A Hot Bowl of Pho

I park my car on the usual side of the street. A patchwork of old immigrant homes and newly renovated $2M+ investments abruptly ends at a block of tall, grey, government-sponsored residential buildings that quickly remind me of my childhood. 

A mosaic. 

A memory of my friend Volo flashes in my mind. Just a year ago we had soup in this spot right after a rehearsal for his performance at the local Slavic festival. This year he’s still in Ukraine as the war turns to a constant boil. Just two days ago Putin put out a call for military mobilization, the old shaky hands of mania scrapping the barrel in search of ammunition, in search of any remaining youth and energy to set ablaze as much of Eastern Europe irreversibly implodes. I pause to rub a blister on my finger from playing some bass at the park earlier that day. Time to to get some food. 

As I get out of the car I notice an old Vietnamese woman approaching me in the middle of the street, a beautiful smile radiating through her missing teeth. She asks for some change. I reach to grab my wallet and pull out a five dollar bill. She stops just in from of me and accepts the money with both of her small sinewy hands. Before I can move or say a word she quickly exclaims:

“Can I hug you?”

“Of course,” I respond with a smile. 

As I scoop down to give the nice old lady a hug she quickly lands a smooch on my cheek. I blush a little, stumbling towards the Vietnamese restaurant I was heading to in the first place.

“I am gonna get some soup” I say.

She’s says: “too expensive!”

I nod in agreement.

She is right. The Vietnamese don’t eat here, this spot is for the youth of Toronto. The next generation of Canadians with disposable income and incredibly diverse, worldly appetites. Toronto is a city where people don’t just eat “Asian food.” It’s a city where the average person has their favourite Pad Thai joint joint, never to be confused with the joy ride that is late night Dim Sum along Spadina or the mid-day sādhanā of a well prepared Ramen soup.

A past partner of mine had once proclaimed that she was proud she personally introduced me to Pho. I protested, albiet a little too eagerly.

“No Jennifer, my Russian-speaking Ukrainian friend Ivan from Donetsk habituated me to the tradition of a hot bowl of Pho grâce à his teenage heartbreak involving a beautiful Vietnamese girl!” 

The true absurdity of Toronto is never fully grasped. It slips through your fingers like the multicoloured grains of sand you often find on the shores of lake Ontario.

Countless.

Living at the intersection of the entire world, every culture and every history is felt in small reverberations. The tectonic rumblings of trying to integrate the entire history of the world all at once, all in one place.

In Toronto, every global conflict is a shared, local conflict. 

And yet, at the same time it never holds even an ounce of the same weight. In which lies the profound difficulty and the opportunity. We are all a part of this very curious cultural experiment we call the “Global Village.” 

Is it possible to fully understand the immensely complex web of interrelations that have led to form such a place? 

To simply call it colonization is to be over-simplifying. Who colonized who, where and when? 

To call it capitalism is to ignore the rich pool of all-too-human judgment and resentment that different peoples have cultivated over centuries. By those who exploited and those who were exploited, by those who colonized and those who were colonized and not to forget those who helped along the way and made money off of the process, and of course all their kids and the kids of their kids. 

To write it off as gentrification is to assume a visible one dimensional shift in demographics. But what happens when the Toronto real-estate market acts as a bank for the entire world? What happens when money laundering is not a little mom-and-pop laundromat business, but rather an industrial engine that powers an entire city?

In Toronto things are not so simple. This city does not allow to be defined by one identity label alone, be it nationality, race, gender or religion. Socio-economic status still appears to be a pretty reliable indicator, but can be muddled in combination with all of the former. 

The spoiled-brat, son of a Chinese billionaire will verbally harass a PhD-wielding Uber driver from Iran. A richly dressed entourage of Punjab Indians will rush to their limousine ignoring the angry ramblings of an old drunk third-generation Irish-Canadian lying flat on the sidewalk. A Palestinian girl will still meet for coffee with her Jewish-Canadian partner of three years after a particularly nasty breakup. 

