[BRIEF NOTE] Miss Canadiana

This morning in my copy of The Globe and Mail, I read Guy Dixon's article "Beauty queen with an edge" on the front page of the Review section, regarding Miss Canadiana.

In Ottawa, she was a vision of loveliness at the Canada Day festivities proudly wearing her sash. In London, she drew such a crowd in Trafalgar Square that the police had to ask her to leave. Back in Canada, she showed up at a rally in Hamilton with such local dignitaries as MP Tony Valeri, and has toured Toronto's Chinatown, Little India and Church Street neighbourhoods.

Wherever she goes, Miss Canadiana exudes poise and optimism, forever handing out little Maple Leaf flags and looking resplendent in red.

"For me, I feel like she's another person," says Camille Turner, Miss Canadiana herself. "She's not cynical and jaded like I am. She's very sweet, and she really believes in people. She believes people are just wonderful!" she adds, laughing.

Turner's apparent split personality is due to the fact that Miss Canadiana is after all an act or, more precisely, an ongoing performance-art piece.

When not appearing as a figure of blithe national pride and beauty, the Toronto-based artist works in a variety of media, from textiles to digital arts. She struck on the idea of Miss Canadiana while walking through a mall in North Bay, Ont., a few years ago. Originally from Jamaica (she moved to Canada when she was 9), Turner noticed that people were staring at her. Tall and maybe more urbane than some in the mall, there was otherwise little to mark her as an outsider -- other than her black skin.

Receiving the stares immediately made her come up with the idea of Miss Canadiana. Turner then mulled the idea for a few years, trying to decide how to approach arts-funding agencies with what she admits is a somewhat difficult idea to describe.

Then, on Canada Day, 2002, she simply donned a red dress, sash and kitschy Canadian-themed hat (she now favours tiaras) and showed up in Ottawa in her new role.

Although the winner of a fictitious contest, Miss Canadiana nonetheless looks stunning with her braided hair falling lightly around her face, even if she lacks that pinched look and type-A personality of most beauty-pageant winners. If anything, it's that tiny flash of doubt that lies at the core of her performance: Why, despite her obvious appeal, is she still vaguely outside the standard-issue beauty-contestant mould? Is it because she's black? Is it because she seems older and more there than a typical teen queen? (Turner won't divulge her age, saying she wants to maintain at least some of the mystery of Miss Canadiana.)

I'll be looking for her around town, I think. I like quiet smart subversions of unspoken norms, and the subverters themselves.

[REVIEW] Terry Gould's Paper Fan

Terry Gould's recent book Paper Fan is a tremendously compelling read, all the more so because it's a work of non-fiction, tracing the author/protagonist as he searches for Steven Wong, a Chinese-Canadian Triad gangster reported dead under mysterious circumstances in 1992. This crime book reads like an entertaining postmodern crime novel, down to the finest details of characterization and plotting. It's this detail

Consider Gould himself. He starts Paper Fan by presenting himself as a New Yorker, brash and arrogant but also intelligent and street-smart, and goes on to mention his gangster background: his disgraced grandfather was an enforcer in a Jewish organized crime network, and as a child of ten his own appearance as a clean-cut youth let him hang on the fringes of aspiring gangsters. Having assimilated the culture, as an adult he moved to Vancouver to work as a journalist and to teach English to that Canadian metropolis' large population of immigrant youth.

Consider Steven Wong. Chinese-Canadian, at the age of 20 he dropped out of school to quickly ascend through the rangs of the 14K Triads, becoming involved in shakedowns of young immigrants and heroin smuggling. Gould investigated Wong at length, building up something of a personal relationship with the man throughout a series of police investigations. He was surprised by Wong's sudden death in a motorcycle accident in the Philippines; as he investigated the circumstances of Wong's death (supposedly reported by a district policeman who later signed an affadavit, and supposedly producing a body that turned out to have been cremated by an undertaker who didn't own a crematorium), Gould became increasingly suspicious.

Consider Gould's search. Starting in the mid-1990s, Gould traveled across Southeast Asia, investigating the Triad networks of organized crime which permeated many of the weaker polities of the region, like a Macau dominated by gambling interests, a Cambodia run shambolically by regimes concerned with perpetuating their own power, and a Philippines that was simply and completely corrupt. As Gould explored the region at some personal risk, he discovered first-hand how notions of justice had become completely degraded, whether by mony or by the preponderance of force, always in the hands of the rich. There is no lack of horrific anecdotes, whether of the child prostitutes who eagerly await their first menses so they can have time off, or the foreign businesspeople who buy off local officials to dump PCBs

Gould never finds Wong, although he makes a very good case that the man has survived and remains active in Southeast Asia. Paper Fan is alarming enough on its own terms. The Triads, he concludes, are only the symptom of a deeper problem of the perceived (or actual) illegitimacy of states and unjust societies. Dealing with the Triads won't only require effective policing, but effective societies, with economies that function and governments that work and societies that aren't starkly inegalitarian. Fat chance of that, it seems.

For more, start by reading this interview at Scarlett and this excerpt from the first chapter at The Globe and Mail.