Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 219: Almost Brown — with Charlotte Gill
Speakers: Steve Tornes, Am Johal, Charlotte Gill
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Steve Tornes 0:02
Hello listeners! I am Steve Tornes with Below the Radar, a knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.
On this episode of Below the Radar, our host Am Johal is joined by Charlotte Gill, creative writing instructor at University of King’s College, and author of the books, Ladykiller and Eating Dirt. Charlotte reads from her latest book, Almost Brown, and shares her experience of growing up as a mixed-race child in a multi-cultural and religious household. We hope you enjoy the episode!
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Am Johal 0:45
Thank you so much for joining us again this week on Below the Radar. We have a very special guest with us today, Charlotte Gill. Welcome, Charlotte.
Charlotte Gill 0:54
Hi, thank you so much for having me.
Am Johal 0:56
Yeah, Charlotte, I'm wondering if we can begin with you introducing yourself a little bit.
Charlotte Gill 1:01
Yes, I am a writer of fiction and narrative non-fiction. I am currently living in qathet within the ancestral territory of the Tla'amin Nation. I was born in London, England to a Sikh father and an English mother, and most recently, I am the author of a book called Almost Brown, a mixed-race family memoir.
Am Johal 1:25
Well, Charlotte, it's been great to speak with you again, and we were just talking—before you did an event at SFU over a decade ago about one of your previous books. And before we talk about your current book that's out now, wondering if you can speak a little bit about your previous books. You had a collection of short stories, Ladykiller, and your book, Eating Dirt, on your life as a tree planter.
Charlotte Gill 1:47
Okay, so I'll go all the way back to the ancient history, it feels like, of Ladykiller, which was my first book, a collection of short stories. They are set, for the most part, actually, in Vancouver. I lived in Vancouver for about 25 years and then moved to the upper Sunshine Coast. I think right around when my second book was published, which I'll get to. And I always thought that I would be a fiction writer for the rest of my career and then somewhere along the line, I just fell into this realm of creative nonfiction, which is where I've gone for the last two books. And although I really deeply love fiction, and I have been writing and publishing short fiction in smaller forms ever since then, I have mostly written books in the form of narrative non-fiction, which is works that tell a factual story, but they also have a really prominent storytelling element, which was the approach I took with my second book, Eating Dirt.
It is a tree planting memoir and it covers the 17 years that I spent working in the forests of British Columbia, as, basically, an industrial scale landscaper. I planted trees, a million of them, all over the province and in other provinces in Canada as well. And really felt as if I had never read that story before. I had never really heard about tree planters out there in anything other than, you know, very short magazine articles, often written by people who were not part of our community.
So that's really where I started my non-fiction journey and now I have moved on to something quite a bit more personal and intimate. It's a family story. It's about my siblings, my parents, growing up in a mixed-race family, and you know, that has been a completely different adventure.
Am Johal 3:44
So your new book, Almost Brown, it will have been out a few months by the time this episode comes out and so let's start with where it came from, the impetus to write this story, you know, were you hoping to write a book like this for some time? How did you find yourself on this project in particular?
Charlotte Gill 4:03
I have a lot of writer friends, and many of them have written memoirs about childhood and family. And I think one thing we all say we have in common is that these stories are sort of rattling around in our brains almost from the moment we start writing our first pages. And maybe it's a question of, you know, how am I going to tell the story or when would be the right time to tell this story, but in a way, the material always kind of lives with us. And I think my story that I wrote about was slightly different in the sense that it really goes back to the story of my parents meeting, which was kind of the genesis of our very unusual family, even if I didn't realize when I was a child that we had an unusual family.
My parents met in the 60s in London. They were both in medical school and my father had emigrated to the United Kingdom to go to medical school and he met my mother there who was very white, very British. My father was very brown, very Sikh, wearing a turban. And he was, you know, a man from a former colony who fell in love with somebody who under normal circumstances would have been kind of completely inaccessible to him. And this really set off like a whole cascade of other events that really shifted and changed the shape of both of their lives and really influenced the formation of the family they would produced.
