn to her story because of her mention of a Monopoly game that she had carried with her, thinking it would help her settle into life in Canada. At the virtual workshop, Fung Ling mentioned that her father must have purchased it expressly for the trip and paid a lot of money for it (given that it was in English with the pound sterling bank notes and not the more popular Chinese Hong Kong dollar version). This language dimension was particularly exciting to the members of the project team since it dovetailed with one of the key emerging themes. However, as chance would have it, Fung Ling heard a story that day that inspired her to change her focus.

In describing his family’s heritage, Hon Lu mentioned the concept of a generation book, something which (as Fung Ling now describes in her contribution to the More Than a Face exhibit) is used in China and Korea to record the various branches of a family tree. Fung Ling listened to Hon’s reflections with interest, realizing that although the books are generally passed down through male heirs, she is the guardian of her family’s generation book. Although she hadn’t thought to use it for the exhibit, hearing it mentioned at the workshop, and thinking about her special role as a woman guardian, inspired her to document the book’s history (complete with the discovery of a key error) and its significance to past, current, and future generations.

Fung Ling’s reflection, and the process of moving from one meaningful item to another, was revealing. In some ways, she spoke to the problem with assumptions. As the project team, we had assumed the Monopoly board was significant in some way, and for us as researchers, it certainly was. But for Fung Ling, it was the memory book that crystallized things for her. Crucially, it was the process of creating an exhibit where people did not speak to a fixed notion of what it meant to be Asian Canadian that created this possibility for flexibility and for learning in the process.

In some ways, the themes of language, family, and intergenerational difference are not new to research about identity and community in various Asian Canadian contexts. They are regularly mentioned in scholarly inquiries into histories of migration and settlement.[31] The difference with the More Than a Face exhibit is that none of the storytellers were asked about language, family, or intergenerational differences explicitly. They emerged organically from group conversations, just as peripheral reflections about community also appeared. On these occasions, reflections about community were bound up with notions of identity, such as being Iranian Canadian or South Asian in Canada and the kinds of cultural practices that manifest across diasporas. This, perhaps, is the crux of the issue: community appears most powerfully for people in terms of identities and relationships, which is very different from community as a set subject of study. Understanding this dynamic demands a very different approach from conflating community narratives with individual ones and vice versa. It is a lesson that can be translated out in many ways.

Conclusions

I learned a lot from the process of putting the More Than a Face exhibit together. Some of these lessons were quite practical and applied while others helped me think through questions around Asian Canadian history, research, and community more generally.

There is a fundamental difficulty or reluctance in the academy with fostering the capacity to see individuals and communities in all their complexities. We often joke that any academic’s answer to a question is “it is complicated,” but it remains striking that a key way of managing that complexity is to use shorthand when talking about communities if the research is not expressly about complicating or enriching our understanding of a given community.

There is an equally significant challenge in understanding that when people do engage with academic researchers, they do so with complex identities, agendas, hopes, and aspirations of their own. Being able to see people (including researchers) as connected to, and in relation with, different communities can help disrupt the very homogenizing effects of treating communities as categorical wholes. This requires, in part, a radical rethinking of EDI initiatives and efforts at inclusivity that rest on associations with particular groups. These associations should never be assumed for they erase the rich and essential complexity of human relationships to both one another and to various forms of community.

In the More Than a Face exhibit, storytellers decided whether or not they wanted to be involved and shared the narratives they wanted to share. And we, as the exhibit research and design team, made sure that we listened. There is a lot to learn from both the stories in the exhibit and the way the exhibit came to be. Perhaps most importantly, people had the opportunity to identify what was most important to them, regardless of the depth and breadth of any community ties. The result is an exhibit that provides some insights into the experiences of diverse groups with Asian heritage in Canada without foregrounding the idea of being Asian Canadian. It therefore makes space for the essential idea that communities are diverse and underscores the crucial impossibility of any community speaking with a single voice or having universal priorities. As historians, it is essential that we continue to see beyond categories of community to think about the dynamic interplays that shape the very idea of community. We also need to hold dear to the notion that people, including researchers, can be simultaneously of a community and exist in relation to it.