You Can Find Them In The Club: Toronto’s East-Asian Scene

By Karen K. Ho

“It’s hard to explain without seeming racist,” laughs David In when asked about the East-Asian party scene in Toronto. The 29-year-old Korean-Canadian is a co-founder of Epic Nights. The entertainment production company produces concerts and other events, but Epic specializes in promoting club nights targeted at young East-Asian students and professionals.

I haven’t been to a nightclub in years, but I still know that clubbing is a massive part of Toronto’s entertainment industry. I also know that East-Asian nights are incredibly popular. What I wanted to figured out was exactly how popular, and how parties focused on East-Asian clubbers might be different than a “regular” club night. So I asked David, and here’s what I learned.

Club gear transcends race. “You’ll have your hipsters and the guys who are all GQ’d, and obviously the douche-bags who are wearing Ed Hardy,” David said. “You know, the True Religion jeans and really flashy standout style.”

East-Asians drink what everyone else drinks. Bottle service orders are dominated by vodka, while bar orders are mostly Jagerbombs and tequila shots.

“Asian Glow” exists. (It’s increased acetaldehyde accumulation, ok?) “Some people will have one sip of beer and they’ll turn red,” David laughs.

Friday night is Asian Night—it’s when club owners are most likely to ask Epic to help them bring in an Asian clientele. “However on Saturday it’s completely different,” he said, noting that the demand for “white” nights goes up. “But those tend to become mixed anyway.”

Hennessy and Enemies: Booze, Brands and “Liquid Bling”

By Denise Balkissoon

Can you read that wine label? Cause this brand causes dictatorships.

There were many things to be upset about after last summer’s shooting on Danzig Avenue: the deaths, of course, plus the youth of the accused shooters, and how easy it seems for firearms to slip through our porous border.

Farther down on the list, but still troubling, was “Henny & Hip Hop,” a story that ran in the Toronto Star about 10 days after the incident. Dotted with lyrics by Mobb Deep and Eminem, the piece informed the reading public that “Hennessy has been part of hip-hop culture for almost 20 years.” It quoted a Brazil-based spokesperson from Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy, who emphasized that the company “was not part of the party.” In other words, it was embarrassing and nausea-inducing, and almost a year later, it still bugs me.

Does alcohol make people violent? Unquestionably, yes. But I can’t think of a culture other than hip hop for which a string of brand citations follows every incident. When Vancouver Canucks fans tore their city up after losing the Stanley Cup two years ago, I don’t remember hearing what kind of flat beer they were overcharged for in the Rogers Arena.  An upper-class Scottish chef killed his girlfriend last fall, but the news coverage has yet to inform me about what sorts of fine wines he might have been drinking. At a time when there were many important, heart-wrenching things to consider, “Henny & Hip Hop” was just another piece of Othering tripe letting us know that “in urban culture, [Hennessy] is seen as liquid bling.”

I have some questions of my own about liquor brands and identity, questions that I might have considered stupid if the country’s biggest daily hadn’t opened these floodgates. Let’s start with the most important one, and move on from there.

1. Obviously we all want a world without prejudice or hate. Anheuser-Busch InBev is on track to own every major beer brand in the world. When Corona tastes just like Rolling Rock tastes just like Hoegaarden tastes just like Quilmes, will racism be over?

What is a Multicultural Bar?

by Navneet Alang and Anshuman Idamsetty

Nav: This past summer, I lost a silly bet with my Dad, the details of which are far less important than what was wagered: the loser had to buy the other beer. Strangely though, my Dad has yet to collect on his debt.

Maybe my father is just lazy. Okay, fine, my father is just lazy. But I do wonder if I could entice my old man out more easily were there a bar where we, two South Asian dudes, might feel a bit more ‘at home’.