Am Johal 5:37
It's a really beautifully written book, first of all Charlotte, and anyone who's grown up in a South Asian community or a diasporic piece—I just saw my parents this weekend, as well—it's always a complicated, each family story, so, so complicated. Wondering if you could speak a little bit to the migration story of your grandfather in terms of him going to Kenya, and your father from Punjab to Kenya to the UK, first of all.
Charlotte Gill 6:07
I should really back up and say that I never met my paternal grandparents and this is almost entirely due to the fact that my father experienced quite a giant rift and estrangement with his family when he married my mother. It was not what he was expected to do at the time. He was expected to, like many a good Indian boy, return back to the family household and get married as he should and have children as he should. But he sort of threw that script right out the window, and totally started over by marrying my mother. So I really had no tangible, direct relationship with my grandparents, my grandparent's history. In fact, my father didn't really talk about it all that much, because I think he found it quite painful to go back—to rewind the tape. So a lot of it, I sort of pieced together from talking to, you know, this whole sea of cousins that I have, and kind of piecing together fragments of stories that had been told.
My grandfather left Punjab, a little village in the north, for East Africa. At the time, it was the East Africa Protectorate and it was run by the British at the time. He probably left when he was a young teenager, something like around 14/15/16. I don't think my grandfather knew exactly how old he was, which was pretty common for the day. And he sailed across the ocean and landed in East Africa. And there—he really got a start there, he was probably an indentured labourer, although I don't think he would have described himself that way. But I think if history has anything to say, about the patterns of migration between India and Africa, it's almost certain that he was an indentured labourer, coming alone at the age of 14 without parents.
So he settled there. It was a colony at the time. He sort of established himself over a number of years. Married my grandmother, who he returned to India to marry. And then they had, you know, this whole brood of children. My father was the eldest. And then when my father came of age, he decided that it would be perhaps a good idea to go to the UK and to study medicine. And he received a scholarship from the government in the UK at the time, because they were, you know, really funding an influx of doctors into the country because the new medical health service had been formed there. So my father was part of that lucky wave. And so right at that moment, when my father left his roots and then started a new life in the UK, is really where my story begins and where the book starts.
Am Johal 9:02
And the relationship between tradition and change, particularly for those forced into diaspora, is quite a common theme in diasporic stories—how the old and the new intersect, the challenge of leaving a family across borders, the inherited aspects of culture, what to carry, what to leave behind. And I'm wondering—in of course this impacts generations down the line as well and as certainly part of the story that you share, and I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit to those inherited, the upbringings and culture, the inherited weight of both of your father and mother in terms of how you've tried to come to terms with it in the book?
Charlotte Gill 9:48
You know, I think there are so many different versions of the diaspora. Probably there are some very common themes. I think that in retrospect, we kind of think of our family histories as something that was designed or that happened according to a plan but probably a lot of it happened by accident or by fluke or someone was generous. And these really, these little pivot points kind of really influence where people end up in the world. You know, when I dug a little deeper, I started to see some of those little fulcrum points that have sort of springboarded my parents from one place to another. You know, my parents came from—they were different kinds of immigrants. You know, my mother had come from the UK. When she landed in Canada, of course, she would have been surrounded by many people who would also emigrated from the UK, but when my father arrived in the early 70s, there weren't that many South Asians in Canada, and it would have been a—definitely a more isolated experience than it is today, you know, when there are something like over a million South Asians in the Greater Toronto Area alone.
