I spent the first 18 years of my life in the suburbs of Richmond Hill, Ont. It is an aesthetically homogeneous place, which I think is the source of its two biggest flaws: transit and safety. My boyfriend still, after five years, cannot identify my parents’ house while driving because every home on the street looks so alike (the builders gave buyers the option of garage on the left or right). The urban planning of the town involves a lot of looped crescents and cul-de-sacs, so it’s no surprise that pedestrian and transit commuter traffic is non-existent. The only people that walk in Richmond Hill are people who can’t afford a car, those seeking exercise (usually in loops around the maze-like, go-nowhere residential roads), or people who are too old or young to drive. Subscribers of the Jane Jacobs school of urban planning recognize that populated streets are safer than empty ones (see: crime prevention through environmental design).

With these ideas in mind, here are two events in my life that explain urban planning in Richmond Hill — though these anecdotes could as easily have been told from Markham, North York (pre-Sheppard subway), Burlington, Oakville or Whitby:

1. The time I was 14 and tried to visit the local bike shops to buy a bike.
2. The two separate incidences, at the same York Region Transit bus stop, in which I had two men, in two separate incidents, show me their penises.

There was a brief period of time when I was 13 or 14 and wanted to buy a BMX. I didn’t realize that it involved upper body strength, but that’s another story, which ends with me becoming a roadie instead. In any case, I wanted a bike, so I could go the mall and corner store and back home on my own. Richmond Hill has lots of bike shops, many of which are close, if you’re driving. They are a mere 10 minute drive away — but 30 on a bus, or an hour’s walk. Thus, I had a dilemma: I needed a bike to get around, but as long as I had to rely on expensive and outrageously infrequent bus service, I couldn’t buy said bike. In the end, I gave up on the dream of owning a Haro (Matt Hoffman-endorsed model!), because it took half a day just to visit one shop. I still find that sad, that I was defeated in my goal to buy a bike by the awfulness of Richmond Hill’s transit system. No coincidence, there are hardly any bike lanes in town, too.

Now about the penises…

On top of infrequent service, the bus stops in Richmond Hill are at least five- or ten-minute walks apart. I’ve spent many an after-school afternoon trodding down sad, empty sidewalks for what seems like forever after falling asleep and missing my stop. There are no trees or other shelters from the elements, and long straightaways that channel the wind, so it’s baking hot in summer or cold and windy in winter. Without streetside stores backing onto the sidwalk, you’re rarely going to see people just ambling down the road. I think most folks would pay the bus fare than take the extra block or two on foot.This brings us back again to the the “empty streets = unsafe streets” notion. On top of that, there are long, straight arterials with few visual or traffic distractions to slow down drivers — they certainly aren’t paying attention to what’s on the sidewalk. Even homes that back onto main arterials like Bayview aren’t inclined to notice what goes on in their backyard, because of a) the 8 or 10-foot high fences and shrubs that separate the street from someone’s private backyard kingdom, b) the cul-de-sacs that don’t connect residential streets to main roads.

All this is a recipe for old man perverts to show young women their junk without anyone around to hear your shrieks. Within a three or four month span, I had two men show me their penises at the SAME BUS STOP. Both times I’m just sitting there minding my own business, they sit down or amble up to the bus shelter, and unzip their pants. The first guy had made a name for himself doing this all around York Region and North York to girls, most younger than myself, and was eventually caught. The second guy was an Asian fella who panicked and tried to make a hilarious break for it in his car (imagine his minivan getting two feet of air after gunning it through a row of shrubs and interlock retaining wall), but was eventually nabbed when also showed his genitals to one girl too many, and was also arrested. I felt a little bit like Anna Faris in Observe and Report (see above) — though oddly, this didn’t happen in the four years I used the bus daily during high school, but when I was living at home temporarily in my third year at Ryerson.

Until this happened, I’d always believed, like so many other people, that the suburbs are safer than downtown. As it turns out, they’re great for a lot of things — good dim sum, long dog walks, churning out neurotic teenagers, big malls, a Tim Hortons close at hand — but not at making a 20-year-old girl feel safe.

The Ethnic Aisle, a blog about race and ethnicity in the GTA (and beyond!!), is holding a ‘Suburbs vs. Downtown’ event on Monday September 26th at 6pm at The 519 to discuss the divide between the city and the ‘burbs and what it has to do with differences in culture and identity. Details of the event can be found here.

