Photo by ISTOCK/YNGSA

The thought only seems to come in the mirror. It plays out staccato, like a chess game, tennis match, sword fight.

It’s helping. No, it’s not. It could be. It’s obviously not helping. Look, the spot there, a bit back from the front, to the left—no, the right—it’s barer than before. OK. So maybe it’s not helping—but if I wasn’t doing it, it might be even worse than it is now.

I’m talking about the Rogaine. I’ve been rubbing its foam into my scalp—nominally twice a day, though, like any non-binary writer with ADHD and anxiety, I’m far from perfect at remembering—and have been for about a year now. To address My Problem, which people still call “male pattern baldness.” A box of three tubes—a three-month supply—can run you anywhere from about $100 to $150, but apparently no longer requires a prescription in Quebec, as it did when I first started using it. I still couldn’t tell you if it’s helping or not.

Of course, it’s embarrassing. Rogaine feels like such an awfully cis-het man product to me. It speaks, above all, I believe, to a male desire to be attractive to women. I feel like the gay community is relatively comfortable with sexy bald men, that it’s possible to be a sexy gay guy without the thick head of hair or the flowing locks. But, as I began to seriously confront the fact that my hair was thinning a few years back, the question of how this affected me as a non-binary person arose alongside it.

My first act as a non-binary person, after all, was dyeing my hair pink. I made the decision before I’d even come out; it was a statement choice, and a photo of my new ’do was the exclamation point on the sentence. Along with the cut, the colour cost north of $250, a bracing welcome to the world of femininity via professional hair care. My days of $20 barbershop cuts—in places where the men sometimes seemed like they were fighting to see who could say the most sexist thing—were over.

Though my gender does not line up with the sex I was assigned at birth, my experience with dysphoria has been a bit all over the place. I quite like having a penis, though honestly I don’t especially care for testicles, and I do dream at times of being able to try having a vulva and vagina—just as an option. I don’t mind being tall, but I do wish I was skinnier in a way that I recognize as feminine—because I, too, have internalized the idea that skinniness and feminine sexiness are inextricable from one another. I don’t crave surgery—but I wish I didn’t have facial hair or body hair, and if I ever had the money I’d probably look into laser hair removal. I think typically male modes of dress are largely boring, but it’s a boringness I feel comfortable in, and I have close to zero interest in wearing dresses or skirts. I’m curious about makeup, a little bit, and I wear eyeliner on occasion, and nail polish often, but most of it feels overwhelming. I’ve largely stopped wearing them entirely. I think about going on hormones every now and then, but they don’t call to me the way they do for many trans people.

On some level, then, I understood that hair was the easiest, best, most fun place for me to express my gender. Since the pink, I’ve gone back to get it dyed silver, pink again (though this time a subtler one), and, most recently, turquoise. Watching the colours fade over the first few weeks to a uniform blond, and then watching the blond hold tight while my natural brown sprouts irrepressibly up below it, has been fun. I’m 33 now, but for a long, long time—all through my teens and 20s—my hair was a place of conformity, one that, on some level, I longed to use for exploring, but didn’t know how to bring myself to. Coming out finally allowed me to confront, and satisfy, that desire. It felt, to use a word that comes up a fair amount in gender discussions, affirming.

One of the things I love about transness is its ability to subsume the world, the way it functions as a lens, the way everything can be considered in a trans light, in a trans context—even hair loss. One of the most beautiful things I’ve ever read is a sentence about transness I saw on Twitter. It was something like, “every person assigned male at birth has a potential breast size and they’ll never find out what it is unless they start taking hormones.” The idea that our bodies contain within them the blueprints for gender markers we do not claim as our own is a fascinating and unsounded depth of human thought, a beautiful, glittering pool whose bottom we have not yet attempted to touch.

American trans author Thomas Page McBee has at least done a jackknife dive into those waters. As he writes in his wrenching, gorgeous memoir, Man Alive, “In more anxious moments, washing my hands in single-stall gas station johns, I hoped that being a man would not feel like pretending. I looked in the mirror and tried to imagine myself into being. I could have a deep voice or a reedy one, I could become bald or not, I could be skinny or muscular, hairy or pimply. I was a mystery to myself, and yet my body knew what it needed. My body waited for me.”

