Jehovah's Witnesses and Non-toxic Erasers
B-rolls from a Serial Immigrant
Dear all, this is a B-roll story that came out this morning as I was trying to write a newsletter telling everyone about some of the heavier creative lifting I’ve been doing over the last months. I didn’t get to writing the newsletter yet, but enjoy this champagne-spritzer.
My entire life has been defined by migration. But this hasn’t always been so clear to me. My first migration was at the age of six from Daqing, China to Calgary, Canada. We moved following the Tiananmen Square massacres in 1989, when my parents saw how brutal political repression could be. I grew up in Calgary, a conservative, Christian place. Kids at school would regularly come up to me and demand, “Do you believe in God?”
We had Jehovah’s Witnesses knocking on our door every other week to tell us about the good news. There would usually be a man with a copy of The Watchtower in his hands, and an awkward-looking teenager standing behind him. I was always confused about just what these visits were about. They seemed to want something from us, even as they were gifting us these books. I took one a few times, and tried to read it, but couldn’t understand why the male pronouns were always capitalized.
It took me a few years to get my bearings at English-speaking primary school. Compared to where I’d been briefly schooled in Daqing, the experience here seemed to resemble a wild zoo of kids who scrambled over each other, ate crayons and squirt glue into each other’s mouths. Once on Hallowe’en, our grade two teacher handed out plasticky neon orange erasers in the shape of carved jack-o-lanterns and told us that these erasers were special because they were ‘non-toxic’. Someone asked what ‘non-toxic’ meant, and she replied that they wouldn’t poison you if you accidentally ate them.
I looked closely at my eraser - a jagged-tooth smile on an orange blob topped with a scribble of green. Another moment of confusion. Was I supposed to want to eat it? Was it half-eraser, half-candy? I rubbed it over some pencil marks in my notebook. Instead of fading the carbon away, it smudged them deeper into the page. Not a good eraser. I gingerly lick the blob. It tastes the way a piece of firm, rubbery plastic would taste. Chemical. I try to take a bite of it to test if I can taste how non-toxic it is. My teeth make a little mark on it, but I can’t bring myself to gnaw it into pieces to test if I would be poisoned.
I nearly raised my hand to ask the teacher how someone could ‘accidentally’ eat something. I am trying to understand if children our age were not considered developed enough to navigate the uncanny valley between stationery and food. I was imagining someone trying to do schoolwork, and ending up stuffing the contents of their pencil case into their mouth instead. Is that how the teachers saw us? Is that how I was supposed to be?
These were questions I didn’t have words for, and not only because I wasn’t speaking much English at the time. I always had the feeling that I wasn’t getting something about the world around me. I probably could ask, but even when I did, the answers didn’t satisfy what I really wanted to know: Just what is going on around here?
Coming up: The next migration