Discrimination and the Search for Self
Inside and outside the kitchen
I wasn’t born here. My first memories are in a different country with a different culture with different-looking people speaking a different language. You grew up here. You grew up believing you belong. You’re able to walk around being yourself without any fear. I see you laughing at work, not caring about the minorities around you working hard. I envy you.
I want to be myself, but I don’t even know who I am. I had to change myself to fit in with you. I had to change myself so I wouldn’t get laughed at, so that I wouldn’t be called smelly. So that I wasn’t like the pictures of those men on the news who were on those planes. One of them even had my name and I was ashamed and scared. I still say my name too softly for anyone to hear it the first time, and then they repeat it wrong and it confirms their contempt for me, and so I give them a shortened version or I spell it out for them so that they say their version of it and I agree. I become who they want me to be.
I am mud forced into shape by a boot sole. I can change. I can like who you like, hate who you hate, even hate my own people, hate myself, anything, just to fit in.
Early life
I moved to Toronto from Pakistan when I was 7 years old. I remember speaking with a thick accent and being made fun of.
One day after school, a kid from the 5th grade asked me where I was from, I replied with “It’s a very bad place . . .” referring to government corruption and poor living conditions. “I come from Pakistan,” I said. He laughed and responded with “Eww! You stink!!” The crowd of kids around us laughed at me too.
Ever since, my accent and my name resulted in bullying. This cemented my belief that where I was from must be something terrible and that I had to hide it at all costs. If I told someone where I was from, it would lead to isolation. So I hid. I lied about my heritage, my culture, saying I was Spanish, I was Middle-Eastern, or anything vague to avoid specifying the country.
In the kitchen
On a Friday morning, an hour into my shift, I slice red onions for a bean salad. My mug of coffee sits steaming next to my cutting board. The chef, Ricardo, a skinny Scottish man born here who claims to have Peruvian heritage, stands across from me preparing a shallot vinaigrette. Ricardo has a shaved head and tattoos of vegetables on his arms.
We discuss all our complaints with the building: how the uneven floor leads to back pain and bad knees, the fact that the owners keep adding more items to our menu without taking any items away, how they extend business hours without hiring more staff, how expensive it is to live in the city, the cost of a carton of eggs.
The owner/head chef walks in and we all exchange pleasantries. He has tattoos of roses and plays hockey. “How was the night?” he asks. We tell him all the great things we were able to do during service, the fact that sales are up.
None of what we were just talking about before he walked into the kitchen is discussed.
Ricardo turns to the owner, Rob, and says, “So, I let the dishwasher go yesterday.”
“I heard about that.” Rob replies, “What happened?”
The new dishwasher
The dishwasher was a Moroccan man, about my age, who barely spoke English but I was able to communicate with him in my mediocre French. He ran marathons professionally. He worked pretty fast and this was definitely not his first dishwashing gig.
One day during his shift, I noticed he was missing so I went to look for him. When I went down to the concrete basement near the bathrooms, I saw him praying on a bed of kitchen rags. I was shocked. I immediately went back upstairs.
My reaction came from a place of fear. Syed was praying in the basement, in full view of every employee passing by.
I had spent decades hiding my culture, and here was this man who was not afraid of who he was. He needed to pray, and that’s exactly what he did, and no one at work seemed to mind either. It made me reflect on my reluctance to speak about and show where I was from. Maybe people didn’t care that I was Pakistani anymore, maybe it was okay to be who I was. I had a great deal of respect for the dishwasher.
Casual othering
Ricardo continued to explain his decision to fire Syed: “He didn’t finish cleaning his station at the end of the night and when he was putting back some trays, he dropped some chicken cutlets and just picked them up off the floor like nothing happened. I tried to tell him, this is not how we do things, and he didn’t seem to listen.”
“So, you texted him saying he’s fired?” Rob replied.
Ricardo said, “Yeah, and he replied telling me he enjoyed working here and that I’m an evil, angry man, that I’m not a nice man at all.” He laughed, “I think he hates me.”
Rob responded, “Well hopefully he doesn’t come back and run a Jihad on you.”
They both laugh. I continue cutting onions. I let out a chuckle. I want to put my knife down, grab my things and leave. I feel othered, again. I feel unseen and alone. I want to scream. I want to tell my bosses, coworkers, and friends, that this is exactly why I’ve suppressed my culture. Comments like that are what reassure me that although we all joke together, in a fraction of a second, all of that camaraderie is gone, erased. They’ve reinstated the otherness that separates us in this kitchen. I am an immigrant working in a kitchen of Caucasian cooks.
I went down to the bathroom and allowed myself to cry.
Trying not to be alone
I suppose it’s the immigrant experience. I am in a place where I’m expected to learn the rules, language, and culture to fit in. A place that prides itself on diversity and multiculturalism.
I understand that the people who bully those who are different, do so to join the majority around them who are also throwing punches: sometimes with their words, sometimes with clenched fists. We’re all trying to be part of a community. We’re all trying not to be alone.
I try and envision myself in my chef's shoes. What it must be like to walk into a room and truly believe, in your bones, that you belong there. To be confident in the fact that you will not face any sort of racism due to your appearance, your name, your accent, or the food you grew up eating. To have never changed yourself to fit in. To have never changed so much of yourself that you don’t even know who you are anymore.
I’m working on coming back to myself. I want to be able to call people out during moments of racism. I want to have the self-worth to believe I’m allowed to show anger in the face of ignorance. Whatever my sense of self will become — maybe my child self — I hope he’s able to let go of the fear and be confident that he belongs.
For more stories about diversity and acceptance, follow Fourth Wave. Have you got a story or poem that focuses on women or other disempowered groups? Submit to the Wave!