I wondered what that might be like, the idea of anticipating a baldness, of awaiting it like one might await a child, that your body failing you was somehow a sign of rightness, of success. It was a hopeful concept, but one I felt outside of. Did any older trans women rejoice to find out they could no longer achieve erections? At least going grey, and then white, is gender neutral.

Still, for what feels like the overwhelming majority of out trans and non-binary people today, the questions of bodily aging remain academic. The one fact about trans ages that I’ve seen cited often—that trans women die on average at the age of 35—has since been debunked in a 2019 article in The Stranger, though the study it stemmed from did shine a spotlight on trans women of colour’s alarming vulnerability to acts of (almost always male) violence. Elsewhere, there simply isn’t a lot of data on the subject yet, given that non-binary people are still fighting to be recognized in the medical literature to begin with. The figures that are available—and Canada made a big step forward on this account when it released data from the 2021 census, which contained a question about non-cis gender identities, in April—suggest that trans and non-binary people, as a cohort, are younger than the general population, seemingly in large part because younger people come out at higher rates than older people: Canadian Gen Zers are about six and a half times more likely to identify as trans or non-binary than those born in 1945 or earlier (0.79 percent of the age cohort versus 0.12 percent, respectively). And with a growing acceptance of transness leading to even young children coming out, it’s plausible that the median age for trans people is actually dropping even as our numbers swell.

At 33, I’m hardly an ancient trans person, but it often feels like I’m over a decade removed from where the action is. Which means, for better or for worse, that the embodied experiences I’m living through are ones that so many trans people haven’t encountered yet, and, in many cases, haven’t even begun to consider. And while many trans people will find themselves aching for a different kind of aging as they hit middle age, as their bodies begin to deteriorate and change in sexed ways that may feel like betrayals, there is simply no playbook for aging in a non-binary body. It’s a kind of freedom, of course, but also a form of aloneness.

When was the last time you saw a sexy bald woman? I don’t mean a woman with her hair shaved close, like Amber Rose or V for Vendetta-era Natalie Portman. I mean a woman with a Mr. Clean-style cue-ball head—or worse, the inescapably “male” look that mixes sheer baldness on top with hair around the back and sides. Mainstream conceptions of female sexiness are so wedded to thick hair flowing from the top of the head that it’s conceptually hard for many people to imagine a beautiful woman without it. So, while the first signifier of beginning to go bald may be that one is moving away from youth, to begin to go bald is also to move inexorably away from femininity, or at least from the possibility of expressing a traditionally feminine beauty.

For someone who was just coming into my appreciation, in a real way, of that potential in my male-presenting body, that was a blow. I was only beginning, it felt like, to become myself, when genes, hormones, the inscrutable hard-coded logics of the body were already robbing me of the fullness of that self. I would never be the me I could have been.

Of course, no one is guaranteed beauty, particularly if your ideas of beauty have been passed down to you by mainstream culture, as they have been for so many of us. We don’t deserve that narrow ideal of beauty, we aren’t promised it. That’s sort of the point—it’s more a measure of what some people have and most others don’t than it is any one set of visual standards. We see that in the way ideals shift. People love to parrot that old saying that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but what’s more interesting about it is that certain time- and place-specific groups of beholders all seem to agree on a specific look, only for it to fall out of favour as soon as you cross a border, whether between countries or between decades.

So, I think about wigs, another hallmark of trans life. They can make any kind of wig these days—they could make a wig that looks like the hair I wish I had—short and masculine in length, unmistakably feminine in colour. Do I have wig money? Do I have wig confidence? Do I have a certain wig je ne sais quoi? Would wearing a wig make me feel more like a sad businessman with a toupée or an over-the-top drag queen? Would wearing a wig feel non-binary to me?

Recently, I’ve seen several meme-ified variations of a phrase on Twitter: non-binary people don’t owe anyone androgyny. But that doesn’t mean some of us don’t feel like we do, don’t feel that we’re not being “queer enough.” Did I recently describe myself to a friend as “diet trans” for feeling like my transness wasn’t, as people say, “embodied” enough? I did. Do I feel guilty whenever I let my nail polish lapse? I do. And when an old friend offered to take me out to get my ears pierced and I took over half a year off before getting back to her? It ate at me. How will I feel when it’s too late for me, when the hole in the ozone layer of my hair grows too big to paper over and I need to embrace being bald?

