An Autobiographical Essay

I was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and educated in Vancouver, British Columbia. Apart from time spent behind the counter in my boarding school tuck shop and as a volunteer librarian in various places, my work experience has been in Vancouver and Fukuoka. My wife and I live in a comfortable house in a quiet neighbourhood in a city that is at once out of the way and in the thick of things. These are the bare facts about me. This essay will tell you a bit more about who I am, but it won’t say much about what I am.

My great-grandfather was a civil engineer, a highly competent amateur musician, and an enthusiastic Mason. His daughter, my grandmother, was a teacher; she had the unenviable tasks of managing a household in a Prairie city during the Depression, and of spending her later years managing my great-grandfather. My grandfather began his adult life as a soldier in France, then attempted to clear uninhabitable Canadian swampland, then did a degree in political economy before being ordained as an Anglican clergyman. He briefly served as chaplain to the English church in Utrecht, which is why my mother was born in Holland and has a Dutch middle name. After a long career in the civil service, my mother retired to Victoria, British Columbia; she now receives a pension much smaller than what she deserves.

I spent my childhood in Winnipeg and Sandy Hook, with my time divided unevenly between the two places: everyday life with my mother in Winnipeg, and school holidays with my grandfather in Sandy Hook. ‘Winnipeg’ has a solidly North American urban thud to it, and ‘Sandy Hook’ sounds as rural as it was: my childhood city was large enough to be a major centre, and my childhood country town was seasonally bustling but generally sleepy. In the recent past, both relied on farm produce and railroads for their money. By the time I was growing up, the older money was starting to leave Winnipeg, and Sandy Hook was cultivating golf and pesticides. The railroads remained, but the trains became more and more rare. I have fond memories of Manitoba, in the way one usually remembers important, lost, and unrecoverable things.

I learned the basics of my French from a formidable woman distantly related to Louis Riel. She was both fearsome and disarmingly kindly, and in retrospect she taught me the value of regional languages. My German teacher was a charming scholar of an obscure branch of medieval literature who reportedly had several dozen children and rode everywhere on a bicycle. I remember his smile vividly, but I can no longer read the passage of Leibniz I translated for him.

After brief and unsuccessful twitches of enthusiasm for Spanish and Italian, I decided to learn an Asian language. At the time I had been living in Vancouver for more than ten years, and I was starting to get desperate. I felt myself detached from the cultural roots I sent out in Winnipeg. In my attempt to grow some new ones, it seemed like a good idea to turn my attention away from Europe and toward Asia. I thought that Japanese would be easier and faster to learn than Chinese, because it isn’t tonal. Ignorance really is a better tool than ambition to crack open fate. My first Japanese teachers were very bright, and very confusing. My current teacher has great plans to help me shed some of the bad habits I’ve collected in recent years. I am an overly ambitious and easily distracted student, much better at accumulating information than I am at practising.

Now that I live in Asia, my neglected roots are starting to grow back. There is a huge new bookshop here in Fukuoka with a vertiginous section for foreign language texts. A few weeks ago I walked through the shop, leafing through books to help me learn Latin and Greek, and Arabic, and Sanskrit, and the modern European languages. It’s the sort of thing that makes me at once deliriously happy and overwhelmingly sad. After all, English I am, and English I will always be. What, exactly, that means I don’t yet pretend to know.

2002-05-25

Date posted: 2003-09-15