So I think the one thing that they had in common is that they had both come from, in many ways, very traditional, kind of conservative backgrounds. My mother was Catholic, Roman Catholic, and she had come from a fairly conservative family. And my father, of course, had—was informed by the values of his parents who had kind of arrived from the village in the years before partition. In many ways, that culture had been sort of frozen in time, you know what I mean? And on the one hand, I think that they were very different culturally speaking, and they sort of shared this emotional understatement, this conservatism. And then, of course, you have that classic thing that happens to families who emigrate where, you know, you have old traditions, old values that become very important to the parent's generation, the first-gen immigrants, but then of course, they go on to have kids who are second and third-gen. And they introduce an element of, certainly in my case, kind of chaos into the situation, because, you know, of course, everything is new about North American culture and, you know, that, that further complicates and enlivens things in a household.
Am Johal 12:22
Wondering if you'd be willing to read a passage.
Charlotte Gill 12:26
I think I'm going to read a passage from a chapter that is fairly early on in the book, it's called Limbo. And it's about this negotiation that my parents had between what religion would be practiced in their household because, you know, of course, they came from two entirely different religions that have had in many ways conflicted, historically speaking, but I don't know if they had ever really discussed how that would shake out in our family life. And what my father decided was that he really wanted nothing to do with us going to church. And that is essentially where we started our spiritual education. I'm going to read briefly from that.
We learned about the afterlife from TV, a verboten device as decreed by our father, even though he watched it himself. As did we. We stopped before the screen at point-blank range, soaking up its blue rays with copious abandon whenever he was out of the house. Hell was depicted in our favorite cartoons, a place with trapdoors that opened to underground caverns of soot and torment. And here guilty dogs and cats were boiled alive in cauldrons, or lowered into blazing conflagrations, each flame alive, animated, and diabolically sentient. It was just like the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden—true learning, it seemed, was always tied to a hidden crime.
Christmas was followed by mysterious, unnamed rituals, secretly honored by our mother. She quietly returned to the house with dabs of ash on her forehead, or wizened palm fronds given as favors from some kind of grave event she had attended without us, all on her own.
By then her mother had been forced to reveal a disturbing tenet. To get into heaven, you had to be baptized, a rite involving blessings and the dribbling of holy water over a baby's forehead. This water was extra special, according to my interpretation—heavy, steeped in magic. Our mother had been the recipient of this mystical rite, but we had not been, according to our father's wishes. What would happen to us, then?
We found out that there was yet another realm for cases such as ours. We were destined for a floating space in between heaven and hell that was neither good nor bad, like a waiting room in forever, which, although obviously better than hell, still did not sound like much of a party at all. If we were very, very good, limbo was the best we could hope for.
Am Johal 15:16
Beautiful. There's a real tenderness in the book and how you speak about your family and walk through the complexity of it and you also—you joyfully describe your 70s and 80s upbringing with Reagan in politics, TV dinners and cereals. This is, I think we're roughly the same age so this, this I totally know this and remember this myself, and wondering if you could share a little bit about that? You described it as a kind of free range childhood.
Charlotte Gill 15:48
Yeah, yeah, I grew up in the 70s and 80s. And, you know, the way my parents approached parenting was probably totally common and usual in some ways for the time. And then in other ways, you know, completely unusual. For this book, I had an editor who is quite a bit younger than me. And I found myself—she would often point out places in the text where, you know, my brother and I were sort of out on our own as kids or I would be dissecting certain animals in biology class when I was really quite young, and she would say, “this seems like you are much older than you should be in this part of the story.” But I feel as if, yeah, we oftentimes just sort of had free rein of the town that we lived in. We walked to school from the time I was—as long as I can remember, from the time I was in kindergarten beyond, I don't think my parents even knew how we got to school, to be honest. I don't think they knew where we went on our bikes and on foot. We kind of roamed everywhere. I don't think they knew where we went until it was time to come home for dinner. But that was fairly standard at the time, I think.
