It’s a Saturday night in late February, and I’m in small-town West Virginia witnessing an unexpected stand-off. In the garden room of The Country Inn of Berkeley Springs are forty, maybe fifty people, crowded against each other. About 100 more spectators are watching from the perimeter. At the centre of the action are the gleaming prizes they’re vying for: unopened bottles of water, piled in the middle of the floor. Some have brought backpacks and tote bags, hoping to fill them with imported H2O...

This First Person column is written by Adrian Ma, a journalist who lives in Toronto. For more information about First Person stories, see the FAQ.There's a certain inevitability to Googling yourself. Call it curiosity or vanity, but we've all done it, right? Usually, I'm looking for old articles I've published or seeing if anyone's referenced an interview I'd done. But several years ago, on a day at work like any other, something unexpected happened: I found myself looking at the profile of anot...

This First Person column is written by Adrian Ma, who lives in Toronto. For more information about First Person stories, see the FAQ.Nearly everyone I know is into collecting something. Some people collect comic books, others store vinyl records. My kids hunt for sea glass whenever we visit a beach.Me? I love whisky. For nearly two decades, I've been curating a modest collection of this liquid ambrosia. I've got sweet American bourbons, spicy Canadian ryes, Irish varieties and a couple of award-...

The August sun pulsates overhead as my family and I arrive at the doors of our hotel in downtown Victoria. It’s just shy of 7 p.m., the tail end of a long day that included planes, ferries, and a three-hour time difference. For my wife, Elizabeth, our two young kids, Maddy and Max, and their mah mah and yeh yeh (paternal grandmother and grandfather respectively, in Cantonese), this is our first trip outside Ontario since the pandemic. The kids are hungry and exhausted. We need food. Quick.
My fa...

As I write this letter, you are a few weeks old. It will be years until you're able to read and understand this, but I wanted to do something special to mark your arrival. You see, mon fils, your birth year coincides with Canada 150.The milestone has sparked many complicated conversations, which you'll have a lifetime to learn more about — but I wanted to explore one part of it with you today.You see, you're not merely a "Canadian citizen," you're also "Chinese-Canadian." This is like being a me...