They say, “ignorance is bliss!” I agree partially! In most cases, it is true because apparently when you do not know, you do not worry. You live your life as you have always done so…no stress, no anxiety and no confusion. On the other hand, this saying in many cases does not hold true. Take for instance cultural ignorance. Moving to a new country may be exciting but if you have no idea about the way people live in the new country, you are apt to make quite many silly mistakes…sometimes even serious ones. This is true not only about the immigrant. It also applies to the ignorance of the locals about the culture of the newcomers. On a softer note, relating to this matter, I always remember my father’s friend Hagop, who had immigrated from Aleppo years before us. One day, after years of hard work, settling in the first house he had just bought, he noticed his next-door neighbor across the yard. He had invited him for a coffee. The neighbor had accepted the invitation with reluctance. At the end of their chat over coffee, the neighbor had stood up to leave and had nervously asked, “how much?” Hagop told this story, shaking his head and laughing at the ignorance of his neighbor who had wanted to pay for the coffee. How exaggerated this story is, I cannot say. But funny anecdotes like this one are many.
In my very first year in Toronto, the same year I started my dry cleaning delivery job in our building, Indian-looking faces were quite visible in our neighborhood. They looked Indian to me. I had seen so many Bollywood films in my childhood, that I could tell these people and the way they dressed could only be Indian. All of a sudden, my school and building were full of them and a wave of violent racist activities infested the city. Some of these immigrants got beaten up, hassled, mimicked because of their accent and in a couple of cases, were pushed down the subway(metro) tracks. Many of the locals used to call them ‘Paki’s, a very derogatory term for Pakistanis…almost like ‘negro’ for African people or ‘wap’ for Italians.
The sad fact was that most people did not know that these immigrants had nothing to do with Pakistan. It was Idi Amin’s most brutal era, and he had kicked out all the Southeast Asian population of Uganda overnight. They had lived there for generations, originally moved there because of British colonialism. Now they had come as refugees to Toronto and for the average ignorant Canadian, they presented a new opportunity to express their racist qualms with immigration. They hated the way these newcomers looked, dressed, and cooked their spicy food. Added on top, they lived in crowds…too many people in little spaces. They also spoke with a strange accent. All of a sudden everyone felt free to tell a ‘Paki’ joke. It was all out of cultural ignorance. Ignorance brings suspicion and fear. And fear brings hatred and racist intolerance.
To tell you the truth, every time I delivered the dry cleaning, I also used to get annoyed by the heavy smell of fried spicy food that overtook the hallways of some floors where they lived. But it was just a passing annoyance. I still knocked on their doors and collected clothes. I also spoke to many of them to such a point that eventually I understood their tragic story in Uganda. Maybe it was because of a tiny familiarity with them through all the Indian films I had seen that made me different from the typical Canadian. Who knows? Maybe also it is because I have hardly had any problem with who people are or where they come from.
But I do not want to wrap up this writing with a sour note about hate and bigotry. I began at the top talking about moving to a new country and making silly mistakes because of unfamiliarity with culture. That’s me in my first year of university. There was a student called France that I liked secretly. We had spoken a couple of times and she was cute. One morning we sat together on the bus to university. We were chatting casually and at one point she said to me, ‘happy Valentines’ and then, taking out a card from her school bag, she added, ’do you want to be my valentine’? I did not know what she meant but somehow, I said ‘sure’. Now, I knew that Valentines Day was for couples. But that was all because I had never had a girlfriend. So, I had no clue what entailed accepting to be someone’s valentine. I was waiting for her to enlighten me. Because I was confused, I was speechless and a silence clouded over us. As the bus got closer and closer to our stop, France’s cheerful mood disappeared slowly. She was not smiling any more. As the bus stopped, she got off the bus and left without a word. I knew something was totally wrong. Some days later when I told a friend about that day, he laughed hard and told me that I was such a weirdo. Apparently, I was supposed to invite her out on a romantic date that night because she had chosen me to be her Valentine…she liked me. Needless to say, France never spoke to me after that day. She must have thought I was such an idiot!
