Kitsilano is one of Vancouver’s most expensive neighbourhoods. It’s where I live here.

And I have felt safer in innercity Toronto in the dark hours before sunrise than I do walking here after the sun has set. I’ve loitered on my own in empty playgrounds in Flemo at midnight and had lone men watch me swing on the swings and felt no fear, while here I sometimes steel myself before walking through these leafy streets, past these quiet and polite houses.

It’s 11PM and I go out for a walk. I stay close to the main street, try to force myself to avoid the alleyways, to stick where the lights are, try to force myself to trust this city, the way it goes dead still with the night. And here, where there are five pet salons in the space of two blocks, the insides of the entrances to the clothing boutiques are people’s homes. You always see the shopping carts first. Then you see the rugs encasing legs, except at first sight, the form is unformed, so you could mistake them for dogs curled up under blankets, and you still often do. And tonight I see the shopping cart and I see the blanket and I’m hoping, as I draw nearer, that he’s asleep, but he’s not. He’s awake, eyes open and mouth closed, sitting up with his back against the door, toque pulled low over his forehead and scarf up tight below his chin. And his hands — why must this one detail, above all the others, hurt most — are folded over his chest, like at the end of prayer, after you’re done asking for impossible things, in resignation or patience, surrender or hope. It’s grown colder in Vancouver than in Toronto, and it’s a deep physical hurt.

So I keep walking, trying to pretend like he doesn’t matter, like the fact of my seeing doesn’t matter, and I shoulder my way through a crowd of drunk boys, and there isn’t a single car on this street, but the stoplights blink green yellow red anyway, diligent and irrelevant. And I think against my will of yesterday, of being in court, under-dressed and over-invested. I think in colours, of the white walls and the brown benches and the orange jumpsuit.

In the daytime, the men — in this neighbourhood, the homeless are always male — mostly disappear, or else they stick to the back streets, like the one I walk through to get home. So we stay close to the thinnest capillaries of this place, away from the surface, where we conflict with the decor.

This neighbourhood is eerie. I do not trust it. I can never put my guard down here. It is too clean, too calm. It is artificial; no one can smile this steadily and this constantly without being a liar. There is too much hidden. I prefer the nights I’d fallen asleep in Thorncliffe to the sounds of people screaming in laughter or anger outside and seventeen flights below my window. Even when it was 1AM and the boy speeding his solitary SUV through the intersection stuck his head out of his window to watch you cross the street, only the two of you awake in public for countless blocks on all four sides, you didn’t feel afraid. But there was a rape here four blocks down from where I live. It was just past 12, and she’d been walking home from a party at the local yacht club.

And the first reaction is, Here? Here, where white people live in vast and beautiful houses with the curtains always open so you can always see into their vast and beautiful living rooms, so that you, anonymous stranger, can stand witness to the reeling heights of their successes; here, where they live the calm lives of people who collect art and cars and designer churches; here, where the only people of colour I see drive buses and sell vegetables; here? Not the Downtown Eastside, through which boys in my law school will drive only after they’ve rolled up their windows, through which girls in my law school will not go, preferring extra buses and longer routes. Not Surrey, whose neighbouring border you can mark by that point on the Skytrain where there are as many conversations happening in other languages as in English. Not there, where it makes sense (crackwhores, and towelheads; those ones deserved it (workplace hazards), and those don’t know how else to do it (culture shock)), but here.

It’s the incredulity, caught so heavy in the broken cuve of the question mark - Here? - that makes me most afraid.

I wrote a near stranger an email the other night, and I wrote
And yesterday I went to a detention hearing for one of the men, and it hit me that the young man in question is the only Tamil boy I’ve seen in weeks.
I nearly wrote a friend an email that same night, and began and ended a paragraph with
lanky brown boy with red eyes, and curly black hair,
but the draft sat there for hours and then I deleted it, ashamed that irrelevant details still throw me, that I still get stuck on the angle of cheekbones and the glint of silver shackles against dark young skin, skin the colour of my father’s, the colour of my brothers. Embarrassingly irrelevant. Crushingly reductionist. I am too rational to admit these fears, too smart to claim this pain. Are you or aren’t you a terrorist. Does someone want to kill you or do you. Those are the questions of the day, questions pre-inscribed with their answers, the questions that delimit peace in this nation, borders drawn on our skins and only ours.

I’m warned so often about the dangerous parts of this city, which places to avoid after which hours, but no one warned me about this particular neighbourhood, here, as though all this money must have bought safety, with all this whiteness its manifestation. I’ve never felt as coloured as I have since moving to this neighborhood, never felt so much like a caricature of myself. No one here can pronounce my name on the first try, or the fifth, so my name has lost now what little significance it once had to me. It’s disorienting seeing it in print now; I’ve spelled it out loud so often in the last three months that that is all it is now, not a name to claim as mine, but a voided jumble of noise and letters. It brings me unspeakable amounts of peace now to hear someone say my name, to hear it said right, the way blood and love says it. But we can go days without saying each other’s names, and so, to keep it simple, we do.

Yet, simultaneously, never in my life have I seen so many dreadlocks and nose rings or so many Nepalese messenger bags and bookstores specialising in “Eastern philosophy.” Maybe they don’t mean it — it’s ignorance, not maliciousness, but what else can follow from that kind of alienation from selfhood, except paranoia. Here, in no other place but here.