Ideas - Cultivating Community, Citizenship and Belonging | Jamie Chai Yun Liew

Episode Date: June 20, 2024

What does it mean to seek belonging in a new place, while also being a good guest on Indigenous lands? Can you ever truly "arrive"? Novelist and immigration and refugee lawyer Jamie Chai Yun Liew explores how to cultivate new forms of belonging. 

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. Good morning. It's a great pleasure to be here with you. We are going to record this as though live. Some of you have had to suffer through this previously. I apologize in advance for my flubs. But I'd love your help as well, because we want it to feel

live. So I'm going to go like this and ask for some applause if you don't mind. So thank you for obliging me. So we can get started. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. And welcome to a live taping of Ideas at Crow's Theatre in Toronto. We've invited five interesting thinkers to give a talk inspired by one of the plays in the Crow's Theatre season. The ideas in a play are often much the same as those that concern us in real life, some of the most pressing questions of our time. The play connected to today's event is The Wrong Bashir by Zahida Rahmatullah. It's an intergenerational farce about a tight-knit Ismaili family that looks at the values passed down through generations and how we are shaped by those who love us most, even when we try to run away from them.

In today's talk, Cultivating Belonging, Jamie Chayun Liu considers the in-between spaces created by migration, the gaps between places, and between generations. And she asks what new forms of belonging we might find in those liminal zones. Jamie Chayun Liu is a writer, lawyer, and professor at the University of Ottawa and expert in immigration, refugee, and citizenship law. Her debut novel, Dandelion, won the 2018 Asian Canadian Writers' Workshop Jim Wong Chu Emerging Writers' Award and was long-listed for CBC Canada Reads in 2023. Her book, Ghost Citizens, examines the ways people are made foreign, stateless, and not kin.

Please join me in welcoming Jamie. Good morning. Thank you for coming. I'm a lover of ghost stories. I love that sensation. You know something creepy is going to come out and pop out at you, but you don't know what it is. I think the horror genre has been inspiring and misplaced in our societal lexicon as simply a visceral entertainment, because I think those who write and think deeply about the human condition are also fascinated with the gross and disturbing mysteries of the human condition. fascinated with the gross and disturbing mysteries of the human condition. I think of ghost stories as modes of philosophizing and an exploration of existential questions of our time, something that I think Bashir and my parents might think are frivolous activities or taken on by quote-unquote, creepy hippies. But I think, and I invite you to think, about how ghosts can tell us

a lot about ourselves. Sometimes ghosts are unfairly feared and blamed for things we don't quite understand, and they have no connection to. They live in the in-between space, neither fully alive or dead. They haunt us and make us question what is reality. Recently, I published a book called Ghost Citizens, which talks about my research on statelessness. My research focuses on the technical side of legal belonging, but it is also interested in the emotional and felt experience of belonging and how law shapes those interactions that gives rise to these feelings. It's the ghost story motif that helps me understand my father's reason for migrating to Canada. You see, before he came to Canada, he was stateless. He did not have citizenship to any country. In a sense,

he was legally homeless. He was born in a country that did not give citizenship to Chinese people born there. The idea of ghosts and hauntings helped me understand how stateless people felt administratively dead, how they lived in purgatory, how their exclusion from legal status and therefore the necessities of life, like education, housing, and healthcare, led to misunderstandings on who they are, but also contributes to ongoing horrific existence of oppression, exclusion, and poverty. The community of stateless people I was researching were those in countries that they considered their home, but they were being ghosted by their own states,

denied citizenship. More than that, they were being told they were foreigners. They were conferred ghost citizenship to another state, even though there was no proof or confirmation that they were citizens elsewhere. People who belong to minority racial and ethnic groups are at risk of statelessness the most. My research traces this to the history of British colonization in the countries that I studied. That the colonizing ideas of categorizing people by race and giving differentiated citizenship and benefits left enduring legacies on our ideas of who belongs today. While my research focused on occurrences in Malaysia and Canada, you can see how the making of statelessness leads to oppression in some extreme forms,

making a statelessness leads to oppression in some extreme forms, such as genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar, Palestinians in the occupied territories, Tibetans and Uyghurs in China, as well as the overnight exclusion of Assamese in India. There are many more, so many that I can't go through the list. In the play, The Wrong Bashir, it is the statelessness and expulsion of Ugandan Asians and Ismailis that is the plot's backdrop. Many equate statelessness with foreigners or migrants, but many stateless people don't see themselves that way. Indeed, in the examples I just gave, each community have argued their long-standing place in the countries they believe are home. They insist they too belong, that they have authentic and deep ties in the places that they live in. I admire the steadfast commitment to their identity and their resilience in advocating for themselves. They have called out the state and its problematic gaslighting of who they are.