I lied about the mirror earlier, actually. I also think about My Problem in summer, when I’m caught in an unexpected rain, fat droplets thinning my hair down to what feels like nothing, exposing the weak spots. Like I’m made of something sweet and sticky that dissolves in water. Spun sugar. Of course, no one is guaranteed beauty. I’m still in mourning for the body I wanted, will never be the me I could have been. But I hope the
next wave of non-binary kids gets to make the most out of their hair while they still have it. And with luck, maybe one day I’ll be the older non-binary person a younger version of me sees as a model for aging gracefully.

Every Canadian knows the caribou. The animal can be found on the back of the quarter, millions of which are circulated every year. Yet, the iconic species is on the brink of extinction, and, according to ecologists and activists, not much is being done to stop that.

Across Canada, caribou are declining as a result of forestry, oil and gas activities, mining, and road-building. And it’s not just the caribou that we’re losing. Because they have such specific habitat conditions, woodland caribou are considered an “umbrella species,” which means their well-being provides important insight into the well-being of their environment. Protecting the caribou means protecting the habitat of other species, and their health is therefore an indicator for the health of their forests as a whole.

While the species’ numbers have been dwindling throughout the country, the debate surrounding the caribou has been growing increasingly heated in Quebec. Over the last few months, the declining situation of caribou in the province has resulted in growing backlash against a lack of action, criticism of industry lobbies, and lawsuits against the provincial government. On December 9, 2021, the Ministère des Forêts, de la Faune et des Parcs (MFFP) released its latest inventory numbers for herds in the Gaspésie, Manicouagan, and Charlevoix regions of Quebec. At the time of the report, there were only 17 forest caribou left in Charlevoix, only one of which was a fawn. Just 14 years ago, that number was over 80. And in Gaspésie, where the last native herd in southern Quebec is found, only 32 to 36 mountain caribou remain. Both forest and mountain caribou are subtypes of woodland caribou, the only type of caribou found in Quebec.

Caribou need old-growth forests to survive. Human development, especially forestry activity such as commercial logging, has fractured and destroyed much of its habitat. In Charlevoix, for example, as much as 89 percent of the caribou’s habitat has been disturbed. These younger forests attract moose that eat new plant growth, which, in turn, brings in predators such as wolves. While the moose is a wolf’s natural prey, a caribou is an easier catch. This is further facilitated by the creation of logging roads and hiking trails, which allow predators to move more freely across the caribou’s habitat.

“The scientific community agrees that, ultimately, the cause of the decline of the majority of the forest and woodland caribou populations is the management of our forests,” explains Marianne Caouette, project manager of Protected Areas and Biodiversity at Nature Québec. “It’s really the harvesting of wood that removes old growth from the forests and will create environments that are favourable to predators, such as wolves or coyotes.”

After delaying the unveiling of its strategy against the decline of the woodland caribou in 2019, François Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government once again pushed the plan’s release date from 2021 to 2023, and in the meantime created an independent commission. The MFFP stated in a press release that the commission will be headed by Nancy Gélinas, dean of the faculty of forestry, geography, and geomatics at Université Laval and a researcher in forest economics, rather than any ecologists or conservation experts.

In a press conference held on March 17, 2022, Gélinas stated that the goal of the commission is not to look at the reasons of the caribou’s decline, but “to add the layer of socio-economic impacts.” She says she believes that Quebec must make a choice that considers the protection of the caribou and the consequences that such protection would have on the regions outside of metropolitan areas, the industry, and the treasury.

Marie-Hélène Ouellet D’Amours, an environmental and sustainable development advisor for the Conseil régional de l’environnement du Bas-Saint-Laurent (CREBSL), considers the questions that comprise the independent commission’s consultation biased toward minimizing economic impacts. Currently, she believes, the ministry considers the environment, society, and the economy as separate entities that talk to each other. “The realistic way of looking at it would be to see the environment as supporting society and the economy,” she says. “There is a kind of conceptualization of things that is different from a real understanding of sustainable development, and I think that’s where the problem is.”

