I'm back in Vancouver.
I don't think I have ever spent Christmas in Vancouver. I'm not much of a Christmas person, and if it weren't for the residual Christian belief left in me, I think I would actually hate Christmas and all this consumeristic rubbish. But just like any other Hallmark holidays, you get bombarded with all this jingle-bell merriment often enough and you feel the obligation to be happy on Christmas Day.
I had a great day on Christmas Day (though really it could be any other day) but I think I also missed Vancouver. I think. I missed the people I associate Vancouver with, I missed the feeling of being somewhere I'm comfortable. I missed the simplicity that you can only find in a place you have spent enough time in, the kind that allows you to go through a day brainlessly if you choose to without having to watch what you're doing and where you're going every other minute.
But before I got all that back when I returned to this piece of soil I've learned to call home, something happened that told me maybe I shouldn't get too comfortable here. When I gave the custom officer my passport, the first thing she said to me was "do you speak English?" Granted, the couple guys before me were visitors from Japan and probably didn't speak the language very well so they got redirected to a special booth just behind, and maybe it was just fresh on her mind so she thought she might as well ask me. But that was the lamest excuse I could come up in her defence.
I held a British passport, I gave her my permanent residence card so if she had just took 2 seconds to look at my documents, she should know that I should be capable of answering questions like, "where are you arriving from today?" Or a simple way to find out is to actually start the questions and see if I could answer. But no, "do you speak English" was what she asked. I wanted to say, "Yes, I speak your fucking language and I speak it damn well even though it's my second language," but she was the customs officer so I just said, "yes... Tokyo.. I was there for the holidays. I was there for the holidays (she asked the same question twice). I was there with the family... no my parents live in Hong Kong. They're doctors. I study here at UBC."
At least she called me "ma'am" or she'd have hell to pay. But I really was insulted, almost more insulted than when people call me "sir". It was the tone that she carried, the expression on her face. It was condescending. I don't care if customs officers are supposed to be stern and intimidating. Respect is something different, something everyone deserves. When I was in Japan and someone mistakenly spoke Japanese to me, she apologized to me after she realized I didn't understand a single word she said, and we both ended up all embarassed. But here back home, before I even opened my mouth I was considered second-grade. I won't call it racism, because racism seems too severe and too complex a term for this situation. But I doubt that I overreacted or took it too personally. It was what it was -- judgment.
And this is Vancouver, where people of all skin colours go through customs, where some Canadian born Chinese might not speak Chinese at all, where some African-Canadians speak mostly French, where some second generation Asians still speak broken English. You'd think that people would learn not to make any assumptions after a while.
I don't understand how it happened, or why she said that. I don't even care what she thought. I just knew that after being gone for a week, the last thing I wanted when I got home was being questioned whether I really belonged.