You know, where it became unusual, is that my parents were, in many ways—although they had come from the 60s, which was a very radical time, you know, the moment of their meeting, I think they had been in many ways kind of swept up in the moment of what was possible socially and even politically. But they—once they arrived in North America, I think they sort of leaned back pretty heavily on some of their more traditional ways of doing things. And so, you know, for them to have these children in the house, I think they worried that we were going to turn into these grass-stained barbarians, who had no table manners and didn't know how to do math. You know, it's probably not far off from how it actually turned out in the end anyway. But I think that they were concerned by just how different we were, culturally speaking. And, as I said before, I think this is sort of the classic conflict between first and second generation immigrants.
Am Johal 18:04
You speak very tenderly, in—particularly in terms of the writing in how you describe your relationship with your father. And having Punjabi parents myself, there's so many nuances and strangenesses to it. Whenever I run into my father, he tells me I shouldn't be a pound over 185. The problem is I'm 230 and also, he shouldn't really be saying that, but this is just the kinds of things you just get used to, having Punjabi parents, that they just go into places that are just entirely bizarre. But wondering if you could speak a little bit to the complexity of the relationship with your father that is a big part of this book, in many ways.
Charlotte Gill 18:47
Yeah. So I mean, a lot of this book, I describe what it was like growing up with my dad, and what it was like having a brown man for parent who had come from such a traditional upbringing, but at the same time, you know, was in so many ways, a man of the Western world. I think he embraced it with both arms, even if it didn't always love him back. He was just the most eccentric, wonderful person, even in the way he dressed, the way that he spoke, he was just very loud and very extra all of the time. And he still is.
But when I was a child, and especially when I was an adolescent, I felt that many of his philosophies of life were kind of retrograde, especially when he approached the parenting of his daughters and his son in completely different ways. And I think I perceived very early how gendered that some of these more conservative ways of parenting could be, and I did not like it one little bit. So eventually, you know, I had a lot of conflict with my dad, in part because we are very alike, and I am definitely his daughter. But also we had clashes over values, about what was appropriate in the—in a modern world, and you know, how life should be lived by anyone, really. So we clashed a lot and that conflict eventually turned into, you know, a full on rift and then an estrangement that lasts for two decades, actually. And it wasn't until…
Am Johal 20:29
Which by Punjabi standards is very short.
[laughs]
Charlotte Gill 20:33
You're actually very, you're very right. I try and explain the nature of these blood grudges in the community and just how serious they can be. And in fact, my father and I replicated a grudge that he himself had had with his own father. So this was not all that unusual. And yet, to have an estrangement that lasts that long with the parent really, totally changes the shape of your adulthood. And if you reconcile, which eventually I did with my dad, to great effect. We hang out all the time and are great friends now. That relationship is forever changed because of the length of time you have spent apart. You know, you don't know what has happened to that person during this period of mutual absence. So, I really approached the story, wanting to write about not only what it was like to have conflict with a parent, and to probe and explore that, but also to write about the possibility of reparation, or to overcome that estrangement and to move into new territory, into something else.
Am Johal 21:45
Obviously, this is a really intimate and personal book in the way that you talk about the estrangement with your father during that period of time, the various layers of dissonance, but also tenderness, frustration, the kind of exhaustive begrudging love that emerges after that. For you as a writer, what kind of a toll does it take, you know, emotionally to write such a personal book, because it's obviously sitting inside you and it's not the easiest thing to put out into the public realm. You know, there's a, there's a lot of stakes in the book when you write such a personal story.
Charlotte Gill 22:25
These are all really excellent questions and I would be lying if I said I had a definitive answer to any of them, or one that would last forever, and that I wouldn't have to renegotiate until I wrote something else that was personal. I feel as if probably many a memoirist kind of grapples with these things. There's an incredible sense of fear going into a project like this, where you sense and feel there is a lot to say, but as a writer, maybe I'm not so sure about how I'm going to approach it or how I'm going to begin to peel the layers back. But the nice thing about writing is, of course, you—as a writer, I don't have to dive in and go deep right away. I come back to this thing over the years, and I start on the surface, and then maybe I come back a couple months later, or a couple of weeks later, and I peel another layer back and another layer back. And eventually, I find a kind of equilibrium in that, and also a sense of fairness.
