Shee Jean moved from China to Canada six decades ago; she has lived here since, given birth here, grown old here. She is an immigrant, a Chinese-hyphen-Canadian That hyphen, today such an accepted part of the language of identity, makes of her a hybrid of two cultures. It implies that she is not quite Chinese, not quite Canadian, but partakes of both.

But is she, in fact, “Chinese-Canadian”? She lives in Canada, yes, but does not speak any of the country’s default languages; she worked in Chinese restaurants all her life, using Mandarin. She lives in Windsor, yes, but—like the nonna buying cannelloni and ricotta in her native tongue at a Little Italy deli; like the strictly-kosher saba attending the synagogue in Hebrew every Shabbat—she also lives in a simulacrum of her homeland willed into being by the mutual need and nostalgia of her compatriots. By choice or necessity, she is at a slight remove from “normal” Canadian life, whatever that is.

It might therefore be more accurate to say that Shee Jean is both Chinese (culturally, linguistically, emotionally) and Canadian (legally, statistically, demographically), but not Chinese-Canadian. She lives an unhyphenated life. She has completed the physical trajectory of immigration, the uprooting, the displacement, without regret, but she has also, in a sense, refused the personal transformation that it implies. Perhaps for her and those like her, we should replace the linking hyphen with the divisive slash, and call her “Chinese/Canadian.”