In the meantime, the government is capturing and confining both the Charlevoix and Gaspésie herds, a relatively new practice in Quebec. The capture of the Charlevoix herd has already been completed, and its members will be held in captivity indefinitely, making it the second herd in Quebec after that of Val d’Or to be held in captivity, which has been enclosed since 2020. The capture of the Gaspésie herd has been postponed to next year, but the plan involves enclosing its pregnant females and releasing them a few months after they have given birth to their fawns. Predators who approach the animals can be trapped and killed.

According to the ministry, the enclosure is a temporary solution that needs to be implemented to stop the decline of these isolated populations until the government’s caribou strategy is adopted in 2023. Many environmentalists, however, argue that the government is merely buying time. “It’s like putting them on life support,” says Caouette.

Ouellet D’Amours believes that culling predators and caribou enclosures would not have been necessary if the government had acted earlier. “It’s a measure that is being taken to make up for decades of inaction.” And it’s not without risk. When caribou are put in enclosures, explains Steeve Côté, a professor of biology and ecologist at the Université Laval, they don’t learn how to survive in the wild. Côté says animals born in these facilities won’t be used to finding proper habitat for themselves. They’ll also be naive toward predators, he adds, as they won’t have encountered any while in captivity. Côté explains that predator control and enclosures will only be effective if the caribou’s habitat is protected and restored while they’re in pens. Otherwise, they’ll simply be re-entering a dangerous environment that is still conducive to predators.

For Louis Lesage, Director of the office of Nionwentsïo of the Huron-Wendat Nation in Wendake, Quebec, the decision is emblematic of the government’s lack of consultation with Indigenous communities regarding caribou protection. “The government, without consulting us, without asking for our opinion, pulled this solution out of a magic hat and unilaterally put our caribou in pens,” says Lesage. The office has been collaborating with the MFFP for the last seven years on re-establishing the local caribou population, but it hasn’t always been easy.

Indigenous communities across Turtle Island have strong ties to the caribou. In Wendake, before their populations began dwindling, caribou were used for food, clothing, and artisanal production. “Caribou were essential to Huron-Wendat arts and culture,” says Lesage. Their leather, for instance, was used to make coats, and their hooves were used to create wall pockets, a speciality of the Huron-Wendat that involved decorating the hoof and using it as a support for different objects.

Yet Indigenous Peoples have largely been left out of the conservation process. In an opinion piece in the Narwhal, Adrienne Jérôme, Chief of the Lac Simon First Nation, and Christy Ferguson, executive director of Greenpeace Canada, criticize the provincial government’s response: “Not only the lack of action for caribou recovery, but the lack of real dialogue or meaningful efforts to listen to Indigenous perspectives is in itself a form of environmental racism. Through the inaction and inertia of the Government of Quebec, the ancestral rights of Indigenous Peoples have been and are still widely violated.”

Some Innu communities have also begun taking legal action against the Quebec government, stating that the government has failed to adequately consult with Indigenous Peoples regarding caribou protection. The Essipit and Mashteuiatsh First Nations filed a motion with the Quebec Superior Court on February 24, 2022, writing in a statement that they “demand respect for [their] Aboriginal rights and immediate measures to protect the caribou and its habitat, based on Innu and scientific knowledge.” The following week, the Canadian Press reported that Innu Council of Pessamit’s Chief, Jean-Marie Vollant, said that he’s willing to follow suit to enforce action.

According to Lesage, “collaboration is never a given [for the government]. You have to want it deeply and you have to convince the government that we have to help each other to act in the same direction, and then we end up convincing the government that by joining our efforts we will succeed in certain cases.”

The province can look to British Columbia, where a caribou herd bordering on extinction tripled its numbers in less than a decade, thanks to the work of the Saulteau and West Moberly First Nations. While their community-led effort included putting caribou in enclosures and culling wolves, it most importantly also involved protecting the herd’s habitat. In 2020, the federal government and British Columbia agreed to protect and restore 8,100 square kilometres of natural caribou habitat in the area, halting a planned resource extraction project.

