"Inside the Black Egg": Cultural Practice, Citizenship, and Belonging in a Globalizing Canadian Nation (2005)

In Canadian contexts, the confusion between culture as an achieved state and the as practiced by embodied citizens has obfuscated the politics cultural representation in the historical construction national identity. Winston C. Kam's Inside the Black Egg is read as social parable that exposes the critical issues implicated in rethinking questions citizenship and belonging. ********** Being open to cultural difference entails the inherent risk the radical transformation the language and structures by which we recognize ourselves. We risk losing the vision ourselves in the mirror our cultural organizations and ministries. But perhaps the risk being open to the views and sites 'others' is the ethical origin democracy.--Monika Kin Gagnon and Scott Toguri McFarlane, Capacity Cultural Difference In the nation-building agenda that underwrites so much Canadian history, the cultural has been simultaneously the most visible and most invisible processes. (1) Its presence is often the most acute when presumably absent. This syndrome--Now you see it, now you don't--has complicated and compromised public discourses that have circumscribed the formation the citizen as one who performs the power and the limits the cultural. Here, I would like to propose the cultural as matrix for the social imagination embodied subjects. The assumption is that these subjects engage in never-ending process making significations and being made by signifying systems in local sites lived networks that fan outward and move inward to include national, transnational, and global interactions. From this standpoint, the cultural needs to be distinguished from culture as an achieved state to be possessed, commodified, or otherwise treated as privileged container that subordinates individual agency to pre-emptive frames already constituted identities. Culture is more likely to be found in complicity with political and economic regimes in power, whereas the cultural, operating out the material exigencies daily lives, can be read as variable complex signs, unpredictable in the multiple affects generated in subjects who process them. I want to present my speculations through short story that works as social parable. For me, Winston C. Kam's Inside the Black Egg can be read as cultural performance that localizes the problems to be addressed before questions belonging can be negotiated in critically informed ways. When the story begins, its loner protagonist, Stephen Shih, is cooking dinner. It is the Christmas season in Toronto, quintessential time for the nation. However, as his consciousness savours his Trinidadian meal of curried chicken on rice, fried plantains, eddoes and cassava, his body--without warning--craves taste his memory traces back to his origins. Unable to suppress his desire, Shih sets out on quest through the ubiquitous winter slush an urban space that has taken on decidedly multicultural air, one that Stephen himself performs as he makes his way. He wants to acquire side dish in the form preserved egg, and while waiting he mulls over what kind egg he might buy (90). As this inner drama unfolds, Stephen finds himself at one numerous green grocers in his neighbourhood. (Is this karma or only coincidence?) It is at this precise moment that he overhears (in kind fatal attraction) a white couple, middleaged [...] looking completely out-of-place in Chinatown; they are talking about the eggs (a.k.a. one-hundred-year-old eggs) talked about on television cooking show, the ones that the ethnic Chinese enjoy during their New Year (91). Torontonians on their own quest, they have adopted touristic gaze in crossing the border into Chinatown. Unlike Shih, for whom the black egg signifies sameness, they seek an exotic commodity that signifies difference. …