Monday, Oct 11

JAN WONG

Friday, October 8, 1999

My invitation to Rideau Hall must have been lost in the mail.

Happily, Adrienne Clarkson's "installation" yesterday was covered live on CBC Newsworld. Unhappily, it went on for three hours.

Installations generally bring to mind things like central-vac systems. In this case, the installation pageantry for Canada's 26th governor-general included 21-gun salutes, trumpet flourishes, marching bands, three choirs, two ballet dancers and a black-tie dinner at Rideau Hall.

She arrived in flat shoes and an ankle-length black dress, her posture regal. Her smile never flagged, even when she bonked her head on the unusually high back of her red velvet throne.

In her speech, Adrienne Clarkson paid tribute to her 92-year-old father, who sat a few feet away, with his war medals pinned to his chest. "To be brought up by courageous and loving parents," she said, "was a gift that made up for all we had lost."

By bringing up the parent thing, she inadvertently reminded everyone of all she had lost. In her moment of supreme glory, her two daughters were absent.

The loss seemed magnified by the sweet, pure voices of Les Petits Chanteurs de Trois Rivières, who serenaded her in the Senate Chamber. The year after her daughters elected to be formally adopted by their stepmother, they were airbrushed from her entry in Canadian Who's Who.

As Governor-General, she wants us to address her as "Madame Clarkson." Perhaps we should call her Madame Icy, as in "Icy Branch Poy," which is her Chinese name.

After all, her new coat of arms, in Chinese red, has Asian tigers, because she was born in the Year of the Tiger, and a golden phoenix, to symbolize her family's rise from the ashes following the horrors of the Second World War.

The Governor-General's new-found Chinese identity is jarring -- and just as phony as her new-found appreciation of matrimony. This is a woman, after all, who kept her first husband's non-Chinese surname, even as she airbrushed him from her Who's Who entry 20 years ago.

Playing the Chinese card in 1999 comes a bit late. She's never identified herself with the Chinese community or done anything for it. When the now Governor-General was head girl at Ottawa's Lisgar Collegiate Institute in the 1950s, a classmate reports that she ignored the other Chinese immigrants there who were struggling to learn English. Maybe that's because she hardly speaks any Chinese herself.

"I learned to be a Canadian," she said in her speech, "through a series of eternally virginal public-school teachers, who treated me only as bright -- and not bright yellow."

All this Chinese-roots stuff is probably not her fault. Prime Minister Jean Chrétien set her up, announcing she would be the "first visible minority" governor-general and "the first Canadian [one] not born in Canada."

What are you supposed to do after that? Pretend you come from Yorkville?

It all made sense the day the papers published the photo of her meeting the queen at Balmoral Castle. Adrienne Clarkson and her husband are body doubles for Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip. The gals have the same hairdo, the same odd fashion sense (kimonos and kilts). The guys have the same receding hairline, the same double-breasted fashion sense (grey suits and grey suits).

Following yesterday's speech, the assembled notables gave the Governor-General a standing ovation. She stepped graciously down from the dais to greet the Prime Minister, the Supreme Court judges and the Cabinet. She hugged some child performers and even blew a kiss to a CBC technician in the balcony. As she air-kissed her way through the VIP crowd, the thought occurred: Looks like she's an awfully long way from her roots.