The Huron-Wendat Nation worked on the creation of the Ya’nienhonhndeh protected area for over a decade and finally reached a partnership with the provincial government in 2021. The Legault government agreed to protect 300 square kilometers last June, and up to 750 square kilometers over the span of the pilot project. Ya’nienhonhndeh means “the place where medicinal plants are gathered” in the Wendat language. The protected area will not only help with caribou conservation efforts, but will also protect rare plants, chimney swifts, and other species at risk on the territory. Ya’nienhonhndeh will be one of the rare protected old-growth forests in the province.

The MFFP confirms that habitat loss is a major driver of caribou decline, and states that forestry practices are being adapted by following interim measures aimed at restoring caribou habitat. Yet, in February 2022, the ministry announced a plan to cut trees in an area bordering the caribou’s habitat in Gaspésie as part of a management plan for the recovery of wood affected by the spruce budworm. “It raises real questions about how the ministry thinks about protected species. There’s a mentality that needs to evolve,” says Ouellet D’Amours.

That same month, it was announced that 83 protected area projects in southern Quebec were rejected, amounting to 20,000 square kilometres of land. All of the rejected projects were in territories where the government allows commercial logging. “The forestry industry and the short-term profits it creates are often prioritized over protecting biodiversity in Quebec,” says Caouette. “We’ve seen this in the last few months [with the creation of protected areas]. The industry has a strong lobby in southern Quebec that will ultimately slow down or be an obstacle to the creation of any protected areas in that region.”

In March 2021, an investigative report by CBC/Radio-Canada unveiled just how intensely the MFFP is under the forestry industry’s influence. To attain its goal of preserving 17 percent of its territory in 2020, the government created 34 new protected areas in Northern Quebec, where forests don’t have much commercial value and commercial logging is mainly outlawed. Forestry projects in the southern parts of the province, where the Charlevoix and Gaspésie herds are located, keep being approved. An anonymous source working for the MFFP interviewed by CBC/Radio-Canada claimed that many rejected protected areas in southern Quebec were originally greenlit by officials, but caused concern for the industry.

A shift is needed. Quebec’s economy is still reliant on the forestry industry: it made up 1.6 percent of Quebec’s total GDP in 2019, and thousands of Quebecers are employed as loggers, technicians, field supervisors, and more. “We need to think of the economic development of the regions outside of metropolitan areas in a different way. This is the question that we’re asking ourselves, and that we must ask ourselves as a society,” says Ouellet D’Amours.

For environmentalists like Côté, the outlook for meaningful action by the government is grim. “There’s no reason why the government would [act] now when they haven’t for the last 20 years, even though they knew about [the decline of the caribou]. Everybody knows about it in this country. There’s no desire to do anything,” he says.

In order to make a difference, Ouellet D’Amours believes in the power of citizen action: “Write to your MP, go to public consultations, and stay informed.” She senses that the tides are turning: “People are more and more informed about what’s happening, and are more responsive to our messaging. That gives me hope.”

Illustration by Diana Bolton

Family has always been complicated for me. My father left when I was three, and by the time I was 10 he had disappeared completely. I left home at 16 and struggled to obtain housing, briefly finding stability in a group home. I moved on to various households with my siblings, partners, and friends. In my early 30s I moved to Hamilton, Ontario, where I met my husband, and over the years we came to the decision not to have children. Witnessing my husband’s relationship with his elderly dad taught me another version of family life, where a parent could be kind and self-contained, always happy to see us, and supportive of our decisions. As the youngest offspring of three marriages, my husband has always been very close to his father. While we have never been certain what shape our future will take, we assured my father-in-law that one day he would live with us.

The pandemic quickly accelerated that trajectory, and what it meant to be the primary companions of a senior. That first spring, my then-87-year-old father-in-law and I began a weekly ritual of playing Scrabble. Prior to the pandemic, we had only played a handful of times. But the routine Sunday game grounded us through the first few months of unprecedented chaos. We watched in shared bewilderment as our lives became smaller and more confined. A soldier in the Korean war, my father-in-law had lived through his share of history-defining moments. It was soothing to know that his world had almost ended before, and yet here he was, teaching me new words on the porch. I kept all of our scorecards, creating an index I intended to work into a poetry chapbook about our deepening relationship.