It got me to thinking: do we need “multicultural” or “ethnic” bars? What would one even look like? Intrigued, I consulted Ethnic Aisle collaborator and friend Anshuman Iddamsetty, and we were soon sitting down in a Bloorcourt pub trying to figure it out. What we came up with were five aspects of a bar we’d need to address: drinks, food, music, seating and decor. As it turned out, though, the more we thought about it, the more complicated things became. Here’s what we visualized:

DRINK: When it comes to booze, familiarity is important. That means any multicultural bar would have to be unusually well-stocked, keeping not only the usual local and popular brews, but among others, Tsingtao, Kingfisher, and Red Stripe. For liquor, you’d need to get more adventurous: next to scotch and gin, you’d need palm wine, Borovička, and arrack in addition to ouzo and grappa—though there is that pesky problem of sourcing these things from both the LCBO and beyond. Whether you wanted to get fancy and experiment with cocktails containing five-spice or coriander, would probably depend on how up- or downmarket you (or your clientèle) wanted to go.

Could it be done? Clearly, an exhaustive list would be impossible, but a decent array of booze from Toronto’s major ethnic groups might be plausible.

Just Say No: Q&A with a Muslim

By Bhairavi Thanki

Aisha Khan (a pseudonym) is a 24-year-old hijab-wearing Muslim woman. Aisha is young and ambitious, so I asked her whether she felt Toronto’s alcohol-friendly culture was a career impediment.

Bhairavi: Tell me about the drinking culture around you, from high school going into university.

Aisha: I grew up in a really ethnically and culturally diverse area at Jane and St. Clair. The only kids that really drank in high school were basically the rich white kids. It was never really an issue till later on in university. In the beginning I wouldn’t drink and I would say that it was for religious reasons. But that was kind of the monotone answer that I was almost expected and conditioned to give.

I did experiment with drinking in university. It did have something to do with fitting in that I had to try it. How do you spurn something without trying it first, right? It just didn’t appeal to me when I did do it.

BT: Was drinking an issue in university?

AK: I wouldn’t say it was a huge problem in university or in high school. It started becoming more of an issue at my first job, when I worked for a communications firm. There were only 15 of us. It was tight knit and the office had a big drinking culture. I had become more observant in my faith too, so I had more of a personal reason to refrain from it.

Whether it was taking a client out to a bar, or getting together after work for drinks, I felt like the odd person out. The firm wasn’t ethnically diverse, so I just felt like the odd person out period, let alone as someone who practiced a faith. At that time I had my own insecurities around praying in the work force, or telling people I was fasting, or how I dressed and all that stuff. In retrospect I wasn’t strong enough to say “it’s not that I just don’t drink, it’s that I don’t even want to be in a bar.” I just felt really polarized. That’s the only time I felt polarized because of drinking.

BT: Did you have a problem with friends drinking around you while you were hanging out with them?

AK: When people get tipsy is when I get uncomfortable. Not really uncomfortable, but I ask myself “should I really be here?” When there were gatherings at my first job, I would feel out of place to the point where I left events early. It felt weird to me to be the only sober person in a room full of people who were inebriated.

I didn’t want to make people who did drink feel like there was something morally wrong with them. Even now I am careful about how I describe things to people, because I don’t want it to seem like I am holier than thou. For example, when scholars in the Muslim community talk about “modest dressing,” I don’t like using that terminology when describing myself. “Modest” means different things to different people.

Opa! It’s Not All About Ouzo

Secret smuggled raki from a secret Toronto freezer.

By Kat Armstrong

To most North Americans, ouzo is the ubiquitous drink of Greece. It has a strong anise flavour and is served in small shot glasses or on flaming kefalotiri in every establishment this side of Zakinthos. But ouzo is not the entirety of what Greece has to offer in the way of booze—it’s not even the most popular drink of native Greeks.

My mother’s people have a laid back view of alcohol consumption: the first time I ever saw someone abandon a half full beer in Greece, I gasped, having just spent my first two years of university pre-drinking hard in residence before heading to the Brunny. I find the Greek people far more interested in the low-key enjoyment of booze over a sheer desire to get bombed. They have a slightly different than palate that of the average North American. If you’re up for a little something especially Grecian, here are some of my favourite non-ouzo drinks.