And international law seems to agree. Markers identifying one's primary citizenship include genuine and effective links such as long-term residence, bonds with people and community, other ties such as attendance at school and employment. It is the quality of these connections that matters. There are undoubtedly success stories. My book documents a story of a young woman named Roysa and how she overcame statelessness by launching a public campaign to perform the kind of citizenship that fit in Malaysia's national narrative of who are deserving citizens. Roysa was a straight-A student. She ideally represented the three pillars of Malay society in the linguistic, cultural, and religious sense.

She spoke Malay, understood Malay cultural norms, was a pious, hijab-donning Muslim woman. She resembles a productive citizen. And for Roysa, I'm elated that she was able to finally covet the ultimate prize of belonging by getting citizenship. But unlike Roysa, many stateless people will not obtain citizenship in their lifetimes. Becoming a citizen changes one's life chances and opportunities to survive and also thrive. My father was able to escape his statelessness by migrating to Canada as an economic migrant. And while he holds citizenship here, the question remains, does he belong?

Do I belong? When people migrate, they in a sense shed some skin and begin again. When they have children in their new home, as playwright Zahida Ramtula says, there's a transitional moment between generations. It is an in-between space. I'm fascinated with this in-between space, how migration, the movement of people, challenges us to think of who we are. Growing up, I reconciled with the fact that my parents would not fully belong in Canadian society. Their accents, their awkward performance of Canadian customs, their misunderstandings manifested in the questions they asked. I would act as translator, guide.

In many ways, my father never shed his status as a stateless person, but would nevertheless try to emulate, pass as a local person. He is in some ways still a ghost citizen, and many still assume he's not of our community. Toni Morrison, in her classical novel, The Bluest Eyes, wrote, Each night, without fail, she prayed for blue eyes, fervently for a year she had prayed. Although somewhat discouraged, she was not without hope.

To have something as wonderful as that happen would take a long, long time. My research has documented the multitude of ways citizenship and immigration law privilege a dominant group, shaping national narratives on who are legitimate citizens and therefore who to emulate to access the path of least resistance. Laws force in legitimizing our ideas have unfortunately encouraged uncritical conformity and promised a false sense of belonging. As I grew up, I thought I would pass, move easily in the landscape. I spoke without an accent, was western educated. I work in a professional occupation. My work as an immigration lawyer and my research on migration and citizenship pulled me into radio interviews on concerns

Canadians were having with pregnant foreign women coming to Canada to give birth to their children. In these interviews, I would point out there's very little research or data to show that there are indeed a high number of non-resident women coming to give birth, and that second, that their motives for coming to Canada was primarily to give birth. I said there was a lot we don't understand or know and misplaced concern. Indeed, some were international students or temporary foreign workers and could be here with intentions to return home to their home countries or transition to making Canada a permanent home. We simply did not know. And yet, there was immense fear of this group of racialized women. I started to receive disturbing emails and letters. People would

write, I was wrong to defend pregnant Chinese women in British Columbia. They were not from Canada and they were trying to get Canadian passports for their babies. Their proof? They took pictures of pregnant Asian women in their neighborhoods and sent them to me. I thought about the collective 18 months I had been pregnant with my two children and whether anyone had surreptitiously taken pictures of me to garner proof that foreigners were invading. And then I thought about the time someone tried to recruit me to be a nanny for their baby because they didn't think the baby I was holding was my own. And during the COVID-19 pandemic, I was told to go back home many times. These are small moments, but they made me think about how I was like a ghost to some people, misunderstood, misidentified,

misunderstood, misidentified, and feared. It has made me think about the assumptions made of people, especially racialized people who cannot pass, hide, change. Who is local? Who is a foreigner? What does belonging feel like and mean? Jamaica Kincaid, in book A Small Place wrote that the native does not like the tourist is not hard to explain for every native of every place is a potential tourist and every tourist is a native of somewhere. I had the privilege of living in Hawaii for four months as a Fulbright visiting scholar. It was of course a beautiful experience. A few things occurred there that made me think about the various ways in which we belong. First, because I am Asian and because there's a significant Asian population in Hawaii, I passed as local. It was a strange sensation to me because I had never felt this degree of local acknowledgement before, even here in Canada.

