Dear Toronto
In this encounter and many more, I have come to experience the immense beauty, freedom, and safety within diversity—a glimpse of the new Jerusalem.
Dear Toronto,
A year ago, I said goodbye to you and moved across the ocean, wearing a new missionary title. A year later, I continue to say goodbye to you.
Standing on the JR Sobu platform in Akihabara Station, waiting for the train, I glance around and behold a sea of Japanese faces—salarymen in their monotonous black suits, high school students in their coordinated uniforms, slender women in their meticulous makeup—a swelling collective of faces resembling each other. Suddenly, I am seized with a strong nostalgia for the northbound platform in Bloor-Yonge Station. The familiar crowd, muttering complaints towards the TTC, the jangling conversations, the peeking tattoos, the myriad skin colours—a scene I have experienced countless times before without much thought, and truthfully always with a twinge of irritation towards the TTC and the disorderly crowd. Now, living in Tokyo, I am becoming aware of things about you I have not noticed before, and relating to you in new, surprising ways. The truth is, there are perspectives we cannot gain until we say goodbye and allow loss to open a new vista.
A result of this goodbye is a newfound appreciation for you, the city I’ve left behind. What you have gifted me with keeps surfacing in my thoughts these days as I live in their void. Of the many gifts you have bestowed, diversity stands out. Growing up in Taiwan and now living in Japan, I have come to realize that diversity is not a given. It appears from time to time in a stifled, masqueraded way. On the Akihabara platform, I see a student with soft pink hair, laughing with her girlfriends, all of whom are donning the season’s trendy flared pants. She resists resembling the collective, but she cannot redefine what it means to be “Japanese.” Collective shaming is powerfully effective in preserving homogeneity and shaping self-identity and expression. It wasn’t until I made you my home, Toronto, that I celebrated diversity, and learned the possibility it holds in bearing witness for God’s kingdom on this side of heaven.
In the years of calling you home, you have gifted me with friends from every continent in the world, and in the blackness, whiteness, yellowness, redness, brownness of their skins, they have gifted me with their unique cultural worldviews and self-expression. I recall sitting at my friend’s dining table for my 22nd birthday, eating her mother’s mouth-watering lentil curry. In the pure laughter of sharing memories and the warm silence of sharing pain, I gazed at my close friends during our meal—Filipino, Caribbean, Indian, Slovak girls—and felt their steadfast love. In this encounter and many more, I have come to experience the immense beauty, freedom, and safety within diversity—a glimpse of the new Jerusalem where, together with our brothers and sisters from the nations, we shall see our God face to face, and know him as we are fully known, enjoying each other’s presence for eternity (Rev 22: 1-5).
Of course, Toronto, you are not perfect in upholding unity and justice in the face of diversity, and systemic injustice continues to create new perpetrators and victims everyday. I will never forget one Chinese client’s tear-streaked face as she described calling the police after being choked by her husband, only to be charged with the abuse because her husband spoke English and convinced the Caucasian police. You witness so many of these stories everyday. At the same time, you make space for these issues to be raised and discussed, and you continue to seek forward movement in these areas. In Tokyo, we are only at the very beginning of that public conversation. I hope your leaders, your workers, your students, and your inhabitants continue to value your gift of diversity and actively seek justice for their neighbours. I hope I continue to do the same in Tokyo.
So, a year later, I find myself missing you and thanking you, Toronto. Moreover, I find myself in this surprising state of missing that rowdy northbound platform, looking forward to standing in the dimly-lit tunnel and marvelling at different faces once again, muttering “only in Toronto.”
Yours,
Jessica
Text: Jessica Chu
Art: Charissa Poon