This morning, I attended the wonderful year-end assembly for Tecumseh Elementary School students and staff. The community spirit in the gymnasium was palpable. Earlier this year, staff and students were displaced and had to relocate temporarily to the South Hill Eduation Centre when their school building flooded over the winter break. Parents and staff rallied valiantly to ensure the students had supplies and support.
This assembly was also the official debut of the poetry video based on a special collaborative poem, “Ode to Vivian Jung,” made of lines that I assembled from poems written by Tom Larson’s grade 5/6 class. (I had been invited by teacher Tom Larson to facilitate a poetry workshop with his students last November to write poems about Vivian Jung.) Videographer Analee Weinberger volunteered her time to help create the beautiful video. Linnea Ritland-Tam did additional editing and post-production work. The poem and video depict how Vivian Jung broke the segregationist colour ban at a local public pool and became the first Chinese Canadian teacher hired by the Vancouver School Board. A beloved teacher and award-winning coach, she worked at Tecumseh for 35 years. The first annual Vivian Jung Award was given out by her daughter, Cynthia Kent, to a deserving student.
The poetry video incorporates artwork by students from Divisions 3 and 5 under the tutelage of AIRS artist-in-residence Julia McIntyre. Archival newspaper headlines and materials appear in the poetry video, alongside wonderful photos provided by Vivian Jung’s daughter, Cynthia Kent, with additional school photos discovered by Division 6 Teacher Thomas Aaron Larson, who also recorded his class reading the poem. I love the exuberant finale where the whole class chimes in!
You can find the text of the collaborative poem in a booklet of student poems and artwork published by the school to raise funds for a school mural that will be produced next year with local artists, Janet Wang and Stella Zheng. Find out more about how to purchase the booklet here. A sample of three of the student poems can also be found in Ricepaper Magazine. There are also audio-recordings of some of the individual poems written and read by these four students:
“It all starts small” by Kaiden Campos
“Standing Up” by Shikira Wu
“Standing Tall” by Tyler Higuchi
“What makes a good teacher” by Hans Go
Host Margaret Gallagher of the CBC Radio program, North by Northwest recently interviewed teachers Tilia Prior and Marion Elizabeth Collins who are on the anti-racism committee that is spearheading the Vivian Jung Mural Project at Tecumseh Elementary School, as well as myself.
If you’re curious to know more about the context and history, I wrote an article for The Tyee about Vivian Jung’s background, based on interviews and newspaper articles and other researched material. (Thanks for advice, tips and assistance from researchers Shona Lam, Olenna Hardie and city historian John Atkin!)
The 1945 incident (where the coach and fellow classmates of student teacher Vivian Jung challenged the segregation rule) could have happened at either Crystal Pool in Vancouver or Crystal Garden Pool in Victoria, according to an interview with Vivian Jung in the documentary, Operation Oblivion. There were subsequent student protests that followed in 1945 that ultimately led to the repeal of the bans in both Vancouver and Victoria. Although it’s unclear whether those actions, letters and protests were directly informed by Vivian Jung’s incident, it would appear that the seeds of social justice and equality had finally taken root in the wider community to render segregation less acceptable and to provoke a sufficient public outcry. My article also mentions Vivian Jung’s husband, Arthur Jung, and her brothers-in-law who fought in World War II for Canada and helped paved the way to Chinese Canadians finally obtaining the right to vote.
For those interested in writing and teaching, I discuss the process of writing and revising the students’ poems about segregation and social justice in the Tyee article.
Putting together the cento (which is the basis for the poetry video) took me several hours over two days. I cut out specific lines from a print-out of each of the students’ poems, then tried to find a way to make them flow together in terms of images, rhythm and narrative.
I made slight adjustments to ensure a consistent point of view and verb tense, and added a bit of poetic mortar here and there, including the last line. And voila!
Then, of course, it just made sense to produce a poetry video! Videographer Analee Weinberger is my long-time friend from Eric Hamber Secondary who volunteered her time and expertise.
Want to see more City Poems poetry videos about local historical, cultural and ecological sites? My previous blog has a resource list for teachers with a selection of site-based poetry videos from the City Poems Project that relate to Musqueam history, Japanese Canadian internment, the Komagata Maru incident, a historic Black neighbourhood of Vancouver, the gentrification of Chinatown, unnamed Chinese workers buried in Mountain View Cemetery, Vancouver’s lost streams and St. George Greenway, and the infamous collapse of the Ironworkers/Second Narrows Bridge in 1958.