People talked to me more openly about issues, questions, and freely gave me insider-type information, like where the secret beach entrances were and what they really thought of tourists. There was also something unique about being in a place where you could physically blend in and understand the culture and language references. And while I could blend in sometimes in Southeast Asia, my lack of cultural and linguistic knowledge would eventually out me. And while I was in Hawaii, I learned that not everyone living there calls themselves Hawaiian. Those born there who have long-standing residence or generational ties call themselves local rather than Hawaiian the term Hawaiian is reserved for native Hawaiians the the term local denotes some link and community but of a different quality than those that are indigenous still there's a tension there too about what it means to be local. Ultimately though, I knew I was a visitor.

I felt I could not passively absorb these local benefits and I paid attention to where tourist dollars go. Spoiler alert, it is a myth that tourism benefits the local economy with large corporations from continental U.S. owning and operating the major hotels, resorts, and retailers in the tourist areas. I started to ask questions and listen and try to cultivate a responsible and respectful presence during my time there. One of the things that I learned about being at a place that is inundated with visitors is how hosting someone is an enormous undertaking.

The kindness extended to me, to connect me to people, ideas, places, is a practice I think we should all think about doing in our daily lives. But it is one enacted with generous authority. Like sitting down to share a meal at a table, a good host will serve their guests first, connect them to one another, and then worry about themselves. Being there, I saw

I was not held captive as an audience to passively receive, but I was nudged to engage on my own and to take on my task in my own way. And good guests don't just dine and dash or dominate the table conversation. They also offer to help clear the table, to wash the dishes and alleviate the burden. Tourists do have a bad name, but that's because of how some of them spend their sojourn. They demand a certain kind of experience. And large companies try to meet that demand,

replacing what is truly local. It is this sense of entitlement to vacation, rest, and play in a certain way, without regard to what was and is there now. Some see this place as a site of lucrative business and investment opportunities through land acquisition. We need to be critical of these activities. But where there is legitimate concern over how tourists behave and how they change the landscape, some of us, no matter how many connections we cultivate, how careful we are to respect the back to the Avirons. We remain perpetual tourists. We are told time and time again to go home. I recently read a piece in the New York Times Style magazine that has encouraged this hunger in me to understand how one belongs. When tomatoes arrived in Italy 500 years ago, they were considered dangerous and undelicious.

As we now know, the tomato is a prominent feature in Italian cuisine, but it's part of its cultural narrative now. The foreign fruit was not only eventually accepted, but it has been reconstituted into an iconic part of Italian life. It led to innovation and dynamic fusion. In the tomato story, we see a perfect example of how the etymological roots of the word traitor and tradition and revolution share Latin roots, that we as social beings have long understood exchange, migration, and belonging to be part of an intertwined evolutionary process. More than that, the story of the tomato has me asking, what made the gardeners stop defending their gardens and make the tomato of their soil? British colonial ideas of land enclosures contributed to modern ideas of property possession and ownership.

Calvin's case, one of the earliest English cases surrounding citizenship, involved whether a Scottish landowner could inherit land in England, with the core question being whether he was a loyal citizen of the English crown. whether he was a loyal citizen of the English crown. The legal and Latin term usoli refers to law of the soil and has shaped notions of birthright citizenship today and looking forward. It has shaped ideas of belonging. Tied to that, of course, is the idea that links soil with loyal servants and subjects. Early English cases show this preoccupation with allegiance and how this could be garnered through place on land and eventually through heirs by blood in eusanguinis, law by blood. In many post-British colonial states,

I've learned that calling people local or native is equated with being of the soil. It manifests as a static or fixed fact. In Malaysia, for example, the term Bumi Putra literally means sons of the soil. And it is used to give legitimacy to the idea that the dominant Malay population were native to Malaysia and therefore could exclude people on that basis. This is not new. We see many people in Canada doing the same things when they shout at racialized people to go home. People whose family may have been gifted property by a colonial government to farm and develop it, and therefore believe they have legitimate citizenship and are of the soil. That tie to land and territory is a strong one in some

people's identities. While many communities use it to own and control more property, for some it is not about possession or ownership or exclusivity, but an acknowledgement that we are all interconnected and need to care for our home. My son came home from school one day while we were living in Hawaii and announced that he learned that the strawberry guava is an invasive species in Hawaii. It forms dense mats of roots, making it difficult for other flora and fauna to exist around it. This species of guava has a habitat-altering effect that could lead to the extinction of other plants in its midst. For some communities, migration has meant colonization, oppression, erasure.