I knew pretty early on, after I started, that I really didn't have any interest in writing a story that was sort of trapped in its own bitterness or resentment. I feel as if there was certainly a lot of tragedy in the story of my parent's marriage and, you know, ultimately, its collapse. But there was also a ton of comedy too and it would be unfair of me to write a story like this and only deal with one side of that thing. So, in many ways, I just sort of naturally gravitated to comedy as a mode of telling some of these stories, because, on the one hand, yes, they—I do deal with some very serious and heavy subject matter sometimes. But on the other hand, these were hilarious times to me as a child, and they were very funny to my siblings as well. And I sort of started from there. I started from a place of wanting to be fair.
And also realizing that, you know, one side of conflict, which I think we're naturally attracted to as readers—I think we feel like we have not been given something that's true and real, unless we can really see how people negotiate their problems together as a collective, in ways that are sometimes very difficult. It feels as if it's glossed over. But I really wanted to deal with forgiveness as well as that conflict. I felt as if I wanted to go even further, to see how far I could get just [by] understanding that my parents, both of them, were very well-meaning, flawed people who were born to well-meaning, flawed people. And I don't have children myself, but if I did, I would also be that same well-meaning, but flawed person.
Am Johal 25:26
There's a part that you wrote in the book and by the way, I'm really happy that you mentioned the comedy because I laughed out loud more than a few times because of just the particularities of being raised by a Punjabi parent but also other moments that you describe in the 70s and the 80s as well. I also really loved how you spoke about airports. You're talking about, in a way, the flattening of identity that happens. I'm someone—I like to go to the airport, like four or five hours before my flight because I love just hanging out. I like having long layovers between the flights, but my partner likes to arrive at the very last minute. So whenever we're flying together, we have this argument about what time we need to be at the airport, because I prefer the time in them, but wondering if you could speak a little bit to this zone of being behind security at the airport and what it does and how it flattens out identities?
Charlotte Gill 26:24
Well, I think that that's a natural law, by the way that when a romance happens, one person must be an early bird and one person must want to fly by the seat of their pants on fire. So I completely get that. I'm in one of those relationships myself. I am the person who flies by the seat of their pants. Absolutely. I find myself in airports a lot. I like them too, I think oddly. We might be the only two people in the world who really like airports.
I sort of like that crackle of possibility and the way that the world seems to intersect in an airport, the way it doesn't really do that in many other parts of life. I mean, there's always somebody who is on their home turf, wherever you go, but an airport is just this place of anonymous non-belonging. And they fascinate me because although they're meant to be sort of blank, where everything is flattened, there's still like thousands of signifiers floating around all the time. And, you know, who, who belongs there and who's just barely allowed to be there, and, you know, what, people kind of pass very early—easily through the turnstiles and what other people, you know, see an airport as a place of obstruction, and possibly even danger, because of say, how they look or who they are or what religion they practice. So these things are really interesting to me.
I sort of start—I take the book in a different direction at around about the three quarter mark and I start in an airport. It felt like a nice way to begin a new chapter. And really, the occasion for being in an airport is because my father now lives in Texas, and I spend quite a bit of time sort of transiting back and forth to his house. So that's how we arrived there.
Am Johal 28:20
Nice. So I've got my Franklin barbecue shirt on right from Austin, Texas.
Charlotte Gill 28:26
He would be proud.
Am Johal 28:29
I'm wondering, did you always know that you wanted to be a writer? How did you fall into writing?
