Migratory Meanderings

Say "Cheese!" (Or "Immigration Canada!")

In between cleaning up the kitchen and watching Will and Grace I’m trying to sort through photos and other evidence for our application. The form itself is pretty straight forward (surprisingly!) and can be filled out in an afternoon, but it’s the supporting evidence that takes way more time and is much more involved. Basically, we have to show proof of our relationship and of our intentions in moving back to Canada. Let me tell ya, it’s pretty daunting when we’ve gotta sort through the boxes of previously-unsorted memorobilia (I keep meaning to put all of this stuff into scrapbooks but it’s one of those projects that I never quite got around to, so all of it is still in boxes and envelopes) and go ‘does this portray our relationship in a way that would show us off the best to Immigration Canada’. I think someone out there has a really good government job—where they get to look at all these potential immigrants’ photos and chortle to themselves at the ones which show these poor saps dancing the funky chicken at Aunt Myrtle and Uncle Stan’s Silver Anniversary party (proof that the applicant has met the sponsor’s family), and the cheesy one where the applicant is at Tim Horton’s with a Dutchie in one hand an an extra-large double-double in the other (proof that the applicant has visited Canada on previous occasions).

But seriously, I’m going through all these photos and wonder if what we have is good enough for our application. Doah! Why didn’t I take more photos over the years? But to be honest, we didn’t live our life with the end result of an immigration application, we just kind of experienced it—without necessarily having The Proof that we did it. I guess after I do some more digging I’ll come up with something adequate to attach with our application. But I wish I knew then what I know now about the immigration process. I would’ve taken more photos.

THIS Is The Kind Of Stuff I Like About Canada!

Chinese don kilts, Scots try haggis wonton at Gung Haggis Fat Choy dinner (C’s note—I love the pun!)

AMY CARMICHAEL
Canadian Press

VANCOUVER (CP) - Chinese men don kilts and Scots tuck into haggis wonton in a multi-culti Chinese New Year party for Robbie Burns that began as a gag get-together among university friends and spread like an endless egg noodle.

More than 500 culture vultures in Vancouver have snapped up tickets for the festivities Saturday and Sunday to celebrate the Scottish bard whose day falls at the dawn of the Chinese New Year. Chicken feet, haggis, anything goes at the 12-course fusion feast.

“This is what Canadian society is all about, introducing each other to our cultures and celebrating more holidays,” said organizer Todd Wong.

He was nicknamed Toddish McWong when he relented to pleas from friends in his university’s Burns club to help out with their annual reading. The club gave the fifth-generation Chinese Canadian man a book of Gaelic-spiked poems to recite and a crash course on Scotland’s traditions: men wearing skirts, carrying swords and eating strange foods.

Immediately, Wong was hit by a fascination with all things Scottish. “People, especially Scottish Canadians, thought it was really cool to see a Chinese guy wearing a kilt.”

Near-strangers started giving him books on Scottish lore. He was invited to highland games and introduced around, only to find that many of the competitors had Chinese spouses. “I felt very welcome,” he said. “Everybody called me Toddish McWong.”

So when he was organizing a 1998 Chinese New Year dinner for friends and realized Burns Day fell just two days later, it only made sense to combine the celebrations. A bagpiper was hired and a haggis was prepared as one of the 12 courses in the Chinese feast. Guests celebrated the fusion with poems and songs related to Scottish and Chinese culture. They all agreed a new holiday had been born, Wong said.

“Burns writes about a love for Scotland. He says ‘If you love Scotland give her a haggis!’ I love Canada and I give Canada Gung Haggis Fat Choy,” Wong said laughing. It’s a play on the Chinese phrase Gung Hay Fat Choy, which means Happy New Year.

News of the wacky event spread by word of mouth and numbers have doubled every year. In multicultural Canada, he said, people love to adopt other people’s traditions and really know how to double dip on holidays.

Gung Haggis Fat Choy exposes people to highland dancers, Mandarin singers, Chinese literature and the work of the poet Robert Burns in a fast-paced variety show between courses. A member of the audience is chosen at random to read the ode to the haggis and ranked on how well they can pronounce the words.

Hearing it tackled in a Chinese accent was quite a surprise, said Harry McGrath, curator of Scottish studies at Simon Fraser University and member of the Vancouver Burns Society.

Wong showed up at one of the society’s meetings to convince members to dump their many commitments to readings and pub gatherings for Gung Haggis Fat Choy. “He played the Celtic accordian, wore a kilt and sang Scottish songs,” McGrath said in an amazed and thick Scottish brogue.

McGrath’s curiosity won out and he is now a regular at the event, along with award-winning highland dancers and bagpipers who can make enormous amounts of money on the Burns Day celebration circuit.