For others, it has meant innovative fusion. We have not yet fully addressed the harmful aspects to migration, and in my opinion, we need to in order to talk about belonging. While much of my work asks people to avoid going to this default position of fearing others. There has been and are legitimate reasons to fear outsiders. How do we balance these competing tensions? How do we know if what we are facing is the strawberry guava, the invasive species strangling the local plants, or the tomato, a rich addition to local cuisine. Indigenous scholar Jody Bird uses the term arrivance to bring nuance to the cacophonies of oppressions, displacements, and colonial conflicts that have led to the arrival of different people in North America, or as some people call it, Turtle Island.

As playwright Sahida Ramtula writes, for some, life is not in our hands. Many of our parents were forced to move because they were made into refugees or stateless persons, foreigners in the lands that they were previously from, fleeing war, persecution, oppression, genocide. Some of our ancestors may have fled famine, brought over as slaves, labored in plantations, mines. They were colonial or imperial subjects. We, as their children, are now privileged enough to share their stories, their journeys. Is it enough now that we are model

citizens, model minorities? Have we arrived? Should we enjoy the fruits of the hard labor our parents endured, toiling away in oppressive camps, plantations, or blue-collar jobs in working-class neighborhoods? Haven't we proved that we are contributing members of society and that we have earned a place to belong here? My research has led me to understand that my father's statelessness flows from British colonial hierarchies of citizenship based on race, the legacies of which are etched in law in different ways in post-British colonial states. He was unlucky in that he was born as a Chinese person in a country that did not want Chinese people as citizens.

He was called a British subject with no citizenship and no right to it either. This status is the reason why he became an arrivant in Canada. And here, this is where I would say it would be a great disservice to our elders to just say we have finally arrived and to declare we belong, that those of us now born here are of the soil, so to speak. I felt a huge responsibility to share my father's story because it is not uncommon, because statelessness still exists. And I think about how his story could ignite action. I think about the millions of people, many children, who remain stateless today and who experience oppression as a result.

But more than that, his story has forced me to think locally about my place here. What our place in relations to others, especially marginalized persons, mean. Many of us come from communities that have histories that rightly should be commemorated, wrongs acknowledged and not forgotten, such as our kin interned in camps in Canada. Our ancestors asked to pay the head tax, those who died building the railroad, loved ones deported and denied protection. All of that should be profiled, explored in art, inserted into school curriculums. These stories can also highlight and explain contemporary forms of harm against other communities. The same kind

of immigration exclusion, for example, is replicated in our laws today. As descendants of those who suffered in the past, our very presence here could be reproducing harmful systems, processes, discussions about who belongs. While sometimes I'm feared as a foreign person that needs to go home, other times I know I represent that model minority. What does this position mean in relation to others here in the country of my birth? It might be uncomfortable to think about how our very existence here might contribute to ongoing colonizing and oppressive structures in Canada. I, myself, have felt destabilized, unmoored in thinking how my very being

is helping to lift Canada's celebration of a multicultural society while erasing struggles of various Indigenous communities and furthering the wrong identification of some communities as terrorists or illegals? How is my so-called good behavior pitted against other racialized communities who are subject to unfair rules and systems? To what extent are they in control over their own image?

In Canada as not behaving, wayward, cheating, even criminal. Canada as not behaving, wayward, cheating, even criminal. Bell Hooks, while believing in the power of naming systems and their harms, distinguishes this important act from crafting identity labels. In her seminal book, Feminist Theory from Margin to Center, Hooks wrote that she avoided using the phrase, I am a feminist. She instead chose to say, I advocate feminism. She reasoned that the second phrase was more likely to begin conversations. I learned from scholar and novelist Tracy Lindbergh the Cree term of Wakotowin, which refers to good relationship. term of Waukotoan, which refers to good relationship. From scholar Noelani Goodyear-Kaopua, I learned the Hawaiian term kuleana, which refers to responsibility. I have taken intellectual comfort in these indigenous legal principles of relational responsibility to ground my daily practice of belonging. In Hawaii, several of my hosts not only informed me of the negative impact of the history of land dispossession by the military,