Charlotte Gill 28:34
Saying that you’re—you come from the Punjabi community, I'm so happy you asked this because you will understand the complexity of announcing to your parents that you would like to be a writer or anything in the arts—an actor, anything like that. It is bound to go over like a lead balloon, which it did. You know, my father especially, really had designs for all of his children that involved the professional life, in some way or another. And in the book, I write about that sort of classic immigrant hierarchy of acceptable trades with, you know, doctor being at the top and maybe lawyer being maybe acceptable, maybe not. But I chose none of those things. And I knew I wanted to be a writer, probably not far out of teenagehood. You know, I like to tell the story about how sometimes my family members will say to me, you know, “Charlotte, you're the only creative person in the family,” and they don't mean it as a compliment.
[laughs]
And people from the South Asian community are some of the few people who understand what that joke means.
Am Johal 29:38
Hilarious. Wondering if you'd be willing to read another passage.
Charlotte Gill 29:45
So, I was thinking about what to read today. And I decided that I would end on this passage, which is about my grandmother, who was a person that I never met, something I'll probably think about until the day I die.
A question that often gets asked during interviews: who would you invite to a dinner party, living or dead? You're supposed to name a legendary or celebrity figure, but I'd always choose my grandparents. They had many grandchildren, dozens in fact, so I'm not sure they would have felt the missed opportunity as keenly as I do.
I know my grandmother only from photos. Often in these pictures, she's surrounded by visiting grandkids, smiling with her head thrown back, eyes closed. She's a cardigan wearing little person with toasted-almond skin, a dupatta draped over her head in the old school way. I'm told she was a quietly joyful person, always retiring, mostly in the background. She'd received just a rudimentary education, never proceeding past primary school, typical for a traditional Indian girl in her day. She spoke little English. She was gentle and shy. But on the other hand, she was obsessed with pro wrestling. Any chance she got, she'd slip out of the kitchen to sit in front of the TV and shake her fist at "Macho Man" Randy Savage. She spent many a happy hour watching Hulk Hogan and the other greased, spray-tanned beefcakes of the World Wrestling Federation chokeslam and piledrive each other into the canvas. Such are the contradictions in my family.
When my dad was training to be a doctor in England, airfares weren't cheap. Sometimes he'd spend long, uninterrupted stretches without ever going home. My grandmother said her goodbyes to her firstborn son, knowing it might be many months before she saw him again, never imagining that it might be years, on just a few occasions, the last time near the end of her life. Now, when I ask my dad how she felt about all of this, he shrugs and looks away. She never said anything about it, he tells me.
"But how do you think she felt?" I ask.
"I think she was sad," he replies.
My grandmother passed first. She died of cancer. My grandfather lived until his late eighties. After they'd both gone, the family home remained there in Kenya, the suburbs grown up around it. It was rented out for many years and then eventually sold, cutting that family tether.
Am Johal 32:28
Thank you for that Charlotte. I wanted to ask you about—you know, there's this moment where the book has been written before it comes out into the public, and so what sits with you as a writer when it's in this space? Like what are your anxieties and excitements in this moment before the book fully heads out into public view?
Charlotte Gill 32:51
I know, it's terrifying.
[laughs]
It's like the worst time ever for a writer. It's very thrilling and exciting in some ways to know that, you know, people are reading it, who I don't know, for the first time, and I don't—I can't envision the circumstances under which they're sitting down with it. It's terrifying. But it's also like an exciting time. A writer can't be a writer, really, without being published and having an audience.
I really hope that it connects with the audience that I had in mind for it, which I think is people from the Punjabi community and second-gen immigrants and third-gen immigrants, as well as people who are mixed race, because in some ways, when I was a child, there were really no stories, no narratives that would give me a sense of being part of something bigger than myself. I shared the experience of being biracial with my siblings, but I really had no idea that that word applied to me until I was practically an adult.
So, I wanted to explore that idea. I mean, I know kids today, they have no problems with being mixed at all. They know exactly who they are. They're very proud of it. And I think that that's wonderful. It's amazing, in fact. So yes, it is kind of a harrowing time to have a book out in the world. But, you know, I think especially writing something like non-fiction, where I've put so much into it myself, it's really one of those things that you—as a writer, I give up control completely and send it out to the world and just hope for the best.
