Yin Chin By Lee Miracle Summary

In a world where our roots are often ignored, and who we are is shaped by outside pressures, our communities have become the place where we proudly embrace our true selves. Understanding identity strengthens community. In a world where people have to live with the fact that they are a minority, where their culture is denied and forgotten, covered up with a new image, flag, and name, what is left for people to unite as one? People lack persistence as it usually takes a lot of effort, but not for the narrator’s mother from “Borders” by Thomas King. While she’s on a trip to visit her daughter in Salt Lake City, she must cross the border, and to do so, she must admit she’s from the “Canadian side or American side”, but she is from the “Blackfoot
This situation does not stop her from giving up her identity but instead pushes her harder to keep persisting for her identity as a Blackfoot. Besides persistence, there is also the story of acknowledging the presence of other cultures and that their identities matter too. The narrator of “Yin Chin” by Lee Miracle takes us on the journey of realizing as an indigenous person in a Chinese community living in Canada, both the narrator and Chinese people are a minority. It hits the narrator “How unkind the world is to school them in ignorance” and build a society where people have normalized issues such as racism and no longer bat an eye at the usage of stereotypes and its spread in communities, creating false stories spreading and eventually carrying on as though nothing was wrong. A concept where they judge people based on who they are, ““Blackfoot,” [said the mother, and the officer said she knows, and she would] be proud of being Blackfoot if she were Blackfoot. But [the mother has] to be American or Canadian” (139). Bluntly, people admit to denying others’ identities, but “after all, it is not their humanity [we are] calling to question, it is [ours]”