businesses, and the government, but they nudged me to look at new endeavors. How land is being converted into community land trusts, land held in the commons to protect, steward and enhance natural landscapes, cultural heritage and role character. The physical act of keeping land from private ownership is one thing, but it is the practices cultivated in these spaces that taught me how differently a table could be set. in these spaces that taught me how differently a table could be set. The activities in these land commons were not just meant to restore and preserve, but educate and connect people to the land through acts of planting, weeding, and talking. And as a side note, I have never experienced a more daunting task of weeding plants that were the same size as my body. of weeding plants that were the same size as my body. It was truly inspirational, this model of sustainable cultural and ethical living that tries to imagine a different future.

Noalani Gujir Kaopua explains the notion of kuleana responsibility, to shift people's thinking away from static identity categories and towards more subtle, context-based responsibilities. Everyone has kuleana, and our task is to understand what it is and to act on it. I see belonging now not as a specific identity, but as a perpetual practice. It is about our choices in our daily lives. What does it mean to be responsible and be a truly good person in relation to others around us? Part of answering this question for me is how do we uplift claims of those dispossessed? How are we helping others in precarious and marginalized communities? How is our silence deployed by others? How is our presence being used to justify certain phenomena?

Belonging is not arriving, but an ongoing practice that shifts, needs to be tweaked, re-evaluated. It's about the quality of our interactions rather than possessing identity or arriving somewhere. It's about the contours of our connections. It's less about finding a singular way and formulating a practice of accountability. One model I admire is the work of Dr. Kyle Kajihiro, a scholar in Hawaii who developed Detour, an alternative tour that explains the impact of the military and tourism in Hawaii, while reinvigorating stories of resisting the American overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom. This tour was meant to educate visitors he welcomed as part of his work as an academic to the islands.

To do this, he had to work collaboratively with local and native Hawaiian communities and engage with visitors. This one project has had such a powerful impact on changing perceptions of Hawaii, and I admire how he has cultivated this specific local existence. This work will become more important as we see land erode, disappear, where homelands cease to exist because of climate change. Where do people call home? Will they perpetually be called homeless, stateless, tourists? In Hawaii, I saw a specific attention paid to welcoming those from other islands whose homes have been compromised from military tests and climate change. I have and will continue to make mistakes, and being on this journey has meant that I'm still asking questions. I try to do so in respectful,

intentional, ethical ways, listening to feedback which might be difficult to hear, understanding that transformative change is slow and requires imagination and intimacy that can only be cultivated through time. It also means being kind, changing my mind, and sometimes letting go. I am aware that personally sometimes I can be vocal, but in other moments I'm more at home providing behind-the-scenes support. In doing so, I hope my actions will make people pause and think twice before they assume I am a wayward apparition that is casting shade on their garden or spreading the seeds of an invasive weed. Recently, my daughter has confessed to me that she loves the horror genre and ghost stories. At her young age, the stories she's interested in are not scary.

Still, it warms my heart that she sees the lessons in those stories, the ways in which people are labeled as monsters, aliens, misfits, and outcasts, and the kinds of social problems that flow from these identifications. She has started to ask me the same questions i am obsessed with how are people made to be strangers ghosts but more than that she's began to tell me her own imagined stories of the futures for these beings that she is fascinated with and in these stories they are not narratives of becoming or arriving but are compelling plot lines that describe their acts of compassion and friendship. She reenacts the daily lives, reinventing, disrupting the familiar, and I have immense hope for the future because of that. Thank you so much for your time.

Thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much, Jamie, for that. Thank you for being so generous and inviting me. It's been a wonderful experience. It's great. You're allowed to have a little break right now because I have to do some more recording and then we can get to our questions. On Ideas, you've been listening to Cultivating Belonging with Jamie Chai-Yun Liu,

recorded at Crow's Theatre in Toronto. You can hear Ideas wherever you get your podcasts, and on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America, on US Public Radio and Sirius XM, on US Public Radio and Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. You can also hear us on the CBC Listen app. I'm Nala Ayyad.

Always feels weird doing that with people watching. Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you've got to know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood

or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto wherever you get your podcasts. Today's talk is part of a new series we've developed with Crow's Theatre in Toronto, an opportunity to explore some of the ideas that animate great theatre. The Wrong Bashir by Zahida Rahmatullah is a comedy about the values passed down through generations and how we are shaped by those who love us most. It was the inspiration for Jamie Chayun Liu's talk about reimagining belonging.

