PASSAGES TO CANADA – ASIAN HERITAGE MONTH PROFILES
STEVE YAN, Manager of Diversity, TD Bank Group
Hi, my name is Steve Yan and I am the Manager of Diversity at TD Bank Group. I
came to Canada in July 1982 from London, England. And this is my story.
I’m Chinese, my grandfather is from China. My parents were born and raised
on a small island called Mauritius and from Mauritius, it’s a melting pot of different
cultures, predominantly of an Indian culture but there is a population of Asians. And they
moved to London, England, before I was born, so they began their life there. The
reason why we moved to Canada was because my mother’s side of the family had
pretty much moved from Mauritius directly to Montreal.
Mauritius is basically a small island where the two official languages are French
and English but the common language is Creole. Creole is a base derived from French.
A lot of my family that moved from Mauritius directly to Montreal was because they
could continue speaking French and they thought it was the land of opportunity at the
time. So when my mother’s side of the family, most of them had already moved to
Montreal, they wanted the whole family together so asked my mother and my aunt and
the rest of our family to move over from England to Canada. So this is the reason why I
came in July 1982.
When I arrived in Montreal, I was 12 years old. My earliest memory for being in
Canada was really because I had family. When I was brought up in very conservative,
strict upbringing in England, I went to a private school, Catholic, so most people
recognize people who are from England to be very conservative and very reserved and
I guess I was brought up that way. When I came to Canada, it was more like it was
huge, it was a big country, everything just looked so big. Everything looked new and
everything seemed so laid back. So I didn’t have a large family and so when I came
here, a lot of my family that had moved over from Mauritius, my first cousins and aunts
and uncles, I didn’t have that exposure when I was in England. So coming here was
great, for me it was just a fantastic place to be.
The reason why my parents moved here was because they were thinking it
would be an opportunity not only in terms of education but career-wise. My mom never
worked, my father was in hotel management or restaurant management, they were, he
was settled in England. My parents were both settled there. When they decided to move
to Canada, the language was one major thing because they had just brought in Bill 101.
So when I came over from England, I had to go to school in French. I was brought up in
English, studied English, most of the time I spoke English so I came to Canada knowing
that I had to speak French.
My mother had to go back to work, she had never worked before in her life. My
father had to find a new job and he couldn’t find a job in the business that he worked in,
so he had to go find a more menial job if you wish. Both my mother and my father
worked in factories, which their skillsets or my father’s skillsets that he had, they weren’t
transferable here to Canada. So they had to start off at the bottom and they worked
really hard to put my sister and I in school.
Thank goodness for family but a lot of the things were against us. Job-wise, it
wasn’t an easy time to find a job. Both my sister and I had to go to a French school, so
we had to go to welcome classes or in French they call it class decare. So we had to
learn French for the first year and usually in the first year, if you don’t, they make you
repeat the year that you were doing. So I was about to go into high school, so I had,
luckily enough, I knew enough French to get me through, so was able to advance and
go into the next year in high school. And that’s how it was tough because I had to learn
a whole new language and I had to still continue my education.
University, I had every intention to continue my work in terms of public policy and
administration. I was very passionate about that line of work. I wanted to work for the
United Nations. I had great intentions to help communities. So working in that world, I
did work for the government for a while, I worked for a government body called the
Centre for Action for Race Relations. Huge, huge exposure for me to meet different
corporations and, and this is my first exposure to diversity. Working out of that, what I
didn’t enjoy in that role was because I had to work on projects and we had to wait for
government funding every single time I wanted to work on a project. So it was really
tough so walking out at university with that an internship in my hand, I wanted to find
something a little bit more practical, so I continued my studies in marketing and went on
to look for a more stable role.
My first internship was to go work at TD. I wasn’t supposed to be there, it wasn’t
my interest to work in finance but what happened was, TD gave me the, wanted to meet
different people in marketing roles and it was a time when employment equity was very
prevalent. And so I came into the role knowing full well that they were looking for young,
dynamic and they wanted diverse people working at TD. So luckily enough, they gave
me the opportunity and ever since then, I have to really say that I’ve had an opportunity
to do a lot of things, never feeling that it was me being Asian that was the reason, it was
really because of the qualities that I had. They gave me the opportunity because I was
trilingual, that I had different ideas and they, they really, really valued that, which was
something that I didn’t expect to see because when I was, when I first came onto the job
market doing the small jobs that I did, my exposure wasn’t, it didn’t give me the right
idea of what the job place was going to be like. But at TD, I had some great people
leading and mentoring me, giving me advice to say what my next steps were in my
career. I had a great opportunity to try different things, so the first two years that I was at
the bank, I was really, I was on an internship and I had fantastic opportunity to shadow
people, to see different sides of the business that I didn’t expect to see.
You come to a country like Canada and you see so many different people, so
many different cultures. But then the predominant culture is the Canadian way and
when I first came here and especially when I had gone to a French school, it was really
tough. Being in high school, being in a French school, not knowing the language
properly, getting teased at because I had an accent, I changed that over the years
because I wanted to fit in. But when I went to university and being in the workplace
here, I learnt to really value my heritage because originally, I didn’t want to be Chinese,
I didn’t want to be part of the Asian community, I was really proud of it because I wanted
to fit in so badly, because I wanted to speak the same language or the same accent like
Quebecers. And then I realized, you know what? I can still be me and still be a
Montrealer or a Quebec and be a Canadian. So be yourself, embrace your difference
because I forgot myself. For a period of time in my youth, I completely forgot who I was.
And today, I can be the different people and I can identify myself in different parts of the
community. And what’s great about living in Canada is that they allow you to, not only
allow you but they embrace the fact that you identify yourself in totally different ways.
Passages to Canada is made possible with generous funding from TD Bank
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