When most girls envision their future, most think of their wedding day rather than marriage and family. And that, my friends, is a problem. It takes two to tango, and I honestly feel that if most people put as much energy into their marriages as they did their wedding days, there'd be fewer divorces. Seriously. My name is Tika Danusubroto-Wallace and I was born and raised in Pariaman, a coastal town in the Sumatra region of Indonesia.
After living in Canada for half my life, I still feel at odds with this wonderful and at times treacherous new homeland of mine. Today, I am a happily married woman and a mother of three living in the City of Toronto. My husband Suleiman and I have two sons, Omar and Kader, and a daughter, our little angel Rani. We're just another family living in the diverse and lively suburb of Mississauga, we simply happen to be an interracial Muslim family.
We do alright for ourselves, I think. I hold a bachelor's degree in business administration from the University of Toronto and I am currently working on my MBA. In the meantime, I'm an account manager with the Toronto Dominion Bank downtown. My husband Suleiman is a corrections officer. Our family lives in a nice house in Mississauga. By all signs, we've made it, thanks to hard work and effort. So why do I feel like there's something missing?
Even though my passport now says Canadian, I'll always be considered the cultural other in this beautiful land. I guess it's the price I pay for being an outsider. In the eleventh summer of my life, my parents, Adnan and Maryam Danusubroto left Indonesia for Ontario, Canada. We've been living here ever since. When we first arrived in Toronto, the place simply blew us away. The most beautiful and racially diverse metropolis in North America became our home. We were in love with it from the get go, disillusionment only came later.
Whenever I talk to folks back in Indonesia, they're so naïve about life in the West it's not even funny. They don't know what life is really like for southeast Asians in the great white north. I'm five-foot-seven, bronze-skinned, black-haired and brown-eyed. I am a minority woman in Canada. During the early days, I wore the hijab but now I do not. I still consider myself a devout Muslim. It's piety and sincerity that makes a true believer, not items of clothing. Allah can see right through all of us, can He not? To understand the root of my malaise, I feel it's necessary to go back to the beginning.
Wide-eyed immigrants who feel like a wonderful, easy life await them in Canada are easy for me to spot, doesn't matter where they're from. What can I say? My parents and I once fit into this category. Not anymore. Living in this land has toughened us up. We're well-aware of the struggles and endless battles against the prejudice which await visible minorities in this oh so wonderful place. Back in Indonesia, my father was a businessman, he owned several restaurants. As for my mother, she was a nurse. Both were shocked to find out that their educational credentials weren't valid in Canada.
Supposedly, the Canadian government is working on a program to adequately evaluate the college and university degrees of foreign-born and foreign-educated peoples, and integrate them into the Canadian workforce. That's a load of bullshit. If you were born outside Canada and your degree is also from the outside world, you're going to have a tough time in this country. They're politely but firmly xenophobic up here, and they fear educated and ambitious visible minority types the most.
I can't tell you about how bright young men and women from places like Nigeria, Pakistan, India and China walk into the bank to drop off their resumes, and never hear from us again. Just in case you're wondering, they've got degrees from schools like Algonquin College, La Cite Collegiale, the University of Ottawa and Carleton University. They're educated in Canada, and for the most part, they're Canadian citizens. They simply happen to be non-white, and that's an unwritten and unpardonable sin, especially in Ottawa. The few visible minorities you see working at the professional level in Ottawa and Toronto tend to be either entry-level private sector types or government workers.
In Canada, we've got discrimination down to a science. You could have a degree from McGill University and if your last name sounds exotic, foreign, or outrageously different, they simply throw your resume into the shredder at the end of the day. The same person who smiled at you and welcomed you into his or her office will toss your resume in the trash and have a chuckle about it at the water cooler with their colleague that same day. Why are they doing this, you may ask?
Simply because they're afraid. The mostly white workforce of Canada is growing grayer day by day, and they're deathly afraid of the influx of young, energetic and educated Asians, Africans, Arabs, Hispanics and other visible minority types set to replace them. And the fact that we visible minorities tend to produce more offspring than white Canadians is also a worrisome trend. This country is changing, and not everybody is happy about it. Welcome to twenty-first century Canada.
I wasn't always that cynical, though. My parents nicknamed me "Beautiful Dreamer" when I was little. I thought I was going to find fame and fortune in Canada. Believe it or not, I didn't always want to work in banking and finance. I once wanted to be an actress. Lucy Liu was one of my favorite actresses growing up. I thought that if western audiences could embrace a beautiful Asian woman like her, then there was hope for me. I would later sadly learn that while many in the west find Asian women beautiful, that attraction is perverted, for they fetishize us, rather than seeing us as the lovely human beings we happen to be.
In high school, I met a young man named Lucien Lemieux. Tall, red-haired and green-eyed, he was the captain of the football team and lots of girls at school wanted him. And I was no exception. You can imagine how I thrilled I was when he asked me out. We began dating, and I was really into him. I saw him as my prince charming. Until the day one of his friends made a joke about Chinese people, and he laughed. Now, I'm Indonesian, not Chinese, but westerners can't tell visually the difference between Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Koreans or Indonesians. I'd been called "China Doll" more times than I could count by random guys, usually white, on the streets of Toronto.
