On Small Town Canadiana & Canadian Nice
“So how long have you been in Hamilton?”
The question always pulls me back to Hong Kong station.
Like the name would suggest, Hong Kong station is located at the very nexus of the city that shares connecting points to all other means of transportation. To accommodate such feat, the station itself has an ant nest-like quality that is made up of meandering tunnels, elevators, platforms. In a 2019 study, the daily ridership of Hong Kong’s MTR is 4.962 million people (compared to roughly 2 million in New York’s MTA). With a new train coming in every 2 minutes on average unloading old and new passengers, one cannot escape feeling part of a “traffic”. Inside the ant nest that is Hong Kong station, citizens find their way through cleverly designed signages, precise shouldering to avoid any unnecessary body contact.
“I just want to go home” seems to be the underlying slogan that unites the public transport system in Hong Kong and perhaps elsewhere.
Whereas from a traveler’s gaze, one might describe such as “organized chaos” (a description tritely used by white travelers to describe Asia) but it is a wonderous sight — how such traffic is conditioned by time, possibilities, and impossibilities of pathways, occasional errors, etc. On a more conceptual level, how does public transport, as a collective experience — give shape to urban living and vice versa?
There’s another car coming now as I speak. The next one is arriving in 2 minutes.
Hong Kong Station - Hong Kong International Airport — Hamilton, Ontario
In August 2018, I left Hong Kong and landed in Hamilton after a 48-hour journey with no expectation of what would come. It was roughly noon on a crisp day right between the Ontario summer and coming fall. My landlord picked me up from the bus station. The sky was blue and not a single cloud was in sight. I wrote down on my notepad “GO TO IKEA” knowing that this is the new life that I am humbling into.
I wasn’t sure if it was because of my excitement of starting a new chapter in life or if it was the infamous “Canadian Nicety” that translated into my social life here. Perhaps it is precisely how, I think, within the cultural landscape of Small Town Canadiana™ there would not have room for verticalities that are measured through the capitalistic lense such as “glamour” and “success”. I thought of Hong Kong station — if the “Canadian Nice” might be something that informs my new Hamilton identity?
Nelson Wiseman, the director of Canadian Studies at the University of Toronto, has theories about the origins of the cliché. Specifically, Canadians may be nice because history demanded it of us. “John A. Macdonald called Canadians a subordinate people,” he says. “That’s in part because we’ve had a strong tradition of centralized regimes, with the French, and then as a British nation.” Further, Wiseman notes that “fragment theory” may be a factor in Canadians’ niceness. The theory suggests that colonial nations are made up of “fragments” of the societies that colonized them. In Canada, the characteristics and values of early European settlers infiltrated the culture and persisted, particularly those of the conservative British Tories. “Although Canada is no longer a British nation,” says Wiseman, “these tendencies replicate and perpetuate themselves like a gene.”
But what is so “Canadian” about “Canadian Nice”? To call “Canadian Nice” a myth does no demystify — but only self-perpetuates the cultural performance that is much fueled by US-neighboring anxiety.
Sharing similar historical trajectories with the United States but at the same time feeling the need to distinguish from the American history of imperial violence, “Canadian Nice” has been historically weaponized against marginalized communities.
“Well, we are not as bad as the US so we are the good guys here!”
In Grace Kwan’s chapter titled “Colonialism and National Myth-Making in Canadian Museums”, Canadian national mythology promotes the widespread idea of a peaceful, tolerant, multicultural nation built by and composed of immigrants. But as Kwan writes, such mythology functions to sustain the ongoing settler colonialism and genocide of Indigenous people in Canada.
Even in our current generation that is transitioning to a post-stereotype zeitgeist, whether sexually, politically, racially — I cannot help but think how “Canadian Nice” has taken on new shapes. How on one hand neoliberalism usurps the aesthetics of niceness while perpetuating indigenous erasures, violence, and marginalization; current administration double-downing on niceness as means to secure power and stifle any radical political change; self-deluding via niceness while the sweeping local rise of the alt-right movement, etc.?
At the beginning of writing, I had the intention of writing about small-town gossip, something that I haven’t had much experience from Hong Kong (future topic maybe?).
Gossip as a sign of belonging?
Gossip as social currency, capital, and relevancy?
Gossip as surveillance?
The task to unpack what “Canadian Nice” actually means appeals to me, especially as a young, queer, Asian, migrant who moved here from Hong Kong. As I am about to enter my fourth year in Hamilton, I would love to write about this place in whatever loving way I try. But as someone growing up in a culture that diminishes personal autonomy (whether sexual, creative, social) in a post-colonial city, there is always a part of me find small-town Canadian experience “too good to be true” but when in fact, how niceness has been afforded and coded through privilege — as someone who is English-speaking, multicultural, queer, etc. — and by extension the broader histories of “Othering”?
At the same time, our understanding of what “small town” is complicated by our migration that tends to escape spatial and numerical definitions (“What’s the population of X compared to Toronto? How far is city X from Toronto?”). Someone moving from Toronto to Hamilton versus Hong Kong to Hamilton has a different understanding of what a “city” means. This is evidently the case in Hamilton — a city that has had a ghastly history of gentrification over the past decade and is now facing an exasperating housing crisis. Perhaps right between the “small town” and the “city,” Hamilton’s experience is a fleeting mode of relationality that is much complicated by fear and hope at the same time. Perhaps we need to move beyond the spatial language and approach “Canadian Nice” with a radical diversity and inclusion perspective, as bell hooks write so succinctly, “all too often we think of community in terms of being with folks like ourselves: the same class, same race, same ethnicity, same social standing and the like…I think we need to be wary: we need to work against the danger of evoking something that we don’t challenge ourselves to actually practice.” Perhaps “Canadian Nice” is a warning that urges us to look at kindness as work and more than just the prettiness it offers on the dinner table.