Twice a week that summer, my husband and I visited his father’s nearby apartment, loaded up with laundry detergent, toilet paper, and groceries. By the fall, it had become three times a week, as we realized that in our absence, he was increasingly eating bread and cheese for dinner. We would visit, make dinner, refrigerate the leftovers, and two days later be back again. For that first year, we didn’t see a single friend indoors, but his dad was at the centre of our fiercely protected bubble. By winter, the constant worry about my father-in-law’s health, isolation, and the effort of stocking two apartments culminated in a shared decision: we would move in together.

Many of my friends watched on in bewilderment, pulling their cellphones out of their toddlers’ gooey mouths as I explained what was happening. The gulf between my friends and I felt bigger than ever, as I recounted the mountain of books, file folders, and trinkets my father-in-law owned, and his determination to move them all. I found us a new rental home that had enough storage space for all of his things, cursing him under my breath as I gave away half of my own books in the process. My husband and I developed a series of looks that flashed between us, denoting our surprise, laughter, or frustration as we shepherded his father through his first move in almost 20 years. Upon his arrival in the new house, after an epic snowstorm trapping the moving truck in the street for hours, he declared that he would never move again. This assuredness struck us with both relief and trepidation. We were so exhausted and stressed out from the months leading up to this day that it was rewarding that he was happy and comfortable in our new home. But, at the same time, there was a finality to his statement that caused us to panic: what would our own future look like now?

Adjusting to living with my husband’s father has been challenging at times, in particular due to giving up the privacy of our marriage. Daily tasks like preparing meals are interrupted by his father’s recitations from the daily newspaper. In the middle of cuddling on the couch with my husband, his dad is prone to walk in, armed with a new fact from a recent YouTube search. I have digested more about world history, war, and nature than I have an appetite for, while my own analyses of feminism, social justice, and popular culture have been met with equal reticence. A retired university professor, my father-in-law yearns for a heated debate on the freedom of speech, whereas any kind of raised voice causes me to shut down, panic, or retreat. This dynamic may be typical of the father-daughter archetype, but having grown up without a dad, the struggles characteristic of that bond remain uncomfortable to me. These entangled feelings of anger, amusement, respect, and love are evidence that I am finally, in my late 30s, learning how to have a father.

Perhaps because of the strain it puts on the younger generation, multi-generational living is not very common in Canada, despite its normalcy in other countries around the world. According to Statistics Canada’s “Housing Experiences in Canada: Seniors in 2018” report, only five percent of seniors aged 65 and over lived in multi-generational housing in Canada. In contrast, 15 percent live in senior residences and long-term care facilities. As the pandemic ravaged long-term care homes, the vulnerability and disposability of elders in Canadian culture was exposed. Disregard for the heightened risks of the elderly was regularly vocalized throughout masking and vaccine debates, while a staggering 34,999 people over 60 in Canada died from COVID-19 by April 2022.

Amidst these figures, seniors face daily accessibility issues exacerbated by the pandemic. My father-in-law is very
healthy, but as an 88-year-old, he has required two emergency hospitalizations during the past two years. Neither experience yielded follow-up care from his family doctor; his attempt at a phone appointment left him waiting all day for a call that never came. Despite his media and technology literacy, he could not navigate provincial COVID-19 websites. Instead, I booked my father-in-law for his vaccines, drove him to his appointments, and monitored his symptoms afterwards. My husband ordered him masks he could breathe well in after he experienced problems with other medical masks. The single attempt he made to go out for coffee under the vaccine passport system left him denied entry to a coffee shop, standing outside in the cold, clutching his clinic-issued proof of triple vaccination in confusion; to be admitted to the cafe, he required a QR code, despite not owning a smartphone. I feel acute rage thinking of all of the individuals and families who have struggled in similar, and more pronounced, ways due to barriers in accessibility, exacerbated by other forms of systemic and individual discrimination.

