The first time I tell this story out loud, I am standing in a large wooden hall in Sunshine Valley, a beautiful and mountainous place in southern British Columbia where dispossessed Japanese Canadian families were held during World War II. When the rows of shacks were first erected in 1942, the settlement was referred to as Tashme—a name that combines the first two letters of the surnames of three officers in the BC Security Commission, a group that was established to forcibly relocate tens of thousands of Japanese people in Canada. The place now serves as a remote holiday park with a tiny but important museum that attests to its history. I had been invited to come share my story by Kikiai Collaborative, a grassroots network of Japanese Canadians. Seated in front of me in the hall are hushed rows of internment survivors, their extended families and local residents, all of whom have come to honour the memory of what was lost and seek what might be salvaged through reconnection. The smell of incense from the morning’s Obon ceremony, a chance to pay respects and bring offerings to the spirits who remain on the land, clings to my dress. My hands are shaking, but my voice is steady. We have gathered to name and resist the silence that fills the room; so, I begin to speak.

I tell the group that when I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at seventeen, I was terrified of writing my mental illness into our family history. My grandmother had endured tangible hardship in an internment camp in the Slocan Valley, a place buried in the BC Interior; like many others who come from families that have made huge sacrifices for a life here, I didn’t know how to admit that I was struggling despite everything I had been given. But now, a decade and a half after my diagnosis, I know that our stories are intertwined in a way that is challenging but important to articulate. 

There is often a chasm that separates our understanding of mental wellbeing from our conceptions of our racial and political histories. I have come to understand that my role as a writer is to bridge that gap, to offer my language as a container for others to parse what scholar Mimi Khúc calls the ways we are “differentially unwell”: how the structures around us shape our vulnerabilities and our needs for care. When mental health is discussed in workplace seminars and health campaigns, the conversations are frequently governed by the idea that positive mental health is something that can be attained if we do the work and build strategies for our survival. But what is less often articulated is that our starting points and supports for doing this work vary considerably; that the hurdles we must jump over are inconsistent in height. That sometimes, it takes a community reckoning with the past to start a meaningful conversation about our wellbeing in the present.

My grandma, like most of my family, thrived on routine. The eighth-born in a family of eleven, she called many of her sisters often, but rarely deviated from her schedule even for her closest confidantes. Every morning, she walked on the treadmill for thirty minutes. She drove to the supermarket on Mondays, when the freshest fruit would come in, and drove to my childhood home on Wednesdays, to bring us dinner or cook for us. She took me to used bookstores on school holidays, to help build my growing catalogue of Nancy Drew novels. Tosh, as she was often called, lived in the same Scarborough bungalow for over sixty years. In nearly every photo I have of her she’s wearing a black fanny pack clasped around her waist, an accessory that underlined her safety-first approach to the city. There was a certain comfort in knowing where she’d be no matter what day it was. But underlying that schedule was fear, too. 

When I turned eight years old, my grandmother took me aside and told me that one day, I would attend university. “They can never take away your education,” she said solemnly, patting me on the hand. It’s no coincidence that she was that same age when her own education was interrupted, after the Canadian government declared all Japanese Canadians enemy aliens in 1941, shipping them off to roadside camps and inhospitable shacks across the BC Interior a year later. The government sold their assets and outlawed their return to the West Coast until 1949. After internment, my grandmother’s family, among many others, was forcibly relocated east of the Rockies, landing in Toronto. My grandmother became a seamstress in her teens to help support her family, then obtained her first office job, which she said she secured based on the hiring manager’s understanding of Japanese Canadians as “a hard-working people.” Productivity, then, became a safeguard against loss. The pursuit of education, especially by later generations, became a method to ensure that Japanese Canadians would be listened to. But our productivity also became a steely measure of our ability to adjust to the ever-changing rules of our inclusion.

It’s no secret that Asian diasporic groups have not been served by mainstream clinical definitions of wellness. These definitions look at mental health in a vacuum, as though it could be separated from our overlapping histories of war, dispossession and structural racism. In 2019, the Asian American Literary Review published DSM II: Asian American Edition, a critique of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is used by healthcare professionals to identify and treat mental health conditions. In this reimagined DSM, Chinese Canadian writer Kai Cheng Thom analyzes how the World Health Organization’s definition of mental health focuses on a person’s ability to work productively, arguing that those of us who find ourselves unable to contribute in this way become “responsible for managing our illness in private, for our own failure to recover, for our inability to be and feel and do what is needed of us.” 

Khúc also considers the way we value work, and ourselves in relation to work, as part of the problem with our definitions of wellness. In her essay collection dear elia, she writes: “The stories I had been told—that mothers are supposed to sacrifice, that they do not and should not need, that Asian Americans can belong in the United States only through assimilation and respectability and model minoritization, that Vietnamese Americans are resilient survivors of the worst kinds of war and refugee trauma—were not only wrong but [were] also the very structures that shaped why life felt unlivable for me.” In their work, Khúc and Thom ask us to reassess the stories that shape us and identify what causes us pain.

