FEATURES

SFYou: Dr. Jen Marchbank

The professor who does it all invites you to Surrey Pride Festival 2022

Written by Yasmin Vejs Simsek

Editor’s note: The acronym LGBTQ will be used, as is used by the interviewee. This is not meant to diminish or neglect those identifying with IA2S+.

Dr. Jen Marchbank is a professor and graduate chair in the department of gender, sexuality, and women’s studies (GSWS), but her commitments don’t stop there. As a deeply engaged activist for the LGBTQ community, she inspires people to create the change they want to see through innovative teaching practices. On May 26, she received the YWCA Women of Distinction Award for Education, Training and Development. The award ceremony recognized 75 remarkable women in 14 different categories. The Peak spoke to Marchbank to find out more about her accomplishments and the upcoming Surrey Pride Festival she’s putting a lot of effort into planning.

Marchbank credited her award to her work with NEVR, the Network to Eliminate Violence in Relationships. Marchbank attended the awards ceremony with her wife, Sylvie Traphan, and was thrilled to hear an anonymous donor matched the fundraising. “They had a target of raising $125,000 in that night [ . . . ] and then an anonymous donor matched it, so they got a quarter of a million for purpose-built housing for women and their children in Burnaby.”

Speaking about the award, Marchbank said, “One of the things I was recognised for was my

innovative teaching practice and using things like podcasts, intergenerational oral history, and my research in LGBTQ and trans youth and elder abuse.” Marchbank received the award not just for her work at SFU but also the work she does outside of it. She explained that includes the advocacy she does with Youth For a Change, a Surrey-based organization she founded with Traphan in 2012 to educate and support queer youth, “training them to become social justice advocates themselves.”

Of all the projects Marchbank has done, one of her favourites came through SFU. “I really liked the elder abuse project that I did with Dr. Gloria Gutman from gerontology, Claire Robson from GSWS, and our artistic director at that time, then PhD candidate Kelsey Blair.

“What I liked so much about the LGBTQ elder one was the intergenerational aspect of it, the community level aspect,” Marchbank said. The project was created with both Youth For a Change and Quirk-e, a queer collective for elders that Marchbank and Traphan helped found. When they began this project, they didn’t realize that no Canadian material existed on the topic. In the end they created Canada’s first educational materials on elder abuse in the LGBTQ community through the creation of five posters in different languages with different cultures represented and three videos.

PHOTO: Simon Fraser University - Communications & Marketing / Flickr

They also toured with members of the collectives to every health authority in BC.

“And it’s still going! Claire, Gloria, and I are still working as a team and the project’s been morphed into the Indigo Project,” said Marchbank.

Surrey Pride

This month however, Marchbank is busy with Surrey Pride. As secretary of the Surrey Pride Society, she is deeply involved in the festivities being held at and around SFU’s Surrey campus. She previously served as president and, under her leadership, they changed the name from Out in Surrey Rainbow Cultural Society to Surrey Pride Society. “I used to say after that, my favorite title is past president. I really like being a past president of Surrey Pride,” she joked.

Marchbank’s journey with Surrey Pride started when she went to their AGM in 2011. Looking around the room, she realised that she and her wife were the only lesbians present. “So, I made a comment: ‘where are all the lesbians?’ Which got me noticed and elected,” she said. After a short hiatus, she is now back on the Board to help Surrey Pride get back on its feet after COVID-19 restrictions. Marchbank’s daughter, Jasmine Brodoer, and Traphan are

also on the Board, and it’s jokingly referred to as “the family business.”

There are many things to look forward to in Surrey that celebrate LGBTQ history and that Marchbank was heavily involved with. A three month long LGBTQ history exhibit, curated by Marchbank, just opened in the first week of June in the Museum of Surrey. Marchbank’s personal archive is now available through her donation to the Surrey Archives.

On June 23, SFU GSWS and Surrey Pride will host the Canadian premiere screening of Nelly Queen: the Life and Times of Jose Sarria, a documentary telling the story of the world’s first openly gay man to run for public office in 1961 San Francisco. The event will take place at SFU Surrey and registration is required.

