Brian Lin
Erica Kiemele may be a poster child for cultural diversity, but the Harvard Medical School-bound grad most wants to be recognized for one thing: her talent.
Kiemele has an Aboriginal mother and a Taiwanese father, but was adopted at six months by a German-English father and a Taiwanese mother. Her adoptive older brother is ethnically Chinese.
“Visually I don’t have an identifiable ‘look.’ People see me and have no idea what I am—in addition to Aboriginal and ‘some kind of’ Chinese, I’ve been called Hispanic, Filipino, and even Egyptian once,” recalls Kiemele, who will receive her Master of Science degree from the Department of Chemistry before starting medical school in Boston this fall.
“I had plenty of access to my Taiwanese heritage through my family, but growing up in Calgary, attending French immersion school, I’ve felt a strong need to find my Aboriginal roots and assert my identity,” Kiemele says.
She has attempted to obtain official Aboriginal status—“to become a card-carrying Aboriginal”—but with limited information on her biological mother, the task has proven challenging.
“As far as I know from adoption papers, my biological mother is Aboriginal and French and most likely part of the Blackfoot Nation,” she says.
“She ran away from home when she was 14 and somehow ended up in Los Angeles, where she met my biological father, and that’s where I was born.”
Kiemele originally thought she’d become an accountant like many of her family members. “It seemed kind of practical,” she says. “But to get into the University of Calgary’s business school you needed two science credits, so I took Chemistry and Physics.”
She did so well in Chemistry that her high school teacher encouraged her to pursue it as a major. By the time she was pursuing a PhD in Chemistry at UBC, she found her true calling after volunteering with various projects with the First Nations House of Learning at UBC, Canucks Place Hospice, Vancouver Coastal Health, the Urban Native Youth Association and BC Children’s Hospital.
“I love working with children, and issues concerning Aboriginal and inner-city health really resonate with me,” she says. “My time volunteering at hospitals helped me realize that I can combine my passions into a life-long career helping people.”
“Despite their cultural and ethnic differences, underserved populations have a lot in common—especially in inner city communities—in terms of their health needs, ranging from addiction to diabetes to mental health,” says Kiemele, whose multicultural background will be an invaluable asset in serving these communities.
The opportunity to study—and later practice—in the U.S. appeals to Kiemele’s desire to spread her wings, and having been born in the U.S. makes her eligible to do both.
“In a way, my biological mother running away from home to L.A. as a teenager paved the way to my destiny—long before I knew what it was.”
Heather Amos
Mary Nagata remembers how she felt, attending UBC in the 1940s as a young woman, the oldest of seven children and from a minority community.
“For me to be the first person in the family to go to university was a real privilege,” said Nagata, now 90 and living in Toronto. “In those days very few Japanese Canadians could go to university – it was expensive.”
Nagata’s parents were adamant that she and her siblings get a good education. Her father’s dream was for Nagata to graduate from UBC and go on to further studies at Cambridge University in England. But as a Japanese Canadian student on Canada’s West Coast during the Second World War, those dreams soon evaporated.
In 1942, 21,000 Japanese Canadians living on the Pacific coast were forced to leave their homes under the federal government’s internment policy.
Nagata was one of 75 Japanese Canadian students at UBC at the time. Unable to complete their studies as planned, their lives were changed forever.
Now, 70 years later, UBC is recognizing what was lost. This May, the university is awarding honorary degrees to the students who were unable to complete their UBC education, and re-conferring degrees on students who completed their studies but were unable to attend their graduation because of internment.
In 1940, Nagata and her family lived in Vancouver’s east side. At the age of 18, she began working towards a Bachelor of Arts degree with a major in English at UBC. Nagata remembers the joys of studying in the library, walking around the big campus, and being a member of the Japanese Students Club, a social group.
“University life was very, very nice for me,” she said. “I liked to study. And sharing ideas with other students was my joy. It was a very safe world.”
On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbour. That night, two police officers showed up at Nagata’s door and asked to see her father. Although he had done nothing wrong, Nagata said the police took him away “like a criminal.”
Nagata remembers asking – “Where are you taking my father?” “Why are you taking my father?” – but received no answers.
“The moment that I saw my father walking out that door between those two mounted police, something happened inside of me,” said Nagata. “Over the years, I could not bring myself to talk about it or think about it.”
Only recently has Nagata decided to share her experience from that traumatic period.
“I owe it to my father and mother; I owe it to the Canadian people to know what happened,” said Nagata. “It was not correct but it happened.”
“As my mother said, ‘it was shikata ga nai’– it couldn’t be helped.”
Shortly after her father was taken away, Nagata stopped going to UBC. Her mother was very upset but was determined to keep the family together and make sure her children got a good education.
Before the spring of 1942 when internment forced Japanese Canadians in Vancouver out of their homes, Nagata’s family decided to leave the city for Edmonton. They thought that prisoners, like Nagata’s father, might be interned nearby.
Nagata left Vancouver ahead of her family, taking a train filled with soldiers to Edmonton and renting a house. Nagata’s mother and siblings soon joined her. After a year, they headed east to Toronto, where the family settled permanently. Nagata and her remaining siblings still live there today.