In the end, the Scots and Chinese alike appreciated the plum sauce and deep frying of the sharp-tasting haggis, which Wong served in an eggroll. “I think it’s wonderful, this Sino-Caledonian fusion,” McGrath said. “Burns would approve. He believed all men are brothers and his inclusive ideas should be shared beyond cultural boundaries.”

After checking out Chinese New Year parades in passing and wondering what they were all about, McGrath said it’s amazing to be given the chance to participate in the celebration and learn about the symbolism. Wong and Chinese culture expert Beverly Nann are blown away at how mainstream their new year events have become. Both experienced discrimination growing up and kept their traditions to themselves.

“Now everybody is calling me saying Gung Hay Fat Choy! and people on the street, regardless of their background, know what it means,” said Nann, who always attends Wong’s annual dinner.

She said she was happy to learn how similar Chinese and Scottish people are.
“The whole approach to family and clan is the same and when you can relate on that very basic level it really breaks down barriers.”

Wong hopes to roll out the dinner across Canada in hopes of drawing everyone into the new world celebration. “Just imagine if we could get some big stars involved,” he said, dreaming of serving East Coast fiddling star Natalie MacMaster haggis wonton and listening to her play.

Here’s the 12-course menu for the Gung Haggis Fat Choy dinner, with editorial comment provided by organizer Todd Wong.

1. Cold Plate Appetizer with Vegetarian Spring Rolls, Pork Hock, Shredded Jelly Fish. (Shredded Jelly Fish really is sea weed gluten).

2. Hot & Sour Soup. (Warms up the innards on a cold January night. I am sure Burns would approve.)

3 Special Appetizer Surprise. (Take something Scottish, wrap it in something Chinese, create a special Canadian sauce, and serve it to a willing and playful audience that understands the value of multiculturalism and good food innovations.)

4 Beef Lettuce Wrap. (This is always fun. Imagine a hamburger without the bun. Oops… nothing is holding the patty together either.)

5 Lobster and Crab. (The lobster symbolizes the prosperity from the East Coast of Canada, and the Dungeness crab from the West.)

6 Vegetables and Tofu. (I know a lot of Caucasians who detest tofu… Maybe this venerable bean curd staple is the Chinese equivalent of haggis?)

7 Haggis. (You can’t have a Robbie Burns supper without haggis… The first time I tried haggis, I gagged.)

8 Crispy Skin Chicken. (Better than fried chicken and healthier too.)

9 Buddha’s Feast with Mixed Vegetables. (Thin rice vermicelli with mushrooms and vegetable - so called because it is a favourite vegetarian dish for Buddist Monks. It is also a traditional New Year’s fare to bring enlightenment for the coming months.)

10 Fish dish. (The Chinese pronunciation of the word for fish - yee - sounds like the word for coin. It is important for New Year’s dishes to evoke prosperity and wealth.)

11 Special Gung Haggis Fat Choy Fried Rice. (No haggis.)

12 Dessert.

© Copyright 2004 The Canadian Press

Getting it together

The scouring around for evidence begins…

So far we’ve managed to find

• A few flight ticket stubs and boarding passes for the last few years
• A couple of car hire agreements
• At least 1 flight itinerary

Strange what you realise that you need all of a sudden. We need more evidence than that! Luckily we do, of course, have photos of Canada (including the usual tourist trap photo’s of the CN Tower and the Calgary Tower. We also have photos of us at the Stampede which should suffice to show that we have actually been in Canada at some point! ;)

Of course we also have our (actually my, as C is a CDN citizen she doesn’t need to get her passport stamped) passport stamps to show we’ve been in and out of the country.

We’ve also got all our long-distance bills going all the way back to 2000 (not before because I can’t find them though they’re probably around somewhere - we used a different provider before then).

We’re hoping to get everything sorted pretty quickly to send off…

So, Where The Heck Are We Going To Live?

Now that we decided that we are going to move back, we have a slight problem. Canada is a hee—ooge country. Deciding which bit to live can be a bit tricky…we’ve gotta move someplace where there are jobs (Why are you all laughing? The Canadian unemployment situation mustn’t be that bad!), not too big or too expensive—but I don’t think living in the sticks, far away from any decent restaurants would be too appealing either. I found this bit of humour in my inbox from ages back and thought I’d share it. This is the supremely edited version. Maybe some of you have seen the unedited version, but this is a family blog, after all. I was just wondering though, why none of the Northern Territories were mentioned? Gee, I wonder…Hey Dear, we’re going to live in Iqaluit! Like that will go over well, eh! But if anyone else has any other suggestions (seriously) of any possibilities for us, then please comment. And hey, if it degenerates into a ‘my-hometown-is-way-cooler-than-your-hometown’ argument, so be it! Bring it on!

