How Canada Saved My Life (And Why It Still Matters)

Why Canada’s a Beacon in a World Going Dark

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So much doom in the air. And yes, I’m guilty of it, too — hands held up. Today, let’s talk about a place that’s emerged as a beacon in a world going dark. A place near and dear to my heart, special in many ways. That we should all regard as a model, right about now, in this troubled age.

A place that saved my fragile, teenage life. Canada.

I’m going to talk shortly in hard, objective terms about why Canada matters to the world right about now — why it’s a beacon and a model. But first, I’m going to do something dangerous, which is tell you how I came to…love…this special, unique country. And why I had the inkling it’d do better than so many others, even as a child, when it saved me. So you can skip the soppy story of my life if you want — though I think the context it’s going to provide might matter, too. Up to you. The hard stuff? It’ll be at the end.

I grew up in America. And what I learned, early on, was a grim lesson. America’s something you survive. By the age of ten, I was suicidal. I’d been a happy kid, once. A straight-A student, even something of a prodigy in writing and math. But by ten? I was flunking. Everything. I was on the edge. Because my life went like this.

I’d wake up, go to the bus stop, and be brutalized on the way. My neighbors, sipping their coffee, would look on from their kitchen windows, without a care. I’d be called all kinds of slurs and names — f*g, qu**r, worse — and then, on the bus, it’d start all over again. I’d try to make it through class, but along the way, again, bang, intimidation, violence, you get the picture. On the field, in the halls. The teachers and coaches would either turn a blind eye or egg it all on. Hey! Only one way to build character! Pain. I’d try to make it home, and the violence would happen all over again. By the end of the day? Maybe you can imagine that I was shuddering in horror.

But what really left me traumatized — and I know this now, but didn’t at the time — wasn’t really the beatings. Those, I came to deal with, and gave back, sometimes, what I got. It was the approval of the adults. I came to understand that I lived in a world that was hostile beyond any semblance of reason or even meaning. It wanted me annihilated. Gone. I was not a person in America. The adults — almost every single one of them in my life, save for one teacher, who’d look down, ashamed, and not lift a finger to stop anything, but at least not egg it on — didn’t just think this was OK, they thought it was a good thing.

How do you survive as a kid in a world like that? One that smiles at your annihilation? You lose the will to live.

And then a miracle happened. You see, my life’s been saved more times than I can count. And the first way it happened was that my one friend, out of three, all of us abused just for existing, said, “listen, I heard about this place, and I think we should go.” Suddenly, something…sparked…in me. I have no idea, to this day, why. Maybe it was a kind of foreshadowing of hope. We went. The place was a gay club. This was at the height, really, of the AIDS epidemic. And there? The gay community took us under their wing. We weren’t gay. But they understood, immediately, that we were hunted and hated, like them, and we needed a haven, a place of refuge, somewhere we could just be.

The bouncer would look at our cheesy fake ID’s — so obviously counterfeit, and chuckle. A leather-bound daddy with a mustache. He’d look at us, immediately understand, and wave us in. The bartenders would look at us, get it, and make us extra-weak rum and cokes. And they’d let us sit there. We’d watched, absolutely amazed. Bewildered. People dancing. Kissing. Laughing. Just existing. No violence. No hate. No brutality. It felt like a miracle. We kissed the ground and thanked our lucky stars. We could not believe it. We went every single night of the week, and school be damned. We figured out a way — LOL — to hack the attendance system, so it looked like we were in class, when in fact, we were out till 4AM, every night of the week, tasting the sweetest nectar there was: existence, in peace, freedom, to just be yourself. The gay guys would watch over us, make sure we weren’t getting into too much trouble…and then leave us alone. They understood, instinctively, intuitively. Here were kids who were like them.

And that brings me to how I got to Canada. It came time to apply to college. And my parents, being Asian parents, insisted on American Ivy Leagues. Me? By this point, I understood — America was something you survive. And so in a deliberate two fingers up, I wrote my essay about…my life. My actual life. Not becoming some dumb CEO or whatnot. It was about finding refuge in the gay community, and watching some of my new friends — big brothers, really — die of AIDS. To us, they seemed old and wise. Today? I know they were just young people, too — barely, most of them, in their 30s. I wrote about how that wave of death affected me. What it taught me, about love and resistance and grace and truth. About the will to live.