“The lens of resistance is no longer there…it just feels like it’s trying to be ‘nice’.”

“If only our Chinatown youth were as sharp and radical.”

“That Chinese Canadian youth art show was just…emotional self-gratification.”

Something has shifted in Chinese diasporic organizing in Canada. Things feel nicer, more polite, more self-serving, more psychologized, more about individualized feelings than political or structural change.

I’ve read countless stories about the pain of not being able to communicate with one’s grandmother due to language barriers, relying on gestures instead. Or the classic tales of “stinky” foods that are gross to the unaccustomed noses of white kids, but a pungent, nostalgic sign of home. Stories of restaurant kids, translator kids, kids whose parents forced them to go to Chinese school, or forced them to speak English only, but who still showed care with cut fruit, not “I love you”.

It’s the “disorientation” narrative Christopher Cheung names in his book, Under the White Gaze, a deeply familiar arc of racialized youth grappling with their cultural identities within white society. This narrative has become mainstream through stories like Everything Everywhere All at Once, Kim’s Convenience, Fresh Off the Boat, Beef, and Turning Red. These are now the dominant forms of what counts as “Asian representation.”

Even in spaces that are supposed to be grassroots and social justice-oriented, it feels like Chinese diasporic consciousness stops there. The familiar arc reappears in new packaging, maybe dressed up with social justice phrases, but ultimately still rooted in the same framework of feeling lost or out of place and disconnected from one’s cultural identity or an unwillingness to engage with it at all. Critical analysis of our identities, of our communities, or our relations with other communities and with the broader socio-political world feels increasingly absent.

It makes me wonder: What changed?

I’ve been combing through old issues of Asianadian, a pan-Asian Canadian youth publication from the 70s whose mission included things like “providing a forum for Asian Canadian writers, artists, musicians,” but also “standing up against distortions of our history in Canada, stereotypes, economic exploitation, and the general tendency towards injustice and inequality practiced on minority groups.”

And they really leaned in. In the first issue, they ran a searing review of a book on Japanese and Chinese Canadian history that didn’t mince words calling out Patricia Roy and her white academic contemporaries for their narrow “Western viewpoint.” Another issue awarded a “Dubious Award” to the white-owned “New Chinese Village” restaurant for running a highly Orientalizing ad in The Globe and Mail. Interracial relationships, sexuality, cultural stigmas, immigration precarity, intracommunity conflicts are articulated and interrogated out in the open. Histories were critically re-examined through the eyes of the racialized for the record.

That kind of boldness is rare now. Critiques and commentary like those barely surface anymore in Chinese diasporic organizing in Canada. Today, white scholars like Patricia Roy are respected as elders in the field of Asian Canadian history. Orientalizing, gentrifying restaurants and businesses are embraced and even promoted. Community tensions are avoided, and difficult topics are often smoothed over in aesthetically pleasing, emotionally soothing art and poetry. Histories are glossed over and left unexamined in the name of decentering and cohesion. 

Instead of naming gentrifiers for the harm they cause in neighbourhoods like Chinatown, people often spend more time trying to build relationships with them to help them redeem themselves through philanthropy and partnerships. Rather than taking a clear political stance and holding it, people find ways to stay “neutral” or sit comfortably in contradiction. And instead of taking immediate action to challenge the status quo, people would rather spend years sitting in committees creating policy documents that are destined to gather dust.

I’ve even been questioned by leftist youth for publicly critiquing a white woman who opened a business in Chinatown styled as an “outpost” with colonial aesthetics, while being told to tone down my rhetoric on calling out racism in an Orientalizing French band called “Chinese Man” that featured yellow face in their music videos.

What made the youth of yesteryears more bold in their being?

Perhaps the Asian youth of the 60s and 70s lived in a radical era of Third World solidarity, where people of colour across North America raised their voices amid overwhelming geopolitical oppressions directly tied to their families, personal histories, and identities, making the struggle deeply immediate and lived, not theoretical and distant. This period also sparked a new desire to define an Asian Canadian identity, similar to Asian Americanness, where people felt compelled to ask: What does it mean to be Asian in a white colonial country?

Perhaps this was a coming of consciousness for a generation born after overt periods of anti-Asian oppression like the Chinese Exclusion Act and Japanese incarceration during WWII. A time when youth, now grown up, could tell their family and community stories honestly for the first time.

Why have we withdrawn?

Maybe it’s because we think the work of defining what it means to be diasporic Chinese in Canada is already done. We believe we’ve figured ourselves out, and now it’s time to focus on passing the platform to others without critical reflection. It’s like a rush to participate in a settler race to innocence, as if making ourselves more invisible could absolve us from settler guilt and the need to interrogate our being in the world more deeply.