Thank you, Jamie, for starting us all on an exploration of these questions. So right now I've got a few questions of my own for Jamie, and then we're going to throw it to you, the audience. If you have a question, write it down on one of the cards that the ushers are handing out, and we'll get through as many as possible. So I wanted to start with a more personal question, if I may. The play, as we mentioned, that's associated with today's talk

is called The Wrong Bashir, a comedy about what gets passed down between generations. I'm wondering if you could talk about, could you tell me what kinds of questions you've inherited from your own family? Yeah, thank you for asking, Nala. You know, I always thought my father's story was uncommon or unique or an anomaly. My father's also unusual because a lot of Asian people and a lot of my relatives did not talk about their past statelessness. And they'd rather forget about it. But my father was very open about telling me his story and what it felt like to him and how it has stayed with him for many years. And so some of the lessons, especially that has inspired my research really, has been, A, how could this phenomena still be around?

How is it that people do not have citizenship whatsoever? And secondly, how it is part of an enduring identity for some of them and that my father still wears it and the pain and the psychological harm from that to this day and in some ways has affected me as well in my ideas of who I am and and my sense of belonging that makes a lot of sense uh to me as well I'm wondering though so those are the questions you inherited from your father. Is there an overarching question that is your own beyond those? Yeah. And I guess for me, it has actually made me zoom out to a bigger place where I think about what does community mean? How do we organize ourselves in society and communities?

community mean? How do we organize ourselves in society and communities? What are the structures that allow us to say, you are a member, you are not, you get to enjoy certain benefits you do not. And we all can experience this in a myriad of ways in our life, whether we belong to a book club, we belong to, you know, universities do this really well saying you're alumni you're forever part of our family you know there's different ways in which this kind of idea of belonging and membership are being used in our society to for various purposes but it's made me think in a wider concept of how states are organized why borders exist and why is it that we use and rely on this very powerful mechanism of state power to decide who gets to come in and out and who gets to say yes? Yeah. Two questions come from that. So I'll ask you the two in quick succession. That deliberate tension that you talk about between being, you

know, an arrivant who's made it, you know, the immigrant's daughter, the successful model minority. I'm wondering how hard that is to practice in a society that uplifts and holds up the model minority and the people who have made it. Yeah, you know, that is a question I'm still dealing with personally. But I think it is, you know, a lot of scholars have challenged this notion that those of us who have made it, who resemble successful stories of migration and the children who are propped up as proof that letting these people in was a good choice, does promote this idea that yes, immigration is a good thing, but on the other hand, it can also contribute to very troubling ideas about what does it mean to be a good citizen? And why is it that some people are misunderstood as not? And that to me is tied to the fact of assimilation and modeling certain kinds of behavior from dominant groups that are in power. Yeah. There are so many big questions that are, as you just indicated, that are hard to answer, but I'm still going to ask you an even bigger one.

You said just now, you know, how we organize our borders is controlled by governments, and we kind of take it for granted. And in your talk, you say that each community has argued that their longstanding place in the countries they believe are home. The belief is a big part of the argument for these people's presence in those countries. Is it realistic to imagine a world where there's more room for that belief as proof of where people belong?

Yeah, I think there are because there are some communities that are able to access that as proof, as confirmation that they do belong, whereas others seem to not be able to deploy that same kind of claim. And, you know, my research really documents how it is certain people who are able to resolve their issues of statelessness, for example, more readily than others. And it's simply reliant on ideas of who belongs and who is part of our community. But more than that, I think, you know, this tension really should ignite us to think bigger questions about why. us to think bigger questions about why. Why is it that we accept that certain people can access things more easily and why others aren't? And to really be honest about that, because sometimes we'll be surprised at how flimsy or frivolous the reason is. You spoke about what it means to be a

good guest on Indigenous lands, which we all are, or at least we're guests. Maybe we're not all good, but we're all guests on this land. What does that mean for people who arrived in Canada because of forced migration or statelessness? Yeah, I think that is provided for me as a person who benefits from migration and a scholar who's studying this. It's an area of tension because on the one hand, this it's been it's an area of tension because on the one hand you know all of us in in a variety of cultures understand that we should provide sanctuary when people are in need we should help people when they need help and it's not a foreign concept in indigenous legal traditions from what i understand and i'm still a student of that the way, so I don't claim to be an expert in this, but in many legal traditions, there is the notion that when someone is in need,

