Dimensions of Small Talk

by Madeleine Kardetzky (Germany)

Making a local connection Canada

What’s a perfect place? I think the question gets more difficult, the longer you consider it. If we look at the world right now, and everything that is going on, a few places clearly wouldn’t stand a chance to win a popularity contest while others bask in the glory and industry of a successful image campaign. Should you feel guilty then, to be fascinated by a place that some hipster with a fancy craft beer and a man bun would call too ‘mainstream’, too ‘decorous’ – congratulations on your word of the day – at this point? When did ‘good’ become ‘basic’ and ‘basic’ turned into an insult? I don’t think I should have felt guilty for wanting to go to basic, popular Canada. It’s a seven-hour flight from Frankfurt, Germany to Halifax, Nova Scotia – East Coast, right at the ocean. You got to start somewhere looking for your perfection. I didn’t know what to expect, really. Cold weather? Nice people? A perfect place? Questionable but good enough for me to hope. I think hope is nothing to feel guilty about either. For Canadian Thanksgiving, I was invited by this guy named Brandon that I’d met maybe three times. We had a conversation about where I was from, the weather, and hockey. He was working at the hostel I was staying at. I was just learning about the awe-inspiring Canadian practise of small talk. His house was this tiny one-storey place, a forty-five-minute bus ride into the suburbs of the city and a walk up the hill in the drizzling rain, very 'New Scotland'. There were eight other internationals and two Canadian travellers Brandon had picked up here and there, along with his two sisters, cousin, mum and grandma. He told me later that his dad had been in the Canadian army and died of a brain tumour at age forty-two. An odd topic for small talk, I thought. His mum and grandma had made more food than any of us could eat and we sat on the floor of the living room because there wasn’t enough space, not that it mattered. One of the Canadian travellers was Ken, a fourth-generation Japanese Canadian coming from Vancouver, almost 4500 kilometres to the West, right by the other ocean. While I was eating turkey and mashed potatoes, he told me about his relatives, grandparents growing up in Canada. In 1947, they had been released from an internment camp for Japanese Canadians in Lemon Creek, British Columbia. Over 90 percent of the Japanese Canadian population had been interned in 1942 for reasons of ‘national security’. He said ‘concentration camp’ multiple times. All of his family members back then had been Canadian citizens by birth. Ken also told me that the last Indian residential school, established to assimilate indigenous children taken away from their families into the Euro-Canadian culture, was closed in 1996. I was born in 1997. I realized I really didn’t know how small talk worked, at that time. We stayed until late in the evening and I promised Ken, I’d try and make it to Vancouver because it was, in his words, “the best place in the world”. He said so eating a piece of pecan pie because somehow, we still managed to fit in dessert after dinner. I don’t know how Brandon’s family could afford all of it, a single mum with three kids couldn’t have had it easy and making a meal like this, it’s not nothing. It’s a lot that they did for ten random strangers. I clearly didn't know how small talk worked but I knew, this wasn't something you'd ask But I felt welcome, I did, in a place that hadn’t been welcoming, not always, to everyone. They don’t tell you these things about places they want you to think of as perfect. Neither kindness nor epiphanies have a specific taste to them, but that evening, I took a whole plate of Thanksgiving food back to the hostel with me because there were so many leftovers. Because, in the end, I don’t think it is a failure to cherish – despite its failings and shortcomings – the small perfections of a place that you can find for yourself.