A New Face In Canadian Television

After years of running away from her culture, this rising star learns to embrace it in her CBC Gem web series.

- Supinder Wraich

I moved to Toronto from Punjab, India, when I was four years old. My dad had immigrated from his small village in rural India to the suburb of Scarborough two years earlier. After building a small foundation in Canada, which consisted of a one-bedroom apartment, a car, and a shaky income, he sponsored my mother, older sister and me to join him.

Thinking about it now, I can’t imagine being apart from your wife and kids for that long. It’s a big sacrifice, but one my parents were both willing to make to build a better life for us.

People often ask me if I remember anything about India, given that I moved here so young. I guess because of the differencein the landscapes—from a village to a city— certain changes were so stark that I clearly remember the before and after.

I remember when I was a kid in India, my mother would regale us with stories about what Canada was like. We’d wave at planes that flew over our heads, knowing that some day we’d be on one to see our dad. Since she’d never been to Canada herself, a lot of her stories came from her imagination rather than actual facts. She would spin tales about how big the mansion my father lived in was. The mansion turned out to be a small apartment complex near Victoria Park Avenue, where we would spend two years before moving across the city to the suburb of Rexdale.

When we finally did arrive in Canada, it was winter, and two very important introductions occurred:

Number one was meeting our dad, who neither my sister nor I recognized. Since the last time we’d seen him, he’d grown a beard and I was only two years old at the time, so I just took my mother’s word that this man was, in fact, our dad.