I think every person can pinpoint a moment in their lives when they begin to view their parents not as the role models and heroes you automatically trust and believe because they told you so, but as people with feelings, flaws, opinions and ideas that make you think more, less, skeptically or maybe just differently about them.

That moment for me came when I was about 15.

It was a Saturday morning (circa 2002/03, when the same-sex marriage debates and legal rulings were beginning in Ontario), and I had woken up and come down the stairs just as my parents came through the front doors. It wasn’t unusual for them to be up way before me — getting groceries, doing yard work, eating dim sum — but I immediately noticed the bright red T-shirts they had on. Here, to the best of my recollection, is what they looked like:

So I asked them, more rhetorically than anything, “Where have you been?”

“Down Yonge Street. Church organized it. Lots of people were there, hundreds.”

“And the shirts?”

“We were all wearing them. We matched!” they enthused.

“Oh.” That’s pretty much where the conversation ended, since I was too bleary-eyed to process exactly what the fuck they had gone and done, besides to think, WHATTHEFUCK. Also, I remember being miffed because they did not bring home dim sum leftovers.

Around the same time, I had a very good friend come out of the closet between periods at school. When he told me, he said so sheepishly, as though he expected my reaction (and that our other friends) to be one of scorn or revulsion. The disclosure seemed so unimportant, so immaterial to the dynamic our friendship that I just blinked a few times, smiled and said, “That’s cool, man. We’re going to be late for French.”

Between then and now, I also had a feminist awakening, a liberal awakening, all events that would set me further and further apart from my parents on the spiritual-political spectrum. It wasn’t in the way that kids instinctively want to be the opposite of their parents, but a real philosophical divide. The struggle that my parents (my dad, especially, who’d grown up poor) had faced as Trudeau-era, university student immigrants was intrinsically linked to that of LGBT folks, women and the poor. Couldn’t they see that?

(Tannis Toohey/Toronto Star photo)

These days, I often view my relationship with my parents through the Jason ‘Smiling Buddha’ Kenney lens. Up until May, the riding I’d lived in my whole life had been a Liberal stronghold, but the last few years have been a case study in how the Tories court an ethnic riding:

1. Parachute in candidates with no qualifications other than having Chinese names. (N.B. candidate Chungsen Leung lost in 2008, but for what it’s worth, my parents voted for him, and every Chinese candidate before that.)
2. Back policies that mirror the views of the socially and fiscally conservative population. Direct quote from my parents: “We’re voting Conservative because they oppose gay marriage.”
3. Pander to them with symbolic gestures such as the redressing of the head tax. My mom was so deeply touched by this gesture, yet to my knowledge we have no relatives, distant or otherwise, who ever came to Canada while this law was in effect.
4. Shake hands with a couple people from each community, maybe put on their ethnic dress.
5. Sit back and win.

Anyone who doubted the efficacy of this strategy is probably a now-former Liberal MP. I hope someone’s writing a political science thesis on this.

So, it’s no surprise that the Chinese people of Richmond Hill helped swing the vote blue. My parents and many of their friends are an immigration minister’s wet dream: fundamental Christians (members of a 5,000-member Chinese-Canadian megachurch), affluent GTA suburbanites, double-income families that value hard work, education and pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. And since traditional Chinese values are pretty much Confucian values, in which filial obedience and child-production are paramount, gay marriage doesn’t fit into the Chinese social fabric. Religious or not, I believe your average Chinese person will always be closer to the Tories in social values than any Liberal or NDPer.

Add to this that their church is also active in politics. Their pastors have endorsed parties, candidates and particular legislations and, as the t-shirt indicates, encouraged other forms of activism such as protest and letter-writing. (Lest you think their church is a political anomaly, I should point out there are Chinese-Canadian megachurches just like it in every Asian-GTA burb: Markham, North York, Unionville, Scarborough, etc.)

My parents will probably read this, and I’m sorry, Mom and Dad. But like I said, this moment also marked the beginning of the period when I also came to appreciate (not just criticize) my parents — that even if I disagreed, they believed in their politics as ardently as I do mine. They weren’t just these pylons I yelled at and begged for rides and money… they came to Canada as university students speaking little English, carrying little money and carrying the fire to succeed. They also keep dinner time conversation interesting, if a bit combative.

