trotzen protzen kotzen

For some reason, when people here find out that I’m Canadian, the first thing anyone over the age of thirty asks me about is the relationship between Canada and Quebec. The referendum was apparently pretty big news here back in the day because the local media decided to paint it as parallel to the Taiwanese struggle to be recognized as a sovereign nation. I have to explain at least once a week that Canada doesn’t have 900 ballistic missiles aimed at Quebec in the Chinese fashion, ready to maim and destroy if they ever get plucky enough to declare independence, and that Canada sends truckloads of shuddafuckup money in Quebec’s direction every year, quite unlike the threats that China hisses across the Strait every year.

The funny thing about this is that when they asked what I thought about having the Q of E as our nation’s official head of state, and I responded that I thought it was ludicrous, I was accused of disregarding my own heritage. When I pointed out that all non-aboriginal Taiwanese (the vast majority) floated over here from Mainland China relatively recently but don’t necessarily dig the idea of being ruled by their distant cousins, it looked like their heads were about to explode. 

Nationalism. So mind-numbingly boring. I wish they would ask me about les filles du roi and my theory of 10,000 instead.