Historically, so much of Asian Canadian value has been tied to our productivity and the “resilient” paths we’ve taken to contribute to and succeed within Canadian society. The way our communities have been upheld as model minorities has led to the burying of what Korean American poet and writer Cathy Park Hong describes as “minor feelings”—the discomfort, dissent and collective wounds that all too often go unaddressed. Even within community spaces, stigma around mental illness can prevent us from having lifeline conversations. At the first Japanese Canadian mental health panel I ever organized, in Toronto at the beginning of 2020, people were nervous to be photographed attending. They were surprised to see someone in the community openly identify with a serious mental illness. But after the panel, there was a long lineup of people ready to share their family stories with me. Within many diasporic communities, there is a kind of pain we recognize but feel we cannot name; and so, it often goes unaddressed until it is too late. That is the wound to me: that we are waiting for permission to hurt, let alone to heal. 

My elder family members lived their entire lives as if everything could be taken away from them overnight—because, of course, it once had been. I remember finding stashes of bills tucked inside muffin tins in my grandparents’ kitchen, and the stock of cans, cleaning supplies and toilet paper always stacked in their basement, as if they were preparing for Armageddon. My grandmother’s pristine white baseboards and my great-aunt’s plastic-shrouded furniture formed the foundations of armoured lives as far away as they could imagine from horse stables in Hastings Park in BC, where Japanese Canadians were held in brutal conditions while waiting to be sent to internment camps. 

As I recount these images to a crowd of people in Sunshine Valley who share my family’s delicate history, there are knowing nods and more than a few tears. We all recognize the immense cost that comes with this kind of armouring. The limiting of what felt possible, both to live and to discuss. That’s why my grandmother was so insistent that I would be able to live differently than her, that I would have a more expansive life. Tosh proudly watched me do things that were never possible for her, asking for photos from the places I travelled to that she knew she wouldn’t visit—especially Hiroshima, where her father was from—and beaming from the front row at every graduation. But I never dreamed that her desire for a better life for me would bridge a deep generational gap around the discussion of mental illness.

Growing up, I would come home from school every Wednesday to find that Tosh had neatly aligned a newspaper clipping with the corner of my placemat on the kitchen table. Sometimes it would be a notice of a recent produce recall, left anxiously; other times a profile of one of the city’s top students, shared for inspiration. After my manic episodes got so bad that I had to drop out of high school, my parents finally told Tosh about my bipolar disorder, and the articles came to reflect different kinds of fear and care. I’d come home from the doctor’s office to find articles on increasing wait times for psychiatrists, or on the importance of understanding student mental health. Most memorably, my grandma once painstakingly cut out a newspaper profile of Margaret Trudeau, the ex-wife of former prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau who captured the nation’s—and the tabloids’—attention with her decades-long public struggle with manic depression. 

For someone who had lost everything to the Canadian government, Tosh had a strange respect for it—from a distance, at least. Pierre Elliott Trudeau was actually well known among Japanese Canadians for firmly shutting down the idea of redress for their internment during his tenure, before Prime Minister Brian Mulroney finally enacted the policy in 1988. “I am not inclined to envisage questions of compensation for acts which have perhaps discoloured our history in the past, if other means of redress are possible,” Pierre Elliott Trudeau said in the House of Commons in 1984. “I am not quite sure where we could stop the compensating … I do not believe in attempting to rewrite history in this way.” But this legacy didn’t stop my grandmother from relating to Margaret Trudeau’s honest accounts of dosage changes, manic episodes and highly publicized meltdowns. 

Anytime I told my grandma something new about myself that she might not fully understand, she would frown for a moment, think of a story from someone in our family network who had done a similar thing, then tell me about it in her slow, careful voice. After a deep depression forced me to give up my dreams of law school, she offered: “Did you know your mother’s cousin did her degree in English? She got a very good job with the government.” For Tosh, sharing success stories was a form of comfort, a reassurance that if someone else could make it work, so could we. But when it came to bipolar disorder, no one she knew openly identified with the illness. After learning about my diagnosis, she asked my mom for a copy of Changing My Mind, Margaret Trudeau’s 2010 memoir; suddenly she did know someone—as much as you can “know” a political celebrity—whom she could connect to my story. Margaret Trudeau’s raw depictions of suicidal ideation helped my grandmother come to terms with my first suicide attempt, which was perhaps the most challenging part of my illness for us to get through as a family. The difficulty of that experience threatened to swallow me whole, but my grandmother never wavered in her support. 

During one of my many mental health-related breaks from school, my grandma and I would drive to J-Town, the burgeoning Japanese mall tucked beside a Toyota dealership in Markham, Ontario, and discuss the failures of my new medication over steaming bowls of udon. Tosh would take a measured sip of green tea and say something like, “Margaret Trudeau’s doctor lives in Ottawa. He helped her find a medication that didn’t make her lose her hair. Do you think we should go to Ottawa?” Tosh was notoriously difficult to get to deviate from her routine, but here she was, ready to abandon the security of her home to try and get me the best help there was. 