As the world fluctuates in and out of pandemic waves, my father-in-law’s health, safety, and dignity remains paramount in our lives. While no one can predict what their life will look like in the next five years, my husband and I feel particularly uncertain. Every day, out of step with the majority of our generation, we make unseen decisions that revolve around my father-in-law, and shift our larger life goals in line with his aging.

Each morning, my father-in-law encourages me to notice the birds that frequent the feeders in our backyard. Jays, orioles, and cardinals flash primary colors, swiftly taking flight as my dogs barrel toward them. A year ago, I couldn’t distinguish between their calls, but now they ring out separately. “It’s a nice day today,” my father-in-law says, and means it, peering out over the trees. As he holds fast to what autonomy he has left, my husband and I come to terms with our interdependence. Perhaps this is one of the many lessons of belonging in a family, in whatever shape it ultimately takes.

Illustration by Jaden Tsan

“It’s not like you even act that Asian”—these words were spoken to me by a white now-ex-boyfriend of mine during a casual conversation. At the time, I let it go because I was not sure how I felt about it, but the words have stuck
with me.

How exactly am I supposed to act “more Asian”? And why is that something I am expected to perform? Do I need to dress up as Hollywood’s idea of a dragon lady before I am allowed to bear my cultural identity proudly? Strangers and friends alike will, unprompted, comment that I act pretty “whitewashed.” They’ve explained: it’s because I dye my hair, or I was an arts major in university, or that I like listening to punk music, or some other asinine reason. However, this is a loaded congratulations to me, insinuating that, despite my appearance and perceived hardship of being a person from a visible minority group, I am able to fully assimilate into Western society, which is apparently the true marker of success. Being called “whitewashed” is not the compliment that some people think it is.

Although I am usually happy to share my opinion or personal lived experience as a Chinese woman who was born in Canada when I’m asked to, there are times when I’m not willing to do so. I won’t engage when these questions come from strangers or people who are just looking to argue, rather than genuinely listen to my answers.

When non-Chinese strangers or salespeople approach me by saying “Ni Hao” in mispronounced Mandarin, I wonder what exactly their goal is. Are they actually attempting to connect with me and make me feel comfortable in what they think is my mother tongue, or is it to make themselves feel cultured because they want to show off the fact that they know how to say a simple “hello” in another language? Usually, it seems to be the latter. In some cases, I may humour them by responding in Mandarin, after which they will admit that they don’t actually know how to speak it. Other times, when I’m not in the mood, I’ll explain that had they asked and wanted to have a conversation with me, I would’ve told them that my mother tongue is actually Cantonese and I am not as fluent in Mandarin.

And then, if people want to speak to me in Cantonese, do they have a basic understanding or even an honest desire to learn, or are they just looking to learn the swear words so they can have a fun party trick? These are also things that can be learned on the internet for free, instead of asking me to invest my time and energy into a moment of entertainment that I do not share in.

When I worked at an all-you-can-eat sushi restaurant, it put me in the frustrating position of working in a customer service role where I was required to be as polite and accommodating as possible to guests, even if they were rude or ignorant. Guests would compliment me for my English-speaking skills, remark on my lack of accent, or ask me where I’m from—no, where I was really from. Many were disappointed to hear that I’m not Japanese and that, in fact, I was born and raised in Canada. My place of birth shouldn’t even be a talking point when I’m working as a server at a restaurant, and I doubt that white servers are asked about their ethnic origins at work. Sometimes I would just tell them what they wanted to hear and make up a backstory for the most gullible. After all, they came to have an authentic cultural experience and eat California rolls at a Japanese restaurant, and in their minds, that experience is included with the all-you-can-eat menu price.

My coworkers would often try to placate me after these situations by saying that those ignorant guests were harmless. And while I can understand that those customers might have been well-meaning, it doesn’t excuse the fact that they expect me to fill a stereotype and that they are looking to receive some sort of approval from me as an Asian person, to validate that they are somehow more cultured than the average person.

Once, a man came into the restaurant while I was working, showed me a picture on his phone, and asked me if I could
translate the words on the Asian tapestry that he used to decorate his living room. I explained to him that I could not read it because he had walked into a Japanese restaurant owned by Chinese people, and it was written in Korean. He left without ordering anything. These types of microaggressions may ultimately be harmless, but they are unsettling. I am not on call to perform Asian-ness.