we do help them. So when people are coming here, it is surprising sometimes for me as a scholar to see such vitriol and labels attached to people to say, well, they're illegals, they haven't lined up properly, they're cheating the immigration system, when really, we should be looking at the qualities of why, like really

examining the reasons why they're on the move. But secondly, I'm also kind of curious about what kinds of things can be done better for people who arrive to understand the positions we're in, to understand the place that we are in. I was really astonished with how, as a visitor to Hawaii, that was done for me. There was a lot of nudging and very friendly and kind and warm ways. And I think we need to cultivate a better practice with the arrivals here as well. But nudging to do what? To learn, to be open about learning about the history of land dispossession and oppression here, and to understand what their place is potentially in furthering the practice of belonging here. And rather than just, I think this is, you know, we're all guilty of this when we talk about immigrants.

It's like they've arrived. You know, we have this thing where Canada thinks that we've done our job now. We can kind of look to the next project. But, you know, as many of you know, being an immigrant is a process. It's a hard life at the beginning, you have to integrate and, you know, the logistical and mental capacity to live in a new place is really difficult. But part of that should also include a conversation about practices of belonging. Yeah. A bigger form of that question, beyond the nudging, what else can be done to balance, I guess, the responsibilities of being a good guest on Indigenous lands while also supporting the rights of newcomers, as you say, to flourish and to learn and to be whoever they want to be in a new place? Yeah. and to learn and to be whoever they want to be in a new place.

Yeah, you know, on a practical level, it's about creating resources because it is really, not everybody will have easy access to communities and the burden shouldn't fall on certain people to do that education. You know, that's why, you know, I did profile the example of Kyle Kajihiro. He himself is not Native Hawaiian, but he has done that, that educated work himself and is sharing it in a very generative way. father example of kyle kajihiro he himself is not native hawaiian but he has done that that educated work himself and is sharing it in a very generative way and encourages people to do the same so i think you know being thoughtful and and and working in solidarity i guess i would say with with other people in in these efforts but is it is it are they forever condemned in a way to be opposing ideas you know the the the

guest notion and the fact that we are guests but also these newcomers who are kind of in this perpetual state of alienation yeah i i don't know how to resolve that and i think it is a question that will become more and more important as we move to the future. You know, it's something that I think we haven't really grappled with very well. Certainly in my own work, you know, a lot of my work is profiling and shedding light on oppression and understanding and demystifying law and why law plays such a big role in creating narratives about who belongs but i think now is the time to also move past that you know just as some of the scholars that i've mentioned have said you know it's it's good to identify the structures and name things

but now what are the processes in which we move from that to. And I think it's not something that can be answered very easily, but one that's perpetually going to have to be done through practices of engagement. We have quite a thick pile of questions. So we'll treat this kind of, I know it's hard to do in an area as complex as what you're talking about, belonging, but I'd like to treat these as like a quick round

where it's short answers to short questions. And again, it's so unfair. Answer this in 30 seconds or less. If belonging is something we cultivate or we harvest like a plant, what new forms of belonging can you imagine us growing in the future? Yeah. forms of belonging can you imagine us growing in the future yeah um i think more interconnectedness and this is um it's become more apparent to me especially post-pandemic as many of you might know like it was so hard to reconnect with people after um getting used to being in isolation and um i think just you, being more present and,

and as an introvert, I sympathize with those of us who find it really difficult to actually, you know, go out there and, and put yourself out there and learn. But I think we really need to, in order to be honest and thoughtful persons on this land. Yeah. In your own personal experience of work or at work, what are the mutual joint qualities of welcoming communities slash cultures versus non-welcoming communities slash cultures? So this is where I would say that there, you know, human existence has a commonality in sharing.

Like we all have, even the most introverted persons are connected to people human existence has a commonality in sharing. Like we all have, even the most introverted persons are connected to people and we all have connections somewhere. So I think some of the commonality is the fact that we all connect with someone and we have commonalities. We all can feel and experience trauma, grief, but even happy and joyous moments.