I remember the first time Tosh came to visit me during my psychiatric hospitalization. Like they were for my grandmother, stories had become a balm for my searing brain. I was in the middle of reading Matthew Quick’s novel The Silver Linings Playbook, in which the protagonist believes his life is a movie produced by God, and I felt like I was starring in my own God-produced story—that the psychiatric unit was the inciting incident of some grand narrative that only I could tell. My grandmother looked so small staring down the big, white hallways of the ward, and I knew she was no longer assured by my confident narration. That for once, our stories were at odds. She was afraid for me, concerned by the strange light in my eyes as I showed her my hospital room with feverish pride. But that fear didn’t stop her from visiting, bringing my favourite snacks from J-Town so that a little piece of me could feel at home while under confinement, and reading whatever I was reading so that we could try to be on the same page. 

Talking to other Japanese Canadian friends years later, I realized that my grandma’s understanding of my journey through the mental health system was unusual within our community. Like many others from her generation, Tosh had spent the postwar years trying to blend in as much as possible, out of fear of another upheaval. She witnessed the fight for redress and tried to swallow the unease that came with the Mulroney government’s official acknowledgement of her history. “Well, what can you say, you know?” she said when I asked her about the settlement, in which all surviving internees received a governmental apology and $21,000 in redress payments. “I was glad I got something, but that was nothing after what we went through.” The Japanese phrase “shikata ga nai,” or “it cannot be helped,” comes up a lot in community discussions of my grandmother’s generation. Although this sentiment can be read as passivity, I also think that my grandmother chose not to look back in order to keep her focus on what was possible for her children and grandchildren. Two of her siblings had died in the camps’ sanatorium, and she hated all hospitals as a result, but visited me while I was hospitalized anyway. My grandmother lived what you could call a quiet life, but she was unwilling to let my pain go unacknowledged the way that hers had. While she might have buried her own difficult emotions, she was ready to engage with mine. And for that, she was a revolutionary in her own right.

I returned to university after my hospitalization and took up writing essays about mental health for the same magazines that my grandmother stacked on her kitchen table. She was proud of me and fearful of my openness at the same time; but thanks to her unlikely interest in Margaret Trudeau, she understood how a story could save a life. When I got the chance to meet Margaret Trudeau at a mental health gala a few years back, we posed for a photo together before she took to the brightly lit stage to speak to the crowd. When I showed Tosh the picture, she was ecstatic. But I felt like something important was missing from the conversation that took place on that stage. I knew so many people who hadn’t been able to find timely support, or, just as importantly, hadn’t received the sort of help that integrates the communal histories that underpin our struggles. 

And so, the next story I decided to chase was my own—through writing a novel that embraces the Japanese Canadian history that shaped my family, and channels the unconditional love that my grandmother had shown me despite the very different ways we knew how to grieve. Never Been Better was released last spring. The novel features a Japanese Canadian family grappling with the generational gaps that emerge when mental health issues become public. It is a book that argues that we all want to support each other when it comes to mental illness, but that we don’t always offer care in recognizable ways; and that through sharing stories, we can perhaps get closer to finding a common language for our pain.

In the well-thumbed copy of Margaret Trudeau’s memoir that has been passed around my family for over a decade, one of the final lines of the book is marked with a sticky note left by my teenage self: “I have almost touched heaven in my mania, I have been plunged into the depths of despair in my depressions, but with the love and compassion that have been shown to me, I have weathered all the storms.” Years after my diagnosis, I believe this sentiment more than ever. I have been called a mental health advocate for a long time now, but it was my grandmother who first taught me to advocate for what matters, and who showed me how one person’s care for another can ripple outward in unimaginably beautiful ways. Although my grandma passed before the release of my novel, the story is dedicated to her. When I read lines of dialogue from the story’s obachan, or grandmother, I instantly recall Tosh’s sweet mannerisms and steady voice. I carry her with me in the way I share stories and help emerging writers fall in love with words while teaching literature at the University of Toronto, a place she’d always dreamed I’d reach. One of my proudest moments was, before she passed, having Tosh join one of the meetings of Mata Ashita, a virtual writing circle I coordinated for Japanese Canadians. During the meeting, she heard so many writers of Japanese descent share the family stories that brought them comfort. I hope she knew that she was always present in the ones I shared. 

My grandmother might not have dreamed that one day, I’d be reading an essay about her to internment survivors and their descendants, but I think she would have loved to be in the front row like she usually was. Tosh would have pointed at the mountains looming over Sunshine Valley and said they reminded her of her sisters. She would have walked through the museum, hands clasped behind her back, and told me that the dancing for Obon looked very nice, but she’d rather watch than participate. Most of all, she would have marvelled at how many people had travelled for hours just to come together and remember people like her. So many of our stories can feel frozen in time, stuck in history books and family photo albums, but that’s not where they end. We carry them with us, and have the immense honour and responsibility of choosing how they are passed down—and this is what my grandmother showed me, by encouraging me to raise my voice when it mattered most.  ⁂ 

Leanne Toshiko Simpson is a Yonsei writer and psychiatric survivor. She teaches at the University of Toronto, and released her debut novel, Never Been Better, in 2024.