Year of the Pig
[Photo By: KPA]
Above is a photo I took a few days ago (with my zoom lense) of an old Chinese man standing in the main entrance of Mississauga's Square One Mall. He is standing below the banners "celebrating" Chinese New Year, the only ethnic festival in the mall that commands such a large and dramatic presence.
He was alone, probably "walking" around the mall for exercise, as many do. Hs family (a son? a daughter? a grandchild?) must have dropped him off to return later and pick him to take back home. What must it feel like to see such a grand acknowledgment for his country's most important, event but to be surrounded by people who look nothing like his countrymen, and who view this festival as just another quaint event?
He must have found this place of familiarity on his tour around the mall and stopped under the banners. The floor has a seprepsp of Chinese horoscope animals, and he instinctively stood on the pig.
There is a callousness in multiculturalism which affects the most vulnerable: the very old and the the very young.
His family, at one point, made the decision to uproot everyone and everything for pure opportunism to get to the "land of plenty." The material benefits of immigration for non-Western immigrants (including the much-touted Chinese) are beginning to look like minimal, according to various national and regional population statistics.
The damage to the psyche - inability to feel like they "belong," perceived discrimination by the dominant whites who, despite multiculturalism and all kinds of affirmative action rules and regulations still hold the positions of authority and still prefer "their own." Younger immigrants and children of immigrants, rather than blending in wth the mainstream (.e. white) society prefer to be with their own kind: the Chinese wth the Chinese; the Somali with the Somali; the Indians with the Indians.
The cruel works of immigration spawned multiculturalism, and multiculturalism is now officially a failure. And we are left wth an old man looking for a familiar landscape from his homeland in the indifferent space of giant mall in a foreign land.
Perhaps he was born in the Year of the Pig:
So where does the Pig fall on the fortune scale? According to Tai [a Chinese fortune teller and feng shui master based in Vancouver], pigs are definitely considered a lucky animal.Will this old man "have something happen to save [his] life, to help [him] overcome all [these] obstacles and barriers?"
"They are lucky, especially people born in this particular year," he said. "Even if they have some sort of unfortunate thing happen, eventually they will have something happen to save their life, to help them overcome all the obstacles and barriers."[Source]