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Living the Canadian dream |
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Page 2 of 4 That was the start she needed, and eight years later, a short distance from where she originally set up home, the Laluque Atelier Gallery of Toronto is a testimony to her perseverance to stay the course. Her husband has taken over the administration and sales management of the gallery, freeing her to concentrate on her art.
Laluque, who last year received a grant from the Ontario Arts Council for a ‘Canadiana project’, advises immigrant artists not to get discouraged. “Don’t get sidetracked into other professions, or abandon your art,” she says.
As with Laluque, language was an issue for Chinese-born Anna Yin. If anything, her challenge was even greater because she is a poet.
“I almost gave up. Language was a limitation,” admits Yin.
“I have learned to keep writing when the right English word doesn’t come, holding on to the thought and image. Then I go back and find the correct words in the dictionary.”
She recalls how a university professor once read her work and said: “You have a long way to go.”
Yin was undeterred, she had great confidence in the style that worked for her.
Her perseverance paid off and her unique, haunting style caught the imagination and attention of Canadian readers. She received the prestigious Ted Plantos Memorial Award for Poetry in 2005, and her poems and translations are course material at an Ontario college.
Yin has since published three poetry booklets in English and Chinese. She is Director of the Canadian Chinese Poets Association, the Chinese Literature Society of North America and is editor of a Chinese-English literary journal.
To those with English as a second language, Yin’s advice is to “find your own voice and have confidence in it. I can’t write like a Westerner, so I don’t even try to copy one, but feel and write from my own flow.”
There are people who see a poem as a pearl, while others just see the dust on it, says Yin. “So some people just see the grammatical errors and the different word usage. Others see beyond to the pearl.”
A tough business. For immigrants who overcome the early hardships and are looking to take it to the next level of success, there is a different set of challenges.
It took John Menezes two decades of hard core training in the trenches of IT networking and security before he was able to realize his entrepreneurial dream.
Menezes, president and CEO of Cyberklix Inc, a company he founded to package managed security systems, said the bar is set higher for those who come from outside the country.
He had to overcome the initial scepticism of his ‘foreign’ qualifications. That done, “I had to go the extra mile to prove my credentials.”
Menezes, originally from India, said understanding how the Canadian system works and a knowledge of what is happening in that industry is key to making it big.
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