Edited to add: This is not an apologia for my parents’ generation of Chinese-Canadians, but rather an explanation for why they think this way — it’s partly a generational thing carried over from their own upbringings — and a tribute to the political power that such a community can wield. I respect the empire/infrastructure my parents’ church community has built for its members, even if I disagree with the politics. And, in the battle over the ‘very ethnic‘ vote, the voices and experiences of the people in those communities are rarely heard from directly.

I’ve never seen a more thoroughly bewildered person in my life, than that farmer right then.

The air warms; snow melts,
revealing a winter’s worth
of unclaimed dog shit.

I love fruit. I also love fruit-picking, and I especially love it when both of these things are free. It’s my second year as a volunteer for Not Far From the Tree, a wonderful group that seeks to share the bounty of the many backyard fruit trees within downtown Toronto. My experience with them has shown me how expensive and narrow our produce choices are in a grocery store. To wit, most everything at a Metro, Sobeys or Loblaw comes from outside Canada, often even at the peak of our local produce season. Peaches and cream corn is in full swing now, and yet I’ve see “Product of U.S.A.” on more than one basket of ‘em.

Once you’ve tasted a cherry clafoutis made from cherries picked that same day locally (as in, from a backyard in the city’s east end), it’s hard to go back to buying tasteless, mushy, scarily huge black cherry imports from Argentina. You pay nothing for the former, and though they are smaller, they are vastly superior in taste to the latter, and pesticide-free to boot. Once I had that revelation, I started seeing the telltale signs of urban fruit trees (stained sidewalks, wasps and flies, that sweet smell) everywhere, and I couldn’t turn off my radar: Saskatoon berry bushes on Ryerson’s campus; a mulberry tree in the parking lot across from my yoga studio; the crabapple tree at the bus stop near my boyfriend’s work.

Both mulberries and saskatoon berries were in season in early July. My friend Chantal was kind enough to share a goldmine of a mulberry tree with me, and we picked everything our arms could reach. I ended up culling about 5 or 6 cups of berries, which I froze until I found a recipe that fit. Mulberries are sweet on their own, but lack that berry tartness or deep flavour that makes them good candidates for snacking on. They reportedly do well in baked things, or situations where you can add a bit of lemon juice to give it that bit of needed oomph.

Then, I remembered Smitten Kitchen’s wonderfully adaptable Boy Bait recipe — so named because of its reported effect on the guys. I wouldn’t know — I bake all kinds of fruity stuff during the summer, but my boyfriend seems to hate everything except for bananas and apples. But I love this cake something fierce, especially because of its dense, finely crumbed texture. Ontario freestone peaches are in season, and I would eat those all day for the rest of my life if someone would pay me, so why not? Peach and mulberry boy bait it is.

Recipe after the cut.

I’ve adapted Deb’s recipe just a smidge: added some almond flavour here, doubled or tripled the fruit there. Certain fruits could benefit from some lemon zest, others from cinnamon. But it is addictively good, just as she lays it out. I halved this (using two eggs) and filled a 12″ round pan nicely.

Peach-Mulberry Boy Bait
Adapted from Smitten Kitchen, who adapted it from Cook’s Country

2 cups plus 1 teaspoon all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon table salt
16 tablespoons unsalted butter (2 sticks), softened
3/4 cup packed light brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
3 large eggs
1/2 tsp pure almond extract (or vanilla, if you prefer)
1 cup milk or buttermilk, if you have it
2/3 cup diced peaches, about the same size as your berries (I left skin on because I’m lazy)
2/3 cup mulberries, fresh or frozen (do not defrost)
* You could also substitute with blueberries, raspberries, almost anything your little heart desires.

For the cake: Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 350°. Grease and flour 13 x 9 baking pan.

Whisk two cups flour, baking powder, and salt together in medium bowl. With electric mixer, beat butter and sugars on medium-high speed until fluffy. Add eggs, one at a time, beating until just incorporated and scraping down bowl. Reduce speed to medium and beat in one-third of flour mixture until incorporated; beat in half of milk. Beat in half of remaining flour mixture, then remaining milk, and finally remaining flour mixture. Toss fruit with remaining one teaspoon flour (you do this so it won’t sink in the batter while it bakes). Using spatula, gently fold in fruit. Spread batter into prepared pan.

Bake in middle of oven until toothpick inserted in center of cake comes out clean, 45 to 50 minutes. Cool for 20 minutes if you’re going to slide it out of the pan. Serve warm or at room temperature. (Cake can be stored in airtight container at room temperature up to 3 days.)

