Jonathan Trefz
BA ’13 (Asian Language & Culture)
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In May I graduated from the Honours Asian Language & Culture BA program with a minor in Russian and the Rosa Wai Wai Ho scholarship. Booker T Washington said something about measuring success less by how far you’ve gotten and more by how far you’ve come. As a straight white Canadian I’m not quite bereft of privilege. However my surname is Middle-High-German slang meaning ‘good for nothing.’ My yeoman ancestors moved from Prussia to Russia under Catherine the Great. After friction between them and the local Armenians of Grigoriopol, a nearby village was vacated of Romanians on their behalf. There they were soon regularly visited by Nogai Tatar raiders. A hundred years later, in 1905, besides the common upheaval, the outlook for Germans in The Ukraine smelled of rape and pillage by Nestor Makhno’s Black Army during the civil war, and of starvation on cattle trains to Siberia during the second world war. In his haste to avoid certain doom my great-great-grandfather got swindled on a piece of unproductive Alberta land. He and his kin spent the first winter or two of forty below living under their overturned wagon. During the First World War preserving their German culture became untenable in Canada, and somewhere along the line they decided to abandon their established religion for a trendy new North American quasi-christian sect. Both my parents were severely traumatized refugees from this insular faith.
I was raised by a single mother whose life was too tragic for fiction. Growing up, I attended thirteen different schools and resided in about forty different homes including RVs, basement studios and normal suburban houses. Twice I even did time in foster care while my mom was committed to a mental hospital. Moving around so much was disorienting. I usually made friends with the other new guys; immigrant kids from Asia. This and a lack of investment in any culture of my own led to a keen interest in the richness and diversity of Asian culture. A model of a Chinese dragon hung from my bedroom lamp. I relished every invitation to dinner with my friends’ Cantonese, Korean or Japanese families. When I was six my mom was briefly involved a Japanese man who left a lasting good impression by presenting me with a bicycle upon first meeting. I had a habit of marvelling at the wares in the Fan Tan Trading Company in Victoria.
A few months after giving up on high school I naturally booked a one-way ticket to China where I began teaching English on the south bank of the Heilong river while redressing my scholastic failings by correspondence. At the same time my mother moved to Taiwan to teach while finishing her second master’s degree, an MBA. After a semester in Manchuria I went to visit. Both sides of the Taiwan Strait had a captivating and overwhelming impact on me, I felt compelled to understand their bewildering culture(s). The following year my mother killed herself in Taiwan during the Spring Festival. I went to arrange the funerary procedures, esoteric Hakka traditions that I was in no state to appreciate at the time. Having nothing in Canada to go back to, at the end of the Spring Festival holiday I returned to my job at a college in Xi’an. Diagnosed with ADHD and a bit disoriented by my life up to then I didn’t have the self-confidence to tackle written Chinese, though I picked up the conversational language. In my emotional exhaustion I also picked up a wife. I had my family tragedy and she had hers; we propped each other up though we had nothing else in common. Inevitably it didn’t last, but we remain good friends. Teachers get good holidays, and the incredible things I did and saw over those seven years piled up so high that the unimaginable became banal. I spent a total of seven years in Asia travelling to almost every country east of Afghanistan and almost every province of China. I’ve smuggled myself through a Chinese border post, gone over the Karakoram Highway, slipped into Bhutan, sailed across the Tonle Sap, weathered numerous typhoons, visited ancient ruined cities of the Taklamakan, avoided murder twice, once in a rioting city, observed ceremonies in diverse temples, gotten mortally ill in Burma, enjoyed Songkram and many other festivals, stayed at the Golden Temple of Amritsar, eaten a myriad things I hadn’t known existed, met North Korean and Bhutanese refugees, wandered off a mountain into a PLA military base at night by accident, managed a Qing-dynasty courtyard guest house and made many friends. From Lahore to Irkutsk to Penang I’ve found people relatable, open-hearted and hospitable, no matter their station or burdens, all unique and fascinating in their own way. In my experience, not yet being a parent, there is nothing more challenging or rewarding than adapting to a new culture. I think the ability to suspend investment in the values and perceptions one is accustomed to and to try to see the world through another cultural lens on its own terms is a rare and valuable skill, fostering great personal growth.
After enjoying living in Beijing during the Olympics I decided that the financial crisis was a good time to reflect on my job security as a college level English instructor whose only qualification was an aptitude for guanxi building. Moving back to Vancouver after seven years in Asia I experienced the greatest culture shock of my life; settling in to life in my home and native land with which I had lost almost all ability to relate. This was one of the greatest challenges I have faced. It gave me great sympathy for immigrants. While immigrants often face “polite” Canadian discrimination, I faced unfulfillable expectations to relate as a local. I had been surprised when a friend on an internship at the Canadian embassy in Beijing suggested I’d have no problem getting accepted to a BA program, and once I’d been accepted and had struggled to get established in Vancouver I was anxious to start. I was so anxious and unconfident I don’t think I slept more than an hour a night my first two years of study. ADHD made abstract subjects like second year linguistics absolute torture, but my unexpected success in narrative-driven fields provided a huge boost in self worth; I was thrilled to find a natural talent. I liked being a foreigner with very few expectations to conform but Asian Studies is the first place where I’ve felt like I belonged, which is very nice too. I met wonderful people among the students, faculty and staff and found the intellectual stimulation absolutely thrilling. I wrapped up my BA by travelling by rail and ship between study abroad programs in St Petersburg and Taipei, spending a month along the way with a jolly Mongolian family in their yurt, living off airag and horse gut. For most of this year I’ve been getting to know Russia, possibly too enthusiastically, as for some reason or lack thereof I’m currently under investigation by the Federal Security Service. Back to Asia it is then.
A love and fascination for the diversity of human experience drives me to keep broadening my cultural horizons. I hope to continue this for the rest of my life, which wouldn’t be hardly enough time to benefit from all Asia has to offer. I am currently arranging both to seek my fortune (or at least pay off my student loans) and pursue probably my greatest cultural challenge yet by teaching in Saudi Arabia. I look forward to every minute.
