culture Tag

Come curious. Leave learned.

Asian-Canadian Special Events Association. One might simply be attending one of their major festivals for good eats and great music, but Managing Director Charlie Wu’s goal is that you leave with more understanding of Taiwanese and Asian culture. In this interview, he tells us about how it all started, why culture is more than just food and performances, and how curiosity can be a powerful tool for moving from multiculturalism to interculturalism. Please enjoy our conversation and visit the website to see the schedule for TAIWANfest happening from August 30 – September 1.

Please tell us about your organization.

I’m the Managing Director for the Asian-Canadian Special Events Association. That’s the organization that took over TAIWANfest back in 2009. Prior to that, the festival was called Taiwanese Cultural Festival and was organized by another charity, the Taiwanese Canadian Cultural Society. I was part of that organization, but because the festival expanded, we had to form another organization to oversee it. Then we expanded in 2010 as the Cultural Olympiad was looking for a partner in organizing events for Asian communities, and we were brought in to create our second event, LunarFest, a legacy event from the Cultural Olympiad in 2010. We’ve put on LunarFest over the years, and it’s still a flagship festival in the wintertime. I also lead another organization called The Society of We Are Canadians Too, which was founded after Canada celebrated its 150th anniversary. We felt that there was a need to focus beyond the Asian community, so The Society of We Are Canadians Too was established to speak to this concept of interculturalism especially from the newcomers and the first-generation perspective. With this organization, we organize the Jade Music Fest. It was created to elevate Chinese language music in Canada. Now we’ve sort of evolved to include more languages. In the past, most of our music festivals were primarily dominated by English or French artists and we didn’t have a lot of opportunities for people with different backgrounds to include their mother tongue into their work. Right now, we’re not seeing linguistic diversity within the music industry, and it isn’t just me saying this. The Canadian Live Music Association reports that there’s an under-representation of racially marginalized communities in the music industry. The Jade Music Festival is our answer to that. So we have these three festivals that we host on an annual basis, but we also build partnerships throughout. For example, we work with Vancouver International Film Festival, Vancouver International Children Festival, Vancouver Public Library, Museum of Vancouver, and the Dutch Cultural Association of BC. These are some of the partnerships that we coordinate programs with. In Strathcona, we work with the Eastside Arts Society and being here now, we’re trying to be part of the arts community as well.

Tell us about the move to Strathcona

We used to be in the South Marine area, and we didn’t see ourselves as a good fit, especially with our neighbours being businesses that didn’t know what we did. Since we hold our events in Downtown Vancouver and we have a lot of partners living and working in the Strathcona area, we thought it was time that we finally belonged to the arts community. It’s something we’ve been looking forward to, as our footprints are quite often in the East side.

Why is connecting people to culture important to you?

Being from Taiwan, I have always embraced the concept of diversity. Taiwan has Indigenous populations like Canada, and there are newcomers, say people from Southeast Asia and all over living in Taiwan. However, there’s a certain narrative that perhaps comes from past colonization and political situations. People didn’t know how Taiwanese people wanted to identify and thought they were just one group. I’ve seen that here in Canada as well, where people speak of Taiwanese people in a certain way, and I have to explain that we also have Indigenous populations, just like Canada, that aren’t Taiwanese or Chinese, that sort of thing. So that concept of diversity and allowing people to be who they are and have their own way of identifying themselves, it’s very important here in Canada. Sometimes we see cultures being presented in a very stereotypical and superficial way, reduced to the food that we eat, the outfits or the music, and this becomes attached to our identity, but it’s much more complicated. In Canada, we’re so lucky to be surrounded by different cultures and we wanted to make sure there’s an opportunity for everyone to be curious and realize that there’s more than the food. The curiosity factor is something that we want our events to address. When people come for the food, they just want to eat. That’s hunger, not curiosity. Curiosity says “Hey, I’m waiting for you to tell me something that I don’t know” because when people walk away from an event learning something new, that’s something that’s going to affect their lives.

Where do you get your inspiration from?

I love watching sports because of my upbringing. So I get a lot of inspiration from competition and teamwork. I’m inspired by people that work hard and try to be good at something, and this applies to everybody. It applies to artists, creatives and everyday people, because the success that we have is because of the people that we work with. I don’t do this myself, I have people that support the vision, and partners that I don’t always agree with, but we sit down and try to work together. I see a lot of sports analogies in my work. I need help from people, partners and institutions. I need people to be willing to listen to my stories, and I see this best represented in sports. 

Beyond ticket sales and attendance, what does a successful event look like? 

We used to be so focused on building attendance, setting ticket prices and such, sometimes because of commercial sponsorship that wanted us to do certain things, and that created a false perception about our events. Since we moved our events downtown, that’s never an issue anymore. We don’t have to worry about attendance because there are a lot of people on site. But it allows us to learn more about everybody else. Downtown Vancouver is not a neighbourhood that we are in all the time, so we’re mindful of the experiences of the people who work and live there, making sure that we’re not intruders. We want to be positive rather than a disturbance. We want to be that plus factor rather than the minus factor. Now over the years with these intercultural dialogues that we’ve created, people tell us that they didn’t know about their connection to Taiwanese culture. I tell this funny story of when we had the dialogue with the Dutch community. They set up a market as part of TAIWANfest, and it’d never been seen before. But there’s a historical connection, because the Dutch colonized Taiwan for over 30 years. So we reconnected because of this relationship. I remember overhearing two European-looking people ask “Why are we here?” And one person told the other “Hey, we used to colonize Taiwan”. So I think that’s the curiosity aspect, making people ask questions and dive into conversations, rather than, “Hey, this food tastes great” and that’s the end of it. 

What’s been the most challenging moment in your journey so far and what did it teach you? 

For me it’s presenting new aspects of culture to the community and they go, ” I don’t recognize this as Taiwanese culture.” That’s not because they’re not Taiwanese, but that even for them, there’s a part of discovery or exploration that they need to do. So presenting to a Taiwanese community, sometimes that’s a hurdle. Some people don’t recognize it and so don’t see it as a part of them, but as we’ve grown, people now expect to attend TAIWANfest and learn a bit of the past that they didn’t know, and learn about other cultures that are connected to theirs. It took a bit of time before we built this reputation, but in the beginning, it was very hard. 

What does the future of your organization and Asian-Canadian expression in Vancouver look like to you?

As much as our organization is Asian-Canadian and we do a lot of events from this perspective, I see it as a starting point to help our community to learn more about ourselves. Ultimately, I think we all need to have a new perspective of what an intercultural Canada could look like. We all recognize our differences and we share our citizenship as Canadians, but that doesn’t mean that we have to give up our cultural heritage. In my ultimate vision of the future, all cultures are regarded as mainstream, and I think Canada has a great opportunity to do just that. The multicultural policies were a good starting point, but now we have to move towards interculturalism.