Or maybe we feel that overt critique of settler colonial society is no longer urgent because land acknowledgments have become plentiful and reconciliation is written in civic policy. And that the evolution of white settler mentality has become ingrained in our very beings, identities, and communities, making it harder to interrogate ourselves and our communities for fear of discomfort and disruption of our own settled minds and bodies.

Or maybe the media landscape today, where attention is measured by likes and follows, nudges people to appeal to general audiences hungry for friendlier, more “accessible,” and more comfortable language and entry points. So politics gets reduced and distilled to carousel slides to appease the algorithms. Organizing becomes branding. Radicalism becomes a vibe. Activism, a vehicle. Popularity, the goal.

Or maybe the rise of the therapy industry has over-indexed emotional processing and self-care at the expense of political critique and collective resistance. While self-care is important, and can be a companion to organizing, it is not the destination. Individual healing is part of the process of community care, but it alone does not drive structural change. Societal transformation might start in the therapy room, but does not end there. Systemic problems aren’t going to be solved by sitting in the therapist’s chair. When I bring my community organizing struggles to my therapist, she sometimes reminds me, rather bluntly: “Well, that’s just society.” It’s a grounding reminder that changes within me won’t necessarily shift what happens outside of me.

Some may point to the non-profit industrial complex as the culprit. The never-ending cycle of grant applications, budgets, board meetings, and management reviews that make people more complicit, more busy, and less attentive as they run on the nonprofit hamster wheel. But I would argue that being a registered organization shouldn’t make you more pacified. If anything, with access to people, resources, money, and relative stability, you should be more capable of leaning into radical action — to take what’s long been talked about and finally transform it into tangible change.

Of course, this isn’t to say that resistance doesn’t exist. It does, in pockets of anti-imperialist resistance, tenant organizing, labour organizing, sex worker rights, and harm reduction. But the courage to take public risks, the willingness to challenge both systems and our own communities, to name wrongs openly, to stand firmly behind moral stances, is fading in the name of representation, safety, and peace. 

But when a young person asks if it’s okay to wear a keffiyeh at a Chinatown event; when people tell me to be patient with patriarchy; when grassroots spaces stall, insisting “change takes time”; when “safety” is misused as a shield for small nonprofits to deflect critique; when those who once opposed gentrification now tangle with gentrifiers; when memory institutions resemble art galleries more than critical educators of history — something has shifted.

When radical movements become charities complicit with the forces they once resisted; when solidarity turns into feel-good neo-multiculturalism and parroted slogans detached from real people and real struggles; when organizing becomes more about personal advancement than collective transformation — the plot is being lost.

Still, there are glimmers of hope. In an age of rising conservatism, there seems to be a new generation of leftist Asian American youth stepping up in renewed resolve and sharper resistance politics for their communities. 

In New York City, Youth Against Displacement holds a weekly picket outside the Museum of Chinese in America, calling out the museum’s acceptance of what is described as a bribe to support a city-backed jail project in Chinatown that the local community has long opposed. 

Meanwhile, Asian 4 Palestine NYC marched a green and black Chinese lion, a powerful cultural symbol, in the annual Lunar New Year Parade, to unapologetically express solidarity with Palestine, while publicly naming and shaming prominent Asian leaders who endorse Zionism.

In D.C., amid a city-led “revitalization” plan targeting their Chinatown, SaveChinatownDC is pushing back loudly against restaurant evictions by developers at city meetings and staging protests at grand openings of gentrifying businesses. 

In Philadelphia, the Save Chinatown Coalition, anchored by the API Political Alliance and Asian Americans United, rose up to defeat the proposed 76ers arena by occupying City Hall chambers, building unexpected coalitions, risking arrest and retaliation.

In San Francisco, the Asian Law Caucus is enabling Chinese tenants to boldly fight for their rights in their own language and on their own terms. And across the board, progressive Asian organizations in the U.S. are organizing against Trump-era ICE raids and the broader criminalization of immigrant communities.

Maybe it takes overwhelming external pressure for resistance to spark. And in the absence of it, critical consciousness becomes quieted, contained, even elusive. Like a muscle that shrinks when it bears no pressure.

Whatever the reasons, something vital feels like it’s fading in Chinese Canadian diasporic spaces. Not just resistance, but the courage to confront discomfort and reject neutrality. The will to name what is unjust outright without flinching. The drive to imagine and create bold visionary futures instead of circling endlessly around the same safe corners. 

And when we become withdrawn, we need to ask: Are we defeated?