TOP REASONS TO LIVE IN BRITISH COLUMBIA
—Vancouver: 1.5 million people and two bridges.
—The local wine doesn’t taste like malt vinegar.
—Your $400,000 Vancouver home is 5 hours from downtown.
—A university with a nude beach.
—You can throw a rock and hit three Starbucks locations.
—There’s always some sort of deforestation protest going on.

TOP REASONS TO LIVE IN ALBERTA
—The Alberta Seperatist Movement
—Tax is 7 percent instead of approximately 200 per cent
—Flames vs. Oilers
—Stamps vs. Eskies
—You can exploit almost any natural resource you can think of

TOP REASONS TO LIVE IN SASKATCHEWAN
—You never run out of wheat
—Those cool Saskatchewan Wheat Pool hats
—Cruise control takes on a whole new meaning
—Your province is really easy to draw
—You never have to worry about roll-back if you have a standard vehicle
—It takes you two weeks to walk to your neighbor’s house
—You can watch the dog run away from home for hours
—People will assume you live on a farm
—Buying a huge John Deere riding mower makes sense

TOP REASONS TO LIVE IN MANITOBA
—You wake up one morning to find you suddenly have beachfront property
—Amusing town names like “Flin Flon”
—All your local bands make it big and move to Toronto
—The only province to ever violently rebel against the federal government
—Hundreds of huge, horribly frigid lakes
—Nothing compares to a wicked Winnipeg winter
—You can be an Easterner or a Westerner depending on your mood
—Because of your license plate, you are still “friendly” even when you cut someone off

TOP REASONS TO LIVE IN ONTARIO
—You live in the center of the universe
—Your $400,000 Toronto home is actually a dump
—You and you alone decide who will win the federal election
—There’s no such thing as an Ontario Separatist
—Lots of tourists come to Toronto because they mistakenly believe it’s a cool city
—The only province with hard-core American-style crime
—MuchMusic’s Speaker’s Corner - rant and rave on national TV for a dollar
—Baseball fans park on your front lawn

TOP REASONS TO LIVE IN QUEBEC
—Everybody assumes you’ have an attitude
—The only province to ever kidnap federal politicians
—Other provinces basically bribe you to stay in Canada
—Your hockey team was one of THE ORIGINALS
—You can blame all your problems on ‘Those English’.

TOP REASONS TO LIVE IN NEW BRUNSWICK
—One way or another, the government gets 98 percent of your income
—You’re poor, but not as poor as the Newfies
—When listing the provinces, everyone forgets to mention yours
—The economy is based on fish, cows, and ferrying Ontario motorists to Boston
—No one ever blames anything on New Brunswick
—You have French people, but they don’t want to kill you
—Everybody has a Grandfather who runs a lighthouse
—Just as charming as Maine (but with more unemployed fishermen)
—You probably live in a small seaside cottage with no television

TOP REASONS TO LIVE IN NOVA SCOTIA
—The only place in North America to get bombed in the war…by a moron who set a munitions ship on fire
—Everyone is a fiddle player
—If someone asks if you’re a Newfie, you are allowed to kick their butt
—You can pretend you have Scottish heritage as an excuse to wear a kilt
—The economy is based on fish, lobster, and fiddle music
—Even though it smells like dead sea animals, Halifax is considered Canada’s most beautiful city

TOP REASONS TO LIVE ON PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND
—Even though more people live on Vancouver Island, you still got the butt-kicking bridge
—You can walk across the province in half an hour
—You were probably once an extra on “Road to Avonlea”
—This is where all those tiny red potatoes come from
—The economy is based on fish, potatoes, and CBC TV shows
—Tourists arrive, see the “Anne of Green Gables” house, then promptly leave
—You can drive across the province in two minutes
—It doesn’t matter to you if Quebec separates
—You don’t share a border with the Americans, or with anyone for that matter.
—You can confuse ships by turning your porch lights on and off at night

TOP REASONS TO LIVE IN NEWFOUNDLAND
—If Quebec Separates, you will float off to sea
—In the rare case when someone moves to the Rock, you can make them kiss a dead cod
—The economy is based on fish, seafood, and fish-related products
—You understand the meaning of Great Big Sea’s lyrics
—The work day is about two hours long
—You are credited with many great inventions, like the solar-powered
flashlight and the screen door for submarines
—If someone asks if you’re from Nova Scotia, you are allowed to kick their butt.
—It is socially acceptable to wear your hip waders on your wedding
day

Another Decision

In the post below Carla says that if, by some small miracle, I do manage to get a half-decent job then we’ll probably put off emigrating quite so soon.