Be it hot tea or hot soup. Food and drink bring people together.

I sit down to eat alone in a nearly empty restaurant. The waitress brings me the honorary combo: an awkwardly large menu, a piece of paper and a little pencil. I waste no time in opening up to the 101. Pho Rare Beef Noodle Soup, and scribbling down the quantity: one, and the size…

Large, I am feeling hungry today. 

I close the menu and place the piece paper and pencil on top. 

Ah…

What I love about a hot bowl of Pho is that it is a journey for all the senses. I have had a number of deeply emotional bowls in my life and I am forever grateful for this dish’s ability to ground, to nourish and to inspire. To fulfill my animalistic desires with its thin pink slices of flesh that I submerge with a push of my chopsticks. To stir my emotions with the fresh leaves of basil and allow me to feel held in the warmth of a delicious broth that I sip gently after a few bites. 

Ahh.. the perfect Toronto meal: a Vietnamese noodle soup in Little Portugal savoured passionately by a mutt of the ex-Soviet republics.

Something in me calls this feeling home. 

What a strange and foreign concept that can sometimes become….

Grappling with it, I believe is the fundamental Toronto experience. A constant re-discovery of what home means to you. Beyond identity and beyond facticity, beyond the expectations of our immediate cultures and yet grounded in the roots of our ancestors, those who sat around a fire and sang songs. Who shared food with those whom they loved.

“I never felt like a woman. I never felt like me.”

My Persian friend proclaims reflecting on her life before Toronto, echoing the stories of my female friends from Syria, Lebanon and Turkey. Retracing a familiar tale of alienation, of a life split into two. A sinful face to be hidden under the weight of an oppressive regime or the less and less familiar face of that little child that looks back sternly at themselves in the mirror. 

Who am I?

My friend feels Persian to the root of her being, and yet wants nothing more to do with Iran or even the Iranian people. The differentiation between the two words here allow for a clear separation, but not all scenarios have such a clean break. Persia is a land and a soul of the people, Iran is a corrupt, broken and oppressive social regime. Russia and Ukraine are two nations at war. The Slavs are a people and a land I feel a deep connection to. In food, in thought, in song and in spirit. 

A pre- and post-Toronto awareness that is difficult to convey in stereotypical labels of modern identity politics. Of speaking through a lens of one country’s politics: the Unites States. As if all of understanding of human relation stems from a small town in Alabama.

It does not. The world is an insanely complex, ruthless, beautiful cacophony of human interaction. Of the saintly, the good, the bad and the deeply unnerving. Social justice isn’t social, when it has no perception of a unique human subject and neither is it justice when it prescribes an unconditional righteousness.

The truth is far more local. Far more nuanced. Far more complex.

The unearthing of which I believe to be a proudly human experience. Of witnessing and being witnesses by the other. Who am I when I am not seen as just a woman? When I am not simply black. When an I am not just another Jew. 

In Toronto we get to figure that out. 

Not because we want to, but because we have to. Necessity is the mother of all invention. And in the case of developing a genuine human understanding, empathy and compassion have to be the father. 

We are at a cross-roads of a million different decisions, the righting of past wrongs and the wronging of those who we once loved. Of trust and betrayal, of hunger and opulence, of love and blind hate. Again and again, we are confronted with what is fundamentally human in suffering. Harm done onto ourselves, with our own hands. With unresolved layers and layers of trauma sedimenting on our very being like the settling of thick dust after a nuclear explosion.

Happy genocide day! 

Our neighbour says with disturbingly self-righteous cheekiness. A response to our casual “Happy Canada Day!” as he walked onto to our shared backyard in the middle of a little BBQ we were having with our friends on the first of July.

A proud of image of a woke young white Canadian from Nova Scotia, educating his fellow neighbours. But who exactly was he trying to educate? 

