A work that explores the margins immigrants inhabit — those spaces between how they are seen and who they truly are…
by: Ya-Ting Yu
You know those times, when your mind goes blank, but you’re surrounded by people, and all you could do is laugh.
Not that you find it funny.
Because no appropriate facial response reflects what’s happening inside. Like melting glaciers in the Arctic, on the surface, ice sheets look rock solid. Only when you prod and poke, you realize the crevasses festering, eroding the structure that once was whole.
Wholesome — that was how their Christmas dinner invitation felt. A simple text from the B&B host we’d stayed with months before. They knew we were new to town, a remote city three hours from the dead centre of Canada.
On Christmas Eve, thigh-high snow piled on either side of the road. We came bearing gifts of homemade maki rolls and stir-fry vermicelli, recipes we thought accommodated even the least adventurous of eaters.
It was our hosts, their two daughters, and the dog. A Mexican couple, also former B&B guests who were invited to the dinner, couldn’t make it as buses only ran until sundown.
“Here, meet my older daughter, Karina. She just came back from Japan.”
“Yeah, I went to Tokyo, travelled around with an English-speaking tour. Incredible.”
“Wow, was it your first time? How long were you there?”
“Yeah, first to Asia. About two weeks. Honestly, I didn’t expect the weather to be so warm.”
“Oh, Karina, tell them about that guy you met on the tour, the guy who proposed to you.”
“Dad, no— I mean, it wasn’t really a proposal.”
“No? But the guy wanted you to stay! So Karina joined this tour to Mount Fuji, and this Japanese guy, you know, he probably hasn’t seen many blonde-haired, blue-eyed girls, and of course, he was instantly attracted to Karina, talking to her the whole time. On the last day, he asked her to stay with him in Japan.”
Karina nodded and laughed — at her dad’s display or recalling the moment, we couldn’t tell.
“You don’t see many beautiful girls like my daughter in Japan or Taiwan, right? So naturally, she’d catch the eye of Japanese men. I tell her, maybe she could stay in Japan. But no, that’s too far for me to see my daughter—”
“Alright, enough stories. Dig in before the buns get cold, made fresh this afternoon. By the way, thanks again for the sushi and noodles. Our family loves sushi. That Japanese restaurant in town, have you tried it?”
We left after mint tea and desserts, holding their box of leftover buns while wiping snow off our car.
Some dinners are difficult to digest, not because of the saturated fat or granulated sugar — ingredients everyone knows are harmful. It’s the eggs, flour, and innocent jokes. Raw, unfiltered things you pour into the bowl without a second thought about how they affect the system.
For them, every combination of rice, veg, and raw fish makes sushi.
For them, every immigrant comes here because it’s the greatest country in the world.
We laugh, like all guests do when the host tells a joke.
We laugh, even when the fruit cake carries a bitter undertone.
We laughed and choked.
Ya-Ting Yu (she/they) ghosted social media and black-and-whited her phone in 2017. Recently, she cut her hair short against the feminine ideal. A Taiwanese writer fumbling through English — her third language — she turns her three-city identity crisis (Taipei, Toronto, Edinburgh) into stories that somehow convinced Quarter Press and Fahmidan Journal.
I wonder about Karina’s internal response, whether she was aware of her diminution, as well, by her father. The father objectified her, as a presumably (and eventually) throwaway object of desire for this particular Japanese male (and perhaps, via displacement, the father’s apparent and misplaced pride was an expression of his own subterranean desires). By throwing in Taiwanese women into the mix, that certainly was a passive-aggressive (and false) utterance. I can only imagine what he would have said if the Mexican couple had come. “Oh, my younger daughter vacationed in Mexico . . . ” you get the drift.