And I would say those are the things that we should focus on, like these common experience that bring to light the fact that we're all human. And I think that's really hard when we don't connect with people. We forget. Like in my line of work, a lot of immigration applications are done on paper. And sometimes we're like, how do we make someone see there's a person behind this right because i think that really makes a difference in terms of connection absolutely uh this person says as i listen to you any comment about the way people are fleeing by ocean

and the risk to life only to be blocked by the country they are trying to get to seeking a new life which of course we've seen many examples of that, especially around Europe. Yeah, that is a very disturbing phenomena. And, I mean, a lot can be said about the fact that those kinds of practices are violating international law, but not to mention, you know, I didn't have a chance to talk about this in my talk,

but one of the things I'm so fascinated with is it's a very recent phenomenon to have borders and to authorize people to pass through them. Like in not so distant past, people moved around quite freely and didn't need these, you know, very strict requirements to be met and so these kinds of phenomena are being challenged right now by the very dire situations of why people are on the move on the oceans the other thing is like the oceans is a very interesting space in that there are communities who consider practices of sovereignty and citizenship on the water so those kinds of movements really challenge our ideas too about territory, land, citizenship. My father immigrated first to England from India in the 1930s,

and then with our family to Canada in 1974. At that time, belonging meant, and I can relate to this as well, fitting in with the dominant culture or assimilation. With increases in different communities, I see deviating from assimilation and integration into similar communities. How does this impact on collective belonging? I think that's a great question. And I am certainly a child or a product of that. My dad immigrated in the early 70s as well. And to be honest, I'm very, I have a regret in the way that he assimilated and because of the way he he uh felt he had to assimilate in Canada I feel like I've lost quite a bit of my language

some of the cultural understanding and I really admire communities who resisted that and I think you can belong and be different like a lot of, you know, pride ourselves in our particular style, for example, or our different preferences in the movies or food that we like. And I don't see that as any different that we can exist, coexist together differently, but recognizing that we shouldn't have to give away parts of ourselves to do that. In your research and or your own family, in your research and or your own family have you found that stateless people like ghosts keep one foot in their original culture this is kind of what you were just talking about and the other in their adopted culture if so is this difficult yeah it's interesting um all my father's case is one that he actually i remember the first time I went back to Asia by myself, I was,

I think I was right before I went to university. And he said to me, there's a reason why I came here. So you would never have to go back. Like he had an anger and a resentment that he didn't belong there. So for stateless people, some of them don't want to look back and and some of them it's too painful for other people you know like my mother for example she does want that connection she really prides herself in in her cultural linguistic identity so i think it's different for everybody and then they're the trauma and the reasons for migration might inform that. Would you mind thinking about that question? If so, is this difficult in the context of specific examples as music, art, language, material culture?

Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really big question. Yeah, like, for example, you know, when I was writing my first novel, it was really important for me to include the dialect that my parents spoke when I was growing up. And in order to really get the nuances, I had to kind of like reach out to my relatives out there. So I think those kinds of moments really can create this kind of reconnection and also makes you feel like there's a duality. You could be home in different places as well. feel like there's a duality you could be home in different places as well and and to have this kind of westernized notion of allegiance or loyalty to one place only really butted against my idea of belonging and existence so yeah i think there's a tension there and one that some people in canada

for example might not fully understand and might shy away from because there's this dominant idea that we need to be loyal to one place and of the soil of one place, right? This question asks, this person asks, is the problem the need for belonging? This leads to tribalism, racism, elitism. Do we not need to feel the opposite? I think that's an interesting tension that obviously flows through my talk. This is how I've reconciled for myself. For some of us, we do need community. We need people who understand our experience to receive the support needed to overcome the trauma, the grief, or whatever's going on in our lives.

And I think there are some beautiful ways to be in solidarity with people. I think there's nothing wrong with cheering for a particular soccer team, for example, or finding community in the food we enjoy and the language that we study or speak. On the other hand, I don't think that should be deployed in ways to depict other people as behaving badly or depicting them as not ideal or as an excuse to justify exclusion, right? So there's a fine balance between

holding space in your identity, your culture, your language, but also making sure that that doesn't do work to exclude and demonize other people. Jamie Chayun Liu, thank you so much. Thank you for having me. On Ideas, you've been listening to Cultivating Belonging belonging the final in a series of talks inspired by great plays produced in association with crow's theater in toronto ideas at crow's theater is produced by philip colter and pauline holdsworth special thanks to paulo santa lucia chris abraham carrie sager and the entire crow's Theatre team. For Ideas, technical production by Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Acting senior producer, Lisa Godfrey. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayed.

Thank you for being here. Thank you. Thank you.