We made a decision last night whereby that even if I DO manage to get something (some recruiters are telling me the market is picking up) we’re still going to go through with it. Reason being that the timeline for moving this year is amazingly tight as everything takes a while to get. 40 days for the conviction history for example. Up to easily 6 months or so for the actual visa. This puts us at the back end of the year anyway, possibly September or so. Once I get the visa then we have 12 months to travel anyway and why move in Winter? That would be nuts.

So, if this year is unmanageable due to time restraints then it’ll be Spring or Summer ‘05 instead. I don’t think that’s too much of a loss in reality. It gives C (and me) a bit more time over here to explore a little (it’s pretty sad that we’ve never popped over to Europe given the price of flying these days) and if I do get a better job then it means we can save some money as well. The UK pound is worth well over $2.20 CAD at the moment so the more we have from over here the better.

The Decision

So, how did we come to such a big decision about moving back? It wasn’t easy and I’m having to pinch myself on a daily basis; ‘Did we actually make this decision?’. My work colleagues don’t know about this yet. (So instead, I just go and share this news with a zillion other people in my blogs!) I guess because if, by some faint miracle, G gets a job, then the move will be put off for a while and if I tell people that it’s happening before it’s a sure thing, then I’ll look really stupid. But we’re working toward the goal of moving back, there’s a lot of behind-the-scences prep work that we need to do before we actually say ‘Right, let’s make this Official’. We’ve started to fix up our house as cheaply as possible in order to get it saleable. We wanted to fix it up anyway but there’s no point doing stuff like laminate floors when we won’t be around to enjoy it. Let the new owners do that. We are currently in the niddle of tiling our kitchen (it’s never been done since we got our new kitchen a year and a half ago, so we figure naked cement walls are never attractive to a potential buyer) and we’ll give this place a complete paint job at some point. We’ve begun to look at filling in the immigration pack and putting together our portfolio of evidence that we need. We’ve started to go through our posessions and chuck out what we don’t need and give other things, that we’re not that attached to, to charity. We’ve put a spending moratoreum on extras (painful as that is) that we may just have to pack back anyway. So we’ve started the letting-go process.

To be honest, we’ve never felt settled here in Warrington. We haven’t found a good church or haven’t got to know our neighbours very well or felt the sense of community that we thought we would. Goodness knows we’ve tried though. Ever since we were married we had the goal of moving back to Canada (preferably to a smaller town, not a huge city) because the lifestyle is more relaxed, there’s more space and we feel that there’s more opportunity for us there. Contrary to what some people might think, it’s NOT because I miss Tim Horton’s and Dairy Queen Blizzards that much!

But dangit, England has grown on me. This was my first home since we were married and I (mostly) have enjoyed living in another country. I wanted to get out of my small hometown and expand my horizons and yeah, I guess I can say I definitely did that! Letting go will be harder than I thought, though. I can’t imagine how G feels at saying goodbye to his home country. This isn’t even like moving across the country because we literally have to start over again with no furniture (it’s better to sell it here than pay the extortionate shipping costs for it) and creating a new home from scratch. Now that we have made the tentative decision to go back for real (not just ‘at some point’) I feel kind of sad and feel that my time here is not quite finished. But on the other hand, I feel it is. And I’ve got to try to let go.

Prosecution and Conviction letter

Part of emigrating to Canada if you’re a UK citizen (actually a subject but that’s a thought for another time and another blog) is getting your Prosecution and Conviction History from the police.

Actually getting this information is pretty easy due to the Data Protection Act 1998. The Documentation that you get from CHC Mississauga actually states that you need to request your information under section 21 of the Data Protection Act 1994, this is incorrect. The DPA 1994 was repealed by 1998’s version. I believe the correct section to be Chapter 29, Part II, Section 7 of the DPA 1998.

I did, of course, only look this up once I’d actually sent the letter requesting my history to be sent to me. Never mind, I’m sure they’ll get a chuckle from it if nothing else…

The address to write to to get your Prosecution and Conviction History is

Metropolitan Police
Subject Access Office
10 Broadway
London
United Kingdom
SW1H 0BG

Once you’ve sent your letter (recorded delivery of course so you can prove it arrived) the Police have 40 days to return the information. So, if you’re putting your case together to emigrate you’re better off doing this sooner rather than later.

All the legwork is done up-front for a spousal application, so once you’ve got all the evidence and paperwork together it’s a reasonably simple process to send it all to the Canadian authorities and wait…

We’re nowhere near finished putting the case together yet but we’re giving ourselves a month or two to do it, just so we make 110% absolutely sure that everything they could possibly want is in there so once we submit there are no silly delays due to them not having some information.

We’ll see.