A Chink in Your Armor (satire)

I grew up in a small town called Aldergrove.

In that town in the late 1960s, everyone knew your business, except my family was Japanese. Within earshot, the racists who resented us would mutter, "Dirty Jap!"

Little did they know, few of the Japanese Canadian were disloyal to Canada, which shows you how little they knew us!

Once in high school, one of the more ignorant white kids might mistake me for Chinese, and call me "Chink". This amused me so much that I quickly retorted, "That is because I am a chink in your armor!"

Indeed, the Asian immigrants of Canada fit in the chinks in the multicultural chain mail coat of the white majority, though sometimes a racist incident may shake off the flakes of Canadian society.

Thankfully, my memories of high school are rather selective, for there are stories that lay buried in my subconscious to inspire a few of my articles on this blog.

Though I may tell these small-town stories in metaphorically symbolic terms using mytho-poetic language while shielding the guilty from embarrassment to protect the innocent from harm.

Oh, there shall be no naming of names, but in order for me to come to terms with the demons of my past, this marks the beginning of that journey through a small-town world that I thought I had forgotten.

Having a chink in your armor means that if the lance of Truth meets its mark, the ignorance about Japanese Canadians will fall away.

For I am but a Canadian born Japanese who may have some truth telling to give life to future stories on his blog.

Ancestor Worship Forgotten by Japanese Diasphora

In Japan, ancestor worship shows respect not only to your ancestors and the recently departed, but to the family kami if one's family has one.

A family kami is the first male ancestor in your lineage, or he may be the village kami if you have a home village. If the latter tradition is present, then your first male ancestor is Chinese.

In Canada, this heritage is forgotten. If you mention it amongst your relatives, they either mock you or change the subject.

Ah, we Japanese-canadians are too assimilated! We're so assimilated we blend in.

Yet there's an awkward moment when an Asian person talks to me, and I have to reply in English, "Sorry I don't speak Chinese/Korean/Taiwanese."

Though I can still speak Japanese but badly.