A Dubliner’s Rantings on St Patrick’s Day

By Séamus Conaty

Being born and bred (and buttered) in Dublin, I will not attempt to debunk any myths regarding the stereotype that Irish people drink too much. We do. This is not because we have an inherent love for what smart people call C₂H₅OH. What we have is an inherent love for socializing, and this happens in pubs. Our fondness for the juice is a bi-product of our necessity for chat. You will rarely (if ever) see Irish people drinking with the explicit intention of getting rat-arsed. It just happens, like shit.

When I was growing up, St. Patrick’s Day was not unlike Canadian Thanksgiving. Until the early 1980s, pubs in Ireland were actually closed on St. Patrick’s Day. There was little or no alcohol consumed—it was like a day off from alcohol. One went to mass in the morning, had a nice meal with one’s family, went into the city to watch the parade, and then threw stones at Protestants. (Ok, we didn’t throw stones at Protestants, we actually all get along quite well despite what the newspapers would have you believe.) Anyway, I loved it. We used to have great fun mocking the Yanks that had made the 5,000 kilometre trip to the Vaterland for a relatively low key family affair where they were reminded that, no, they were not Irish, they were Yanks, and should go live with all the nasty shit they’ve done. Rather than being a phony celebration of all things green, it was a religious celebration of our most famous patron saint. (Tip: he’s not our only one. Having several patron saints is our bonus prize for tolerating a millennium of molestation, which is a delightful segway into the relatively kiddie-diddler-free land of the maple leaf.)

I moved to Toronto in 1998. Following my diasporic trail like a fly to shite, I ended up working in an Irish pub for a few years. I loved it! I met great people and earned lots of cash, which I spent on booze, drugs and guitars. As March rolled near, I first found the Christmas-like hype around my national holiday rather flattering. But when March 17^th arrived, fuck me: my Thanksgiving was a complete and utter blatant pissfest. The worst of all pissfests! Premeditated, plastic, phoney and pathetic (nice alliteration there).

The Culture Bucket

by Navneet Alang

In recent weeks, as stories about Idle No More or rape in India have populated our news media, I’ve been reminded yet again that differences in culture can’t be boiled down to pat clichés about cuisine, but are instead about ways of understanding the world. The tension lingering around divisions between cultural groups seems more present than usual, and I half expect that at any moment the city’s ethnic groups might break out into 1950s-style street fight replete with switchblades and greased hair.

What has me perplexed though, is that the solution to these problems seems pretty clear. Immigrants and people in developing countries need to learn to put certain parts of their culture aside and think clearly. Tucking your bias away and looking at things objectively is the only way things will ever change, right? So I’m not sure why these silly people aren’t using their Culture Buckets.

Authenticity at Jane and Finch: African Dutch Wax Fabrics

A pile of Vlisco prints at a Jane and Wilson shop

By Adwoa Afful

During my early childhood, my Ghanaian immigrant parents decided to move our family to the north Toronto neighbourhood of Jane and Finch. Jane and Finch hosts one of the largest Ghanaian communities in the city, so I became quite accustomed to seeing small parades of women (and occasionally their spouses and children) covered head to toe in African print fabrics.

While we lived there, I barely took notice of these women or the beautiful multicoloured and intricately patterned textiles they dressed themselves in. I also grew up in a household where what seemed like small mountains of similar fabrics were haphazardly arranged in cardboard boxes and large Rubbermaid bins and stored in the basement. Usually they would sit there for years. During epic bouts of spring cleaning, I would mentally label them as “Ghana Stuff,” and then put them back where I had found them.

I mostly took these fabrics for granted, and rarely thought of their potential cultural significance. I was equally apathetic about their origins and history. In my mind, the fabrics were sent to us in big brown airmail packages from relatives in Ghana, and so were Ghanaian. Then, last year, I read Eccentric Yoruba’s excellent post “African Fabrics: The History of Dutch Wax Prints” on the blog Beyond Victoriana: a multicultural perspective on Steampunk. It seems that the fabrics that I had thoughtlessly labeled as “Ghana Stuff,” were actually the products of an interwoven (pun intended) history of the West African, Indonesian, and Dutch textile manufacturing industries.

