Status Updates From Diamond Grill

"The mayor's toast to the shy Chinese cooks who stand just outside the swinging kitchen door in their dirty aprons faces glazes with sweat"

"He's a boss's son and I'm a boss's son. His pure Chineseness and my impure Chineseness don't make any difference to us in the cafe. But I've assumed a dull and ambiguous edge of difference in myself; the hyphen always seems to demand negotiation."

"I am an obstacle. I can't get out of the way now that I've stepped into the frame."

"...now that you got a head tax will you collect a heart tax too?"

"In fact, the few Chinese words I know are the ones I hear in the kitchen when the cooks swear at me."

"But I love you [...] You and I have done alright, our genealogical trajectories compounded or diluted enough intor the white middle class to put us over the blue line; I can't stay mad at you forever [...] My love for you is as solid as the Civic Centre ice you fell on during your figure skating show, my own heart twanging in tandem to your embarassment [...]

We need to Zamboni our love smooth until it shines."

"Not just being pissed off but allt he way back to something not mine, something I brought with me from before the first angry scream at birth caught deep back in the throat despite me and now you have it too [...] rage to the skin's story is colour-deep, colour deep."

"Instant cow, even more transparent now behind this spotless box of shiny metal [...] Dad looks at that gleaming hunk of modernity, shakes his head, and curses the absence of both milk and memory."

"The soda fountain becomes my territory."

"He loves hockey but never learns to skate." - Unlike Fred Jr., Fred Sr. is unable to ever become part of the "winning team" of whiteness, focalized within the allegory of sports.

"I feel decanting through my body his ocean (I think I can even smell it) [...] the deja vu of body, skin and fur and eyes, a brief intersection of animal coordinates."

"Yet the oceans of women migrant-tongued in double-bind of bossy love and wary double-talk forced to ridw the waves of rebellion and obedience through a silence that shutters numb the traffic between eye and mouth and slaps across the face of family..."

"She feels the pinch of supporting these two half-ghosts."

“I’ve eaten a wonderful dish of tofu and vegetables, back outside, on the street, all my ambivalence gets covered over, camouflaged by a safety net of class and colourlessness — the racism within me that makes and consumes that neutral (white) version of myself, that allows me the sad privilege of being, in this white white world, not the target but the gun.”

“Now that you got that head tax, will you collect a heart tax too?”

“We need to Zamboni our love smooth until it shines.”

“At the same time Chinese were prevented from coming here, white families, sons and daughters and everybody, could get boat passage and even more. The government wanted those people to come here so badly they even offered land.

As if that fold in the tectonic plate along the west coast was like a crack where the yellow peril could sneak in.”