———-

With good reason, many berry pickers (like mushroom foragers) keep their best locations a well-guarded secret. Besides, part of the fun is tracking down your own spots, but here are some resources to get you prepared for next July:

• Unusual Fruits of North America
• Veg.ca — Foraging for wild berries in the city
• Now Toronto — City ripe for picking
• urbantoronto.com discussion on mulberry trees
• Toronto’s messy mulberry sidewalks

When we were there there were piles of the old floorboards in the ballroom, with evidence of other renovation work in the back rooms and up in the loft — but that was months ago; maybe I should head back up there and see what they were up to.

Anyway, here is I, looking shockingly demure, considering what an asshole I really am:

He’s posting the rest of the series on his Flickr account, and there are some other ones on his online portfolio.

The vision…

The realization.

Quite possibly the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. If his online personality was any indication, and from the few conversations I’d had with him, he was probably the brightest guy on the whole forum, with a sense of humour that bordered on offensive or outrageous – but it always made you laugh. He hauled ass on his bike with the best of them, and was well known for his collection of various funny bikes (of the pursuit and fixed BMX varieties?!). This summer, he decided to go on a solo bike tour of epic proportions, which he named The Double Cross.

He was on his way home to Toronto, after passing safely up and down the West Coast and through Western Canada. He died on the Trans-Canada highway halfway between Calgary and Medicine Hat, Alberta, struck from behind by a drunk driver. May your days in heaven be rubber side down, traffic-free, always with the wind at your back. You will be missed.

I never thought myself a fearful person, but once in a while, I am shaken. On Saturday night my good friend Jason was hit by a car edging out from a side street as he rode west on Queen St. He was on his way back from Toby’s Disco Inferno alleycat (though he had already dropped out when the accident happening, thus ruling out any reckless cycling in the equation). As he approached Trinity Bellwoods, the car gunned out suddenly, sending him over and across the hood. He dislocated and broke his right shoulder in three places, and the driver did not stay at the scene. Presumably he either panicked, or saw that Jason got up on his own two feet (hardly an indication of being ‘okay’) and sped off momentarily. A group of pedestrians walking by helped him off the street, jotted down the license plate, and called an ambulance.

This particular moment bothers me, because at the moment Jason was hit, I was probably absentmindedly twiddling my fingers at a checkpoint across from every Toronto hipster’s favourite joint, The Boat, waiting for the last racer to come through. I would sign his manifest, and he would pull a frantic U-turn and head back in the direction he came from. Twenty-one of the 22 racers pulled through my checkpoint. The other guy manning this checkpoint, Paul, called Toby to find out whether this guy was coming at all. Toby says, I dunno, I have no idea who it is. I waited until 12:30 a.m., but decided to pack it in when I figured any rider as slow as this mystery racer wasn’t worth waiting for any longer. So I made my way west on Queen, passing by a crowd of onlookers staring, probably as Jason was being loaded into the back of the ambulance, lights flashing into the darkness of Trinity Bellwoods at night. I hesitated for a moment, knowing how awful it is to ride that section of Queen, and presciently, feeling bad because it was probably some poor cyclist that got hit.

In the last month, I have seen many of my friends explain other stories… how one cab clipped his handlebars and sent him tumbling onto the road before speeding off, close calls and arguments; that night, in fact, another rider in this race clipped the back of a car after it suddenly U-turned. On the ride home from the alleycat, a cab swerved into me. At the next red light, I nearly smashed in his windshield with my lock after he told me I ought to be riding in the gutter, and he would have no reason to signal or check his blind spot before turning if I had been there in the first place.

It wasn’t until Sunday that I got a call from Drew, worried after Jason never showed up at his place the night before. Several hours later, we would find out he was at St. Mike’s recovering from surgery.

Which leads me to think, really, if any amount of altruism in this fucked up world and saving one gallon of petroleum at a time in the name of curbing global warming makes any difference at all. Being drenched in sweat, bumped, having doors opened on me, honked at, bullied into street curbs, breathing noxious fumes from the tailpipes of assholes, secure in their bigger faster stronger vehicles… Is any of it worth the risk?

It’s not, but for the illusions of weightless, unencumbered flight, the fleeting moments of tailwind and abandoned, buttery smooth stretches of asphalt at 3 a.m., I’ll deal with it.

(click the image for a larger version)

Taken on a photo ride out to The Junction. One of many independent cinemas in this city that has become culturally and financially abandoned by the city’s moviegoers. Read more about their sad demise here.