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- Sep 12, 2010
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I plan to participate in #DVPit tomorrow but am unsure whether to tag my books (there are three that I could potentially tweet for this) as #ownvoices. I am mixed race. My father is white, my mother was Chinese. My mother's parents came to Canada from southern China in the 1950s and her family speaks Toisanese. I have two contemporary romances in which the heroes are Chinese-Canadian, not mixed race, and their parents immigrated to Canada from Hong Kong and speak Cantonese. I think there's a difference between me writing these stories vs. my white husband writing them...and yet, I have friends with such backgrounds, and their stories feel different from my family's. I think it may be more of a second vs third generation thing more than me being mixed race, actually. I have a third book in which the hero has a similar background, but the heroine is also Chinese-Canadian, and her mother's family history is very similar to my own. That feels like #ownvoices to me in a way that the other stories don't, although perhaps that's because racial issues are a more important part of the story, and the heroine doesn't feel like she belongs.
But I don't know where to draw the line. Would me writing a white/Korean character be #ownvoices? And yet if I wrote a fully Korean character, I wouldn't consider it #ownvoices...But if a character was white/Korean, my experiences would inform how I wrote that character.
For whatever reason, I would suspect that white people would be more likely to see me as part of that group and see it as #ownvoices, but to people who are actually part of the Chinese-Canadian community? I don't know. I feel pretty alienated from the Chinese community here, which has grown dramatically in the past few decades. Without speaking either Cantonese or Mandarin, it's hard to be a part of it. I feel "other" if I go to a Chinese part of Toronto, but I also feel "other" if I'm at a wedding where everyone else is white.
So...thoughts? It feels like a stupid thing to obsess over, but whenever I see "own voices" mentioned, I feel unsure about my identity.
But I don't know where to draw the line. Would me writing a white/Korean character be #ownvoices? And yet if I wrote a fully Korean character, I wouldn't consider it #ownvoices...But if a character was white/Korean, my experiences would inform how I wrote that character.
For whatever reason, I would suspect that white people would be more likely to see me as part of that group and see it as #ownvoices, but to people who are actually part of the Chinese-Canadian community? I don't know. I feel pretty alienated from the Chinese community here, which has grown dramatically in the past few decades. Without speaking either Cantonese or Mandarin, it's hard to be a part of it. I feel "other" if I go to a Chinese part of Toronto, but I also feel "other" if I'm at a wedding where everyone else is white.
So...thoughts? It feels like a stupid thing to obsess over, but whenever I see "own voices" mentioned, I feel unsure about my identity.