Am Johal 34:32
Charlotte, you teach creative writing as well. And I'm wondering, the process of teaching and being around students, what do you get back as a writer in teaching writing, being around students who are carrying out their own creative projects, how that also shapes or informs your own writing?
Charlotte Gill 34:52
That's tremendously reinvigorating. Because you know, the process of writing and doing research, its output, output, output, but being able to sit in classrooms or in online communities, and talk about what writing is and how it functions. These are really, very special conversations. I learned a lot from my students. A ton. I get a sense of what people are working on right now before it ever sees the light of day. You know what somebody's working on right at this very moment, even if they were able to find a home for it tomorrow, the world wouldn't see it for another two years. So I feel very privileged and lucky to be able to just be a part of what other people are working on.
I feel as if, with non-fiction especially, it's extra important because you know, sometimes I work with people who come from communities whose stories are not out there really, or they feel as if they've had challenges being promoted or published in a traditional setting. So, times have really changed a lot in the last 10 years. It's a really exciting time to be a writer from a historically underrepresented community. I find among my students, they're really excited and very energized about the stuff that they're writing. And so am I.
Am Johal 36:14
Wondering, now that this book is finished, I realize you're probably going to be out, going to festivals and other places talking about the book, but do you have future projects planned already?
Charlotte Gill 36:26
I am always writing something. I am definitely always writing something. And, for right now, I've had to take a pause, because in the run up to a book coming out, things get very busy, and, you know, I'm doing a lot of freelance newspaper and magazine articles at the moment. I have been for the last eight months or so working on some more fiction, which has been just the most wonderful, quiet experience to just kind of toil away on that, just alone, after having had the editing experience for a while, which is, you know, you let a number of people into the story with you, and you sort of perform the surgery on this thing that you have made. So it's nice to be alone again, and just take it right back to the basics and just do the work in my hoodie and sweatpants early in the morning every day.
Am Johal 37:18
Charlotte, is there anything you'd like to add?
Charlotte Gill 37:21
Yes, I think there is actually. I have been thinking a lot about—I think when a writer puts a book out into the world—well, in my case anyway—the second I have hit send on that final draft, I'm always thinking of things I should have put in there, but just didn't. And since, you know, I've become an adult, I really have come to think about what a mixed race existence is all about in ways that I perhaps didn't have the language for when I was a child or when I was a younger person.
And a lot of that has really come from the way the world has changed, yes, but also because of the internet. I think there are these huge social media communities for people all over the world who come from incredibly diverse backgrounds. And some of the things that people talk about, especially when they're my age, is that—or even a little bit older or younger—is that in some way, mixed race people can only be described as fractional sums of their parental parts, or as if we are somehow a little bit broken and in need of healing or mending. And I certainly understand that because I think a lot of us have experienced these intergenerational rifts that are really derived from prejudice and sometimes inter-family conflicts that are created by systems that are much bigger than the family itself. So I get that. I understand that there is sometimes a crack that does need to be mended. But I don't feel like we are inherently broken. I feel as if we are whole people. I mean, certainly millennials and Gen Z understand this implicitly. They are whole people. And you know, not a fraction of this or half of this or a quarter of this. They are whole people. And they understand that. I've taken a lot of inspiration from young people.
Am Johal 39:22
Charlotte, thank you so much for joining us on Below the Radar and sharing about your new book and I really encourage listeners to go out and get it. I've had a chance to read it through twice already, so thank you so much, Charlotte.
Charlotte Gill 39:37
Thank you so much for having me.
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Steve Tornes 39:43
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast created by SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Thanks for listening to our episode with Charlotte Gill! Head to the show notes to learn more about the resources mentioned in the show. You can follow us on social media at sfu_voce to keep up to date on new podcast releases. Thanks again for listening, and we’ll catch you next time on Below the Radar.
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