Nagata’s father joined the family in Toronto towards the end of 1943 but he never spoke of his experience in a Prisoner of War camp.
As her parents had hoped, Nagata continued to focus on her education. She took some courses during the year in Edmonton and then went on to study at the University of Toronto. Nagata completed her English degree in 1946.
Nagata will not be in Vancouver for the congregation ceremony where the Japanese Canadian students of 1942 are to be honoured. But she is deeply gratified that finally, she will be formally welcomed into the UBC alumni family.
For more information about the Japanese Canadian students of 1942, visit: http://japanese-canadian-student-tribute.ubc.ca/
A special ceremony will be held during UBC’s spring congregation to recognize and honour the Japanese Canadian students whose university experience was disrupted in 1942 when they were uprooted and exiled from the B.C. coast – a violation of their citizenship rights.
Honorary degrees will be conferred on the students who were unable to complete their education when they were sent to internment camps in 1942. Degrees will be re-conferred on the students who completed their studies but missed their graduation ceremony because of the internment.
The ceremony will be webcast live. The webcast begins 15 minutes prior to the ceremony. For more information about the webcast and to access the webcast, please visit: http://www.graduation.ubc.ca/ubc-vancouver/live-webcast.
Wednesday, May 30, 4 p.m.
Chan Centre for the Performing Arts
6265 Crescent Road
For a map, visit: http://www.maps.ubc.ca/?130
Members of the public are invited to attend the ceremony. Tickets are free of charge and are available two ways:
For more information, please contact 604.822.2484.
Basil Waugh
The University of British Columbia has entered the smartphone app market with an innovative app targeting the global demand for Mandarin, Japanese and Korean language education.
The UBC Chinese Character Tool is the first ever university East Asian language mobile application. While most language acquisition apps focus on a single language, it is the only one on the market to combine Chinese character instruction resources for Mandarin, Japanese and Korean. And with 10,000 Chinese characters that animate digitally for users, it ranks among the most comprehensive apps of its kind.
“As Asia becomes a global centre of business and culture, more people than ever want to learn these languages,” says Prof. Ross King, head of UBC’s Dept. of Asian Studies, which developed the app. “An app can’t replace in-class instruction, but it can help to improve the educational experience for the 5,000 students studying these languages at UBC and self-learners in Canada and around the world.”
The app, which launched May 10th in iTunes, includes thousands of words and characters, along with meanings, pronunciations, contextual phrases and sentences, and stroke animations. To help users practice and hone their skills, the app comes with built-in support for more than 30 different UBC language courses and their textbooks.
The app was developed by representatives of UBC’s Chinese (Assoc. Prof. Duanduan Li), Japanese (Senior Instructor Rebecca Chau) and Korean (Prof. King) language programs, along with programmer Pan Luo of UBC’s Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology. King says the three-language approach has many benefits for learners, especially those who already speak one East Asian language.
“These languages share many common words, so bringing them together in one app allows users to leverage any complementary language skills they have,” says King, noting that 70 per cent of students learning Asian languages at UBC can already speak at least one other Asian language. “It allows users to jump between words they are familiar with and the language they are studying.”
According to King, the most time-consuming aspect of East Asian language study is learning the characters, a task that requires years of practice since basic literacy requires the memorization of anywhere from 1800-3500 characters, depending on the language. Thanks to made-at-UBC animation software, which sidesteps the iPhone’s incompatibility with Flash animation, the app shows users exactly how characters are written, letting them also practice with their fingers at a variety of speeds.
“The app makes it much easier to practice, which is crucial,” says King, whose department’s waiting list for Chinese, Japanese and Korean classes is typically 1,000-people long. “Instead of being at a desk with a textbook, paper and a pen, you can practice characters with just using your finger, wherever you are,” he says.
“We look forward to feedback so we can make it better and better,” Ross adds, noting that future versions will incorporate audio and improve the search function, making it easier to employ as a multi-language dictionary and phrasebook. The department also plans to add more than 3,000 advanced words, characters and phrases, in addition to updating course content annually.
Although it’s a non-profit venture, King says the app’s modest price of $2.99 will support its creation and continued development. With single-language instruction apps ranging in price from free to $9.99, King sees UBC’s three-language app as a bargain, considering the quality of its content and animation capabilities.
“Like the app market generally, the quality of apps comparable to ours is extremely uneven—there are so many options that it can be difficult to know who to trust,” he says. “So I think our pedigree, as a department with a 50-year reputation for excellence in teaching these languages, within one of the world’s top universities, will provide a level of assurance to people.”
King hopes the app will advance East Asian language education in Canada. “Despite the overwhelming demand for Mandarin language education in Canada, there has been a spectacular lack of investment,” he says. “This is especially true in B.C., which is lagging behind other provinces on this, despite our significant Asian populations.”
“We believe this app can improve how our students learn, give self-learners outside UBC an important new resource —and ultimately, help to make Asian language instruction a greater priority in B.C. and Canada at all educational levels,” says King.
Learn more about the UBC Chinese Character Tool app in the iTunes store.