Surrey Pride Festival is happening on June 25 at Central City Mall Plaza in Surrey from 4:00–9:00 p.m. This year it’s being held both virtually and in-person with welcome in different languages to recognise Surrey’s diversity. In-person, there will be mobility accessible stages, ASL sign interpreters, and porta potties.

A full list of all the events at Surrey Pride 2022 and information on how to get tickets can be found on the Surrey Pride website.

A globally loved dish and its complicated cultural history. PHOTO: Alpha / Flickr

Food for Thought: Hainanese Chicken Rice

This Southeast Asian wonder is a story of migrant frugality and success

WRITTEN BY KELLY CHIA

If you told seven year old me that she was getting a treat, she would picture Hainanese chicken rice. At six dollars a pop in Singapore, the aromatic rice paired with succulent chicken and dipping sauces blew my mind. The dish may look innocuous, but together, the flavours were a symphony of comfort I would dream about constantly. Though it’s been over a decade since I’ve moved to Canada, I’m still in search of a restaurant that can stand up to the hawker stalls back home.

Like the name suggests, Hainanese chicken rice stemmed from Wenchang chicken rice: a dish made on an island in Southern China called Hainan. Hainanese citizens migrated to what was then “British Malaya,” known as Malaysia and Singapore today. These were the countries I grew up in, and food has always been a major storyteller of migrant resilience. Before the 1960s, British occupation and influence had an effect on the economy and education system — my dad was born in the 1950s and would talk about the British boarding schools in Singapore. His father was one of the millions of Chinese migrants in the Malaya peninsulas who had come to Malaya for economic opportunities. Likewise, from the 1880s to 1940s, many Hainan immigrants made their way to Malaya to work in tin mines. Wenchang chicken rice became a part of their story and would grow to be an infamous dish worldwide.

To my understanding, other Chinese groups like Cantonese and Hokkien people had emigrated earlier and established footholds in sectors like trade and agriculture. Because of this, Hainanese people struggled to find employment within these sectors and communicate in their dialect. Many migrants could only work in the service industry as cooks or domestic servants. Hainanese chicken rice was made at home, using the different local fowls and spices to adapt the original recipe from Wenchang chicken, a thinner fowl. A chef on Singapore’s Orchard Street, Liew Tian Heong, explained that chicken rice was a way to keep food on the table with the financial strife the Hainanese migrants endured. “They would make sure they got the most out of it by stretching out the flavour of the chicken — via the broth and the rice and so on — as much as possible.” the British had left the region. This was when Hainanese chicken rice made its way from home kitchens to the many chicken rice stalls that started popping up in the region, because migrants were forced to find work as street hawkers — selling food as outdoor vendors. Their work would help establish hawker culture in Malaysia and Singapore. Although hawker culture generally prospered in the region of Malaya, Singapore is the nation awarded with the UNESCO Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Any Singaporean would be proud to talk about the mountains of delicious foods in the hawker centres. Here, you’ll find freshly made sugar cane juice, carrot cake, and of course, Hainanese chicken rice.

From there, the homely dish of poached chicken and oily rice became infamous. What made chicken rice so special was the rice itself: fried in chicken fat, then boiled in chicken broth, ginger, lemongrass, and other fragrant spices. The yellow, flavorful rice is the most delectable part of this simple dish. Most notably, it became associated with Singapore.

When Singapore and Malaysia split in 1965, both countries laid claim to the regional food, and still continue to. When I’ve encountered versions of this dish in Canada, I’ve almost exclusively heard it called “Singaporean chicken rice,” so it’s clear how much Singapore purports this as a national dish. But in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, a Hainanese chicken rice restaurant has proudly been open since the 1930s, longer than when Singapore opened its first chicken rice stall in 1940 by Wong Yiguan. So who does this belong to?

To this day, because I am both Malaysian and Singaporean, I admittedly feel conflicted about the debate. What I do know is that this dish, so iconic of the cuisine I grew up with, is about overcoming both British and Japanese occupations. It’s the dish of immigrants. Every bite of the succulent poached chicken tells the stories of the Hainanese migrants who made hawker culture prosper.

For a 23 year old me, this dish is still a treat that has me grinning mouth-tomouth. Some of my favourite places to sit and have Singaporean and Malaysian cuisine is a restaurant in Coquitlam called Singapore Hawker — order up a plate of chicken rice, and taste it for yourself!