Dac is a 20 year-old only child, born in Vietnam, who moved to Montreal when he was seven. “Here’s the proof,” he says as he rolls up his sleeve, showing me the scar from his malaria shot. It looks as if they stuck a needle that was a centimeter in diameter into his shoulder. “All us real immigrants have it.” His family was very wealthy in Vietnam, where they had four mansions. However, the communist government seized three of

I come from a mother who is second generation in Canada, 100% Irish blood. She grew up in the Laurentians in Quebec. My father is third generation Ukrainian, born in Manitoba, raised in Toronto. I was born and raised in Montreal, and I’m now a tender 19 years of age. I always lived in a very French neighborhood, where for the first few years of my life my only friend was a Colombian kid. We only spoke English at home, so both he and I had to resort to gibberish until we both learned French in kindergarten. My parents wanted me to learn French at an early age just to give me as many opportunities I could get, living in a world where to me, the dominant culture really was French people.

When Dac and I met in grade 4, we immediately bonded due to our common knowledge of the English language. All of the kids who would be classified as “racial minorities” hung out with the English kids. Both groups were stuck in a school that was for the most part French, so we could band together and relate to each other on a different level. Because none of the French kids watched “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”, or “He-Man”. Since both the English kids and the ethnic-looking kids enjoyed the same things, we were cool. Nevertheless, the French for the most part weren’t colder with the ethnic-looking kids because they looked different, but because their French was shabby. And we for the most part didn’t resent the French. We just had no idea what they were talking about whenever their conversations pertained to television or music. We couldn’t even talk about the movies we had seen with the French kids because they had seen the translated versions which had different titles and character names.

Since my dad did most of the cooking, I often came to school with crazy Ukrainian sausage sandwiches, Germanic and Slavic meals and all sorts of goulashes. Dac always had rice. A different Vietnamese-inspired meal with rice. We were all about the exotic Tupperware food, and the French kids were all about the balogna on white bread. During the first few years of our elementary school life, we got the usual “yuck,” and “ewww!” (in French it was more like “ouache” and “yak”) But as the years passed, our ethnic foods became the subjects of many a French child’s curiosity.

Speaking of women, both Dac’s parents and mine didn’t like the idea of their child getting involved with girls at a young age, so we had to sneak around if we wanted to get pecks on the cheeks and whatnot. What is also funny, is that the most of the obstacles we faced regarding our cul

Some topics in this essay:
Germanic Slavic, I’m Irish, Montreal Dac, Montreal I’m, Khoa’s Despite, English French, Buckminster Collins, Nevertheless French, , Quebec Dac, french kids, school french, elementary school, french girls, ethnic-looking kids, internalized racism, cultural differences, racism bad, multicultural city, genuine quebecer,