FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1998 All Rights Reserved.
| BOOKS The traditional image of Asian women is one of gentle submission and subservience. Louise Bak is a Chinese-Canadian woman who does anything but live up to that tradition. Sexuality counsellor, scholar, poet and editor, she is a woman whose artistic life is as varied and undulating as her throaty voice. From a family who moved to Canada from different parts of China at the turn of the century, she was born in Kingston, Ontario and eventually moved to Toronto, where she lives and works. Her racial heritage hasn't been a stumbling block for her, although she laughingly admits that being an Asian female wasn't the best thing to be as a young writer. As a child she saw through the "overt systemic racism," notably in school, and remembers a teacher pointing out that she was quite good at English - "even though you're only Chinese." It may have been this early experience that has kept her feminism refreshingly inclusive. In an era when even feminists are not immune to splintering on racial and ethnic lines, she prefers a feminism including race, ethnicity, religion and gender. "Liberalism has encouraged insulated ideas of tolerance without engaging in discussion," she says. She cites the comparatively high number of women who receive PhDs in Asia who also marry and have families. "This is seen as a downturn by Western feminists. But these women are entitled to choose their own way." Bak found her way through writing, which came to her early and intuitively. "I remember writing poems to the wind," she says. That process reaffirmed itself during a difficult time in her life - while her father lay in a coma as a result of a severe stroke, she was writing a living poem to communicate with him in his comatose state. "Some of my work has shifted to a meditation on death." But Bak's poetry is only one of many artistic identities. Studying sexuality as an undergraduate student, she was invited to host a call-in show on the campus radio station. Not content to leave it at a fix-it show, Bak felt compelled to bring in the context of sexuality and culture - literature, music and technology." This brought her into contact with a broad range of artists, which continues to fuel her foray into different forms of expression - from performance to screenwriting. "I believe that word, action and image exist in a continuum," she says, calling it "purposeful dissolution." One of the co-originators of SLANT, Canada's first television magazine program on Asian-Canadian art and culture, Bak finds that television is a "continually puzzling medium to work in, because it is so much more profit-oriented." In comparison, she maintains that her collaboration on a feature length screenplay has more balance of integrity and internal autonomy. Bak is now in the process of completing her graduate work at the University of Toronto on the transperformative aspects of Cantonese Opera in Canada. Her research introduced her to a veteran actress in Chinese opera who was only beginning to be considered a star at the age of 60. "It's such an inversion from the Hollywood system of stardom, that a performer would have to spend 60 years of her life in training," she says. Louise Bak's openmindedness, curiosity and cultural heritage contribute to make her an extraodinarily interesting woman in an age when most people prefer the homogeneity of the Oprah Winfrey type of Renaissance woman. Bak forges ahead, expressing herself and questioning the culture at large in a way that few women, Asian or otherwise, are brave enough to do. (Louise Bak will be one of the poets performing at the Poetry Bash on Friday, October 16 at The Uptown at 9:30 p.m.) |