Lynn and I were in charge of setting the table ... and I felt the pressure.
      This was an intimidating task. At my house, my sister and I were always in charge of getting the drinks ... so off I went.
      And that's when I made the first faux pas of my life - I got milk for the kids and then asked where the beer was.

Apparently the parents didn't drink beer.
      I could feel the tension rise.
      The curt response - we drink water.
      How strange. I had never heard of that. All adults drank beer with dinner.
      My parents drank beer with every dinner. And so did my grandparents.
      They didn't drink two or three beers, just one.
      And they didn't drink beer any other time, except maybe on a hot summer afternoon, which didn't happen too frequently in Vancouver.
      I would only learn later that in 1960s parlance beer was the drink of the working class ... Or alcoholics.

I soon figured out this issue of beer drinking was a public sign that my family was 'different'. That somehow we didn't do things 'right'.
      It would take me years to learn that I really wasn't that different, it was the Canadians around me who were different.

You see, I'm a first generation Canadian.
      I belong to the hidden group - that massive cluster of Northern Europeans who arrived here in the late 1950s and 1960s.
      It was a small window. In a matter of 10 years, 'first generation Canadian' would soon become code for the new visible minorities.
      In the meantime, I had an immigrant identity to discover.
      My family drank beer with dinner because that's what people do in Denmark.
      They also ate heavy rye bread, which made it hard for me to truly appreciate the strange alluring qualities of "wonder bread".

Listening to parent's childhood memories proved to be another defining moment.
      I remember my girlfriend's mother telling us about growing up in some strange place called Winnipeg where she watched as a school friend got her tongue stuck on a metal post.
      Schoolyard entertainment - she said.
      My dad, English, spent his childhood playing around bombed out buildings.
      He grew up during the London blitz being dragged out of bed in the middle of night as a toddler. Just a few months ago he told me about siphoning water out of their backyard bomb shelter by sucking on a garden hose. The worst part? Watching not to drink in parts of a drowned hedgehog. We laughed now. I got the impression he laughed then too.

By the time I was in my early teens, I had moved to a new school where the immigrant families weren't from Northern Europe, but Eastern Europe, or even India, Trinidad and Ethiopia.
      Once again I found common ground not with the Canadians, but with the children of immigrants. We shared a bond in being different. I learned about Hinduism, and traded that instruction with invitations to my family's four-hour smorgasbords dinners - complete with lots of pickled herring.

So it was all very multi-cultural. So much so you would have thought Pierre Trudeau lived in our neighbourhood.
      But there was the down side too.

As a young teenage girl, Danish wasn't exactly a label one carried with pride.
      Danish somehow translated into porn flicks.. which translated into sexually promiscuious.. ..which translated into questions about my family and more particularly ... my mother.

One day a fourth generation Canadian friend of mine told me she wasn't sure if her dad would let her come over any more.
      The problem?
      The "red light" in our living room.
      It was a sign - he told her. A sign that I lived in a brothel.
      I told my friend it was a simple Danish modern table lamp ... with a dome red shade. She seemed to accept that ... But there was something else too.
      We had nude paintings in our living room.
      In fact we had one painting of a naked woman with a bare breast.
      People used to ask me if this was a painting of my mom.
      It wasn't.
      I never asked my mom to take the painting off the wall. Maybe I should have. Maybe if I was a real Canadian, I would have.

Rumours always circulate about new Canadians. Who are we anyway? Why do we have to do things so differently? Why can't we just be like everyone else?

I didn't really think about it much until I had my daughter.
      And life is different for her.
      She eats the same food as most of the kids in her school.
      Her mom doesn't have an accent.
      And her mom understands the school system.
      My parents never figured it out.

Her culture is Canadian culture, with a European twist.
      I can tell her peers find it easier to swallow than mine ever did.
      Evenso, she's still my child.
      When I look in my living room, there are signs I am my mother's daughter.

There on one wall is a painting - featuring a nude woman.
      The difference?
      It's a native painting.
      How Canadian.
      Maybe I should take it down.
      I'll ask my daughter.