Even friends and acquaintances will call on me to perform. People I’ve just met will tell me how much they enjoy Asian cuisine or that they watch anime or that they listen to K-pop—as if I’m the authority on these topics and earning praise from me will validate their interests. Of course, these people never make equivalent comments to my white friends who are at the same party as me. They get to engage in reasonable small talk about their hobbies or work, while I get to listen to someone talk about their upcoming trip itinerary to Japan (where I’ve never been and can’t offer any travel advice about). Whether it’s consciously or not, people will seek validation from me—and I’m sure it happens to the majority of other individuals who are a part of a visible minority group.

This brings me back to the first comment. How exactly am I supposed to act “more Asian”? Being Asian is an experience that I actively live through— it isn’t a choice I make. It’s something that people expect of me based on my appearance. I should not be expected to explain myself to strangers and ignorant acquaintances. I’m proud of who I am, but it’s not the only facet of my life that I ever want to talk about.

I didn’t grow up to be a stereotype. There is no right or wrong way to be Asian. I’m not your anime dream girl. I’m not your Hollywood dragon lady. I’m not your idea of a model minority citizen. I’m not here to meet your expectations—there isn’t a point where I don’t act Asian enough to fit into your idea of who I am—and I do not have to do the emotional work to prove myself to anybody.

Photo by INSTAR Images / Alamy Stock Photo

When it first aired over two decades ago, Sex and the City’s fantasy lay in an idyllic New York City lifestyle of affordable rent, flowing cosmopolitans, closets full of expensive designer fashion, a revolving door of attractive men for one and all, and an endless string of meet-cutes. The four best friend protagonists, Carrie Bradshaw, Samantha Jones, Miranda Hobbes, and Charlotte York, had it all at their fingertips.

Seventeen years after the finale (and 11 years after the second movie, but let’s not discuss it), the anticipated reboot, And Just Like That… premiered at the end of 2021. While some of that original fantasy remains intact (like when Carrie walks around the grimy streets of NYC in a trailing, white tulle skirt without it becoming dirty), I was struck by the ways in which it has shifted. In this new iteration, it’s the fantasy of successful friendship into middle age that takes centre stage.

Maybe this is two years of social isolation talking, but some of my friendships are struggling. While I do think the pandemic has a part in it, and I’ll never know otherwise, I still have a sneaking suspicion that I’d find myself here even without a disease keeping us from our loved ones. Now, in my 30s, the majority of my friends have settled down with a longtime partner, and many of them have chosen to become parents.

I don’t begrudge them for it, but we live in a heteronormative society, one that values a more traditional family unit above all else. As a single, childless person, I’m not always sure where that leaves me. Unfortunately, it’s usually pretty low on the priority list, far behind children and spouses and work. At least until an empty nest and retirement. Old women together at the movies, I see and love you.

However, And Just Like That… presents an alternative reality where your friends are your family and you don’t have to spend several months going back and forth in a text chain just to organize a brunch. In the first scene of the show, Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte are eating at a restaurant, their bond unchanged other than a devastating break-up with Samantha. Their friendship is still the focal point of their lives, despite both marriage for all and kids for Miranda and Charlotte.

At the end of the first episode, Carrie’s husband, John James Preston (also known as “Mr. Big”), dies of a heart attack. In episode five, she has hip surgery. After both of these major life events, Miranda and Charlotte drop everything to care for their friend, staying the night, nursing her back to health. But it’s not only the big stuff. They share frequent meals and walks together, their connectedness is a throughline. Making time for each other is a given, not an option.

Deeply moved, I felt comfort in being with old friends, albeit fictional ones. Then came profound grief for how my own friendships have changed. Ten episodes with Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte left me wondering who will be there not only for the hard stuff but the mundane, which is often just as meaningful: coffee, errands, inconsequential stories about my day. Of course, there’s a certain level of unattainability in And Just Like That…. It is television, after all. But maybe, just maybe, if we start working toward community instead of insularity, friendship can take its deserved place at the forefront of our lives, even if we aren’t on a television show