Today I attended a dinner event at Foo's Ho-Ho restaurant in Chinatown.

It was a mixture of sweet and sour, similar to the laundry experience that was being recounted.

Sweet in that a part of our collective history is being recorded, and not forgotten entirely, and sour in a feeling that there is a clinging on to the familiar past.

One thing that the Chinese are good at is re-writing their history. It is why they tend not to have placed much emphasis on digging up their ancestors bones, to prove who did what. Of course it is important to remember the past, to give thanks, and not to white-wash over what we are not 100% proud off, on the other hand, the "Chinese" should not be accepting the shackles that they feel the "White" man placed on them.

The talk mentioned how isolating it was to be a Chinese laundryman, to work 19 hours a day 7 days a week. Frankly I really felt honoured to hear their stories, and felt great respect to know that, that is what some went through to survive. My it was a tough life.

On the other hand, lets not stay in the jail of becoming Chinese. John Jung mentioned that he didn't even know that he was Chinese, didn't feel like it growing up. Now that he has studied more, he feels more connected with the Chinese, and keeps drawing upon those words "Chinese" and "Whites". To me, there is falseness in that terminology. Let's not impose the laundry/grocery/restaurant jail upon ourselves, that may have originally been imposed by others. Let's not stay in the past.

Let's honour the past, but lets also move forward.