Rob Ford’s Diversity Distraction

By Desmond Cole

Since 2006, it’s been City of Toronto policy that all advertised civic appointments—both paid jobs and hundreds of volunteer opportunities—make a direct appeal for applications from “women, youth, First Nations, people with disabilities and racialized communities.” In late September, a damning report by the city’s ombudsman, Fiona Crean, (who is, in fact, a woman) revealed that mayoral staff tried to delete the line calling for diverse applications during the appointment process for 120 citizen positions on city boards this past spring.

The revelation of mayor Rob Ford’s interference was another troubling window into his administration’s dismissive approach to inclusion and diversity. It also shed more light on Ford’s bizarre political posturing: even as he trumpets his private commitment to charity for marginalized people, the mayor reassures to his base that public, systemic change is out of the question.

Ford’s response to Crean’s report was a standard denial and dismissal. “That’s a ridiculous question,” he said when asked if he was against diversity. In the face of such a serious accusation, it would have been easy to drag out Toronto’s well-worn “Diversity, Our Strength” motto to placate concerned residents. The mayor’s refusal to even pay lip service to the idea was a silent statement that those who believe in the motto, and its accompanying policies, are not worth his attention.

The Past, Present and Future of Racism in Toronto

The only photo of the 1933 riot in Christie Pits

This week at the Ethnic Aisle, we’re exploring the past, present and future of racism in Toronto. Racism was and is part of Toronto. Moreover, our racism is evolving. This isn’t a value judgment so much as an observation: as the city changes, so too do our experiences with prejudice, both systemic and personal.

These posts aren’t a referendum on whether each successive generation is getting any better or worse at being racist (we’re saving that for a March Madness-styled tournament post. Haha, just kidding! Maybe). Rather, think of this as crib notes on issues that often get forgotten amongst the greater narrative of Toronto the Good, with a side of self-reflection on our progressive city’s decidedly less-progressive moments.By looking at Toronto’s racism in greater contextual scope, we hope to get the ball rolling on some conversations about how we’re all getting along and where we all hope to end up.

To get things started, we look back at The Past.

Renee Sylvestre-Williams presents a timeline of Canada’s more egregious racist decisions. For example, remember that time our first Prime Minister didn’t believe Asian or First Nations folks should have the right to vote? No? Well read all about it here.

Chantal Braganza gets municipal, exploring how Toronto’s by-laws have been slightly less than accommodating over the years (hint: very passive aggressively. How totally us, right?).

Then, we address the reality of racism in The Present.

Kelli Korducki talks to the Migrant Workers Alliance for Change, and learns some harsh truths about the way Canada treats the racialized internationals who work on our farms.

Lisa Charleyboy dissects last August’s Holy Chuck Burger scandal, when the Toronto restaurant thought it was ok to have a sandwich named the “Drunken, Dirty Half-Breed” on its menu.

Illustrator Roxana Parsa shares her graphic take on the GTA’s downtown/suburban divide.

Sam Tecle show, in stark numbers, how racialization of poverty leaves many non-white Torontonians in substandard housing. 

Navneet Alang on paying lip-service to diversity in a city where the media, cultural institutions and wealth are mostly white.

Anupa Mistry talks toLiza Paul and Bahia Watson, the playwrights and actors behind the hilarious Pomme is French for Apple.

And finally, our writers move on to The Future.

Denise Balkissoon argues for purposeful, perhaps policy-based, integration as the key to a less racist future.

Jef Catapang asks the experts: Canadian science fiction writers share their ideas on what “race” is, and where prejudice is going.

and Septembre Anderson wonders if racial profiling by police will always be part of Toronto.

Comment, tweet, write a response post! We’d love if you joined in the conversation.