This is my story.
​From conflict to belonging.

When I was growing up in Montreal, Quebec in the 1950s and 60s, it was common to see walls, signs, public mailboxes spray painted in French, "Down with the English," "English out of Quebec" and "FLQ," the French terrorist group that was fighting for independence for Quebec from Canada. Then they started planting bombs in mailboxes.
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We found ours when I was in high school. It didn't go off, but it scared us just the same. I left Montreal after I graduated, went to university for a couple of years, hitchhiked and worked in Europe and Israel for a year, married a Chinese man from Hong Kong and raised my children in a small city on the east coast of Canada until we moved to Los Angeles.​

Graffiti from Front de libération du Québec (Quebec Liberation Front) was a common sight. Photo by Toronto Star.

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​I started thinking about what I'd learned and the people I'd met along the way, and I began to write essays about them. They were published in the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and other newspapers and magazines.

​When I began talking to other people about their experiences, I realized I had a fascinating book in the making. Their stories - and mine - became Belonging and Conflict: The Stories of Our Lives, which answers the question I asked myself when I was young: Why does someone who doesn’t know me, hate me? It also answers other questions I struggled with for decades: What causes conflicts between groups and how can they be resolved?

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