Was is the Syrian refugee who was pouring a glass of wine for the Indian citizen that is paying for his every hour spent in Canada through his student visa? Or was it the Canadian-born Chinese woman that was helping her Egyptian friend untangle her blue dreadlocks. 

I am still not sure. In some sense I suspect it was directed at me, the token tall white male. The face of all the oppression that North America has endured over the last four hundred years. 

However, I am sad to disappoint you pal, I think you got the wrong white guy. My people were far too busy enslaving and killing each other by the millions over far more trivial differences. In Russia for example, they didn’t have indigenous* or black people, they had slightly darker, hairier people like the Tajiks, Uzbeks, Azerbaijani or even Armenian or Georgian people. 

I happen to be the happy accident of the latter, the Georgian and the Russian. Colonized and the colonizer if you wish. I like to call myself Sanya.

How do I fit into the North American narrative? I don’t. 

The British have historically been a sworn enemy and would jump at the opportunity to colonize most of the Slavs and/or the Caucuses without blinking an eye. I am well aware of that. So now that I get to share in on their spoils in the New World, I feel little personal guilt for their despicable atrocities on the lands we now call Canada. I feel much more deeply for the native people of this land, who I believe still hold the profound answers to the deep ills of our time and age. I feel their pain as if it were my own. But on the white guilt of the Anglo-Saxon, I am going to have to pass.

Having ancestors from Russia, Georgia, Poland and Germany I already have enough heavy feelings as the peoples of those lands continue to chew themselves out from the inside. Just to remind you, I am not alone. Although there are probably not too many Russian-Georgians out there, there are about 20–30 million people that have mixed families between Ukraine and Russia. Whatever you might believe politically, as a human race we are all far more interconnected than we want to believe. Those who can clearly identify their nationality, I salute you, but I don’t and never will. 

So who am I?

I am human. I am alive and breathing. I am a conscious being in the world. I am many things, which I continue to discover every single day. In this, I am never truly alone, always in relation to the Other. In relation to my friends, my family, to that lovely old Vietnamese lady, to a beautifully rich and complex world. 

I am in a constant search of a place where I can be myself. That is home for me. It is an action, a verb rather than a point of arrival. For now, Toronto is that place for me. T’ronno is my home. It is a city where I feel understood, I feel belonging and I feel I am building community. 

Are all the usual suspects of deep inequality still present? The white Anglo-Saxon domination of all major industries and resources and judicial power. Of course, with out a doubt. And yet there is a particular flavour to this brew. To me, Toronto is a particularly flavourful hot bowl of Pho. 

Is it a chance to show our humanity. To go beyond identity and to practice something completely new and unthinkable for the Old World. In that I see a strength. In that I see Toronto as a place of meeting and a place of healing. 

I mean that on the most basic local level, I have no aspirations to change the whole world. I do however wish to contribute actively and positively to the place where I live and the people I live with.

I wish to create space for healing. Create space for loving play.

This becomes more and more important as the world continues to burn. We have not seen a true refugee crisis yet, and yet we are in the middle of at least a dozen right now. People will continue coming here. The Syrian, the Ukrainian, the Iranian, the Sudanese or the Palestinian. Immediate danger or ongoing disaster, whatever the reason, Toronto is refuge. Let’s not take that lightly. I see a city rising to its call, a true Global Village that goes beyond identity and looks towards humanity. I see it in the people here and the land around us. 

With this I challenge you to do the same. Pay attention to the space that you occupy. Tune into the people around you. Every day living in Toronto is an opportunity to learn about the entire world, through one unique living perspective at a time. Through each individual soul. 

Give nuance a loving embrace. One hot bowl of Pho at a time.

Sanya - 27/9/2022

*technically not true, the indigenous tribes of northern Siberia were treated in much the same way that Britain and France treated the peoples of North America. This list also widens depending on your definition of “indigenous” with events like the Circassian genocide or Holodomor (which deserves its own category of insane).