Scarborough made me who I am today. I love it. Why don’t you?

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Omer Aziz is the author of Brown Boy: A Memoir.

I don’t remember the first time I heard slander spoken on Scarborough’s name, but I do remember the last.

It was 2018, and I was at a book event in downtown Toronto. An American journalist and a local moderator had packed the hall at the Reference Library, Torontonians flocking to hear enlightened opinions about the unenlightened U.S. president. At some point, for reasons I don’t recall, Scarborough was mentioned. What I do remember is the laughter: Rippling through the room, as if to say, you know, Scarborough, that place, why mention it here among the civilized? I sat in the back row and did what I’ve always done around polite Canadians – held my tongue.

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I was born in Scarborough, grew up in Scarborough, spent the first decade and a half of my life in Scarborough – and then went out into the bigger world, studying in Kingston, Paris, London and New Haven, Conn., before becoming a foreign policy adviser in the federal government and a fellow at Harvard. Yet my heart has never left Scarborough. And as an adult, I came to learn all too well that laughter, that derision, was suggestive of other things as well.

In 2007, when I was 17 years old, Toronto Life published an article called The Scarborough Curse. The writer explored the ethnic gang violence plaguing the community, which had become “a symbol of a different kind of alienation, one that carries a hint of menace rather than complacency.” A menace to whom, I wondered. The story framed my community as a deeply troubled place full of criminals, a once-white town that had changed, menacingly, overnight.

The piece crystallized what many people really thought of Scarborough in those days. It didn’t matter that the same year the article was published, Scarborough’s per capita crime rate was lower than much of Toronto’s, and that the following year, the Toronto chief of police stated that Scarborough was one of the safest divisions in Toronto. There was violence in Scarborough, yes, but unlike other places, Scarborough was defined by it.

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The stories told in the media were a far cry from the Scarborough I knew. Different shades and hues made up the mosaic of my childhood, a mélange of brown and Black people. Families lived together, multiple generations, many recent immigrants, striving under the same roof, with the opportunities Canada afforded at our fingertips. Mechanics, retail workers, men who still worked with their hands and built things, West Indian aunties who sat on their stoops on Sunday, uncles who worked mysterious jobs and who when asked what they did, simply said, “Business.” This was our community: diverse, multiracial, working-class.

A kind of segregation emerged in the city – there was Scarborough, and there was the rest of Toronto. Scarborough was 600,000 people. It was also far away – taking hours to get downtown, depending on public transit. Rarely, did I venture into Toronto proper. We were too far, too cut-off. Unlike remote parts of New York and London, where low-income people can catch buses and trains, Scarborough felt totally removed. It seemed deliberately difficult for Scarborough residents to get to the city. Residents of polite downtown could be reassured that dangerous, menacing Scarborough was far away – our very own Siberia (or “Scarberia,” as it was often called).

Already, at the tender age of 10, coming up on Ellesmere and Pharmacy and Kingston Road, coming up on Vic Park and Birchmont Collegiate and the Bluffs, I had the feeling that I was from a place no one cared about. Social services were substandard. None of our representatives at either the provincial or national level seemed to care much for Scarborough, unless it was election season.

As I grew older, I asked myself the same question: Why did it feel like they did not like us, did not want us? What was it about Scarborough, my community, that even a child of 10 could feel so neglected – indeed, despised – by the wider world? More importantly, what did that say about the rest of the country?

My parents immigrated from Pakistan to Scarborough in the seventies and eighties, part of the great movement of peoples that began a decade prior. My mother was a teacher, from the town of Murree. My father worked as a parking officer.

The first room I saw was in Scarborough General Hospital, where I am told the doctors took care of an immigrant mother and her early-born child with grace.

From kindergarten to eighth grade I walked Scarborough’s sidewalks – home, to school, to the mosque. Scarborough was Terraview Willowfield school and Parkway Mall, where my grandmother took my brother and me every Saturday afternoon. Scarborough was Bendale neighbourhood and Abu Bakr Masjid mosque, the overhead power-lines and large fields and spicy Jamaican food and Karachi Bazaar, old and new.

I remember when nine-year-old Cecilia Zhang was kidnapped, and the hysteria that spread through our neighbourhood. I remember the way the Black and West Indian boys would greet me with Whagwan Brejin? Every accent was heard here. Every colour seen here. Every dream lived here, behind private doors, in bungalows, or in tiny apartments. As a child, I felt that Scarborough was the entire world.

After the Second World War, Scarborough was the home of middle-class white families. Large rural tracts of farmland gave way to a manufacturing base that was built around the automobile. To this day, the wide roads and tiny sidewalks of Scarborough are a testament to the time when the family bungalow and driveway were the ultimate North American dream.

In the 1960s, things began to change. Thousands of immigrants, many of them from the Caribbean and South Asia, landed in Canada and many went to Scarborough. The old white population began moving out, to newer suburbs or to nicer postal codes in Toronto. Scarborough welcomed tens of thousands of immigrants and became a landing port for newcomers. Refugees, exiles, dreamers, would all find a home in Scarborough. More people arrived in waves, living with families, building social capital, putting down roots. Scarborough became Canada’s Ellis Island.

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At one point, our family of seven – me, my two younger brothers, an older half-brother, my parents, my grandmother – all lived in a basement in Scarborough, just off Pachino Boulevard. We didn’t have much, but we had each other, had the hard labour of my father, had the sturdy resolve and iron will of my mother and grandmother. The immigrant dream in Scarborough was itself built upon great sacrifices and great journeys.

But what was a safe harbour for some was a menacing invasion to others. When my father got to Canada in the 1970s, he might have read the following “startling report” in the Toronto Star, at the end of that decade. “The boroughs have inherited all the problems normally associated with the inner city – poverty, unemployment, racial tensions, drug and alcohol abuse, and juvenile crime – and are woefully ill equipped to deal with them.” A new term was applied to Scarborough: “inner suburb,” combining the worst of the inner city with the worst of the suburbs. The obvious sources of the problem – underfunding, underinvestment, underemployment – were not seen as the culprit. No, it had to be something inherent in the residents themselves.

What distinguished Scarborough was that it had built low-income and public housing right into the fabric of its neighbourhoods. So the city of Toronto could stuff away tens of thousands of people in these gigantic tower blocks and forget them. The inevitable social ills were symptoms of the problem; but they came to define the town. That meant more cops, more arrests, more violence. Rather than thinking of Scarborough as the home of Canada’s newest and hardest-working citizens, who should be cared for and invested in, our communities were cast with suspicion.

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In the nineties and early 2000s, walking Scarborough’s streets, I was indeed afraid at times. But it was only as I approached high school that I began to discern that many of the youths around me who lived in peril were themselves imperilled – by society, by the streets, and even by the schools.

It was true there were gangs in Scarborough, that some of these were ethnic in nature. I knew them, knew who was drifting down that road by the aimless look in their eyes, how their voices grew angrier as we got older, how their swagger changed, and soon, they were pulling up with unfamiliar friends. The boys without fathers in their lives, or whose fathers, like many immigrant fathers, were distant and separated from their sons’ world – these were the ones we quickly lost to The Life. These boys needed guidance and jobs, not minimum sentences.

The prospect of more cousins and more violence morphed around 17 – when my best friend was killed after being involved in a car chase with the police. We might have thought we had cousins and therefore we had power, but out there, in the real world, outside Scarborough, the police and prosecutors had cousins and power, too. Almost by design, to be from Scarborough meant being trapped. None of us knew that there was a larger universe out there, with great libraries and cathedrals and universities and museums.

What’s left out of the common story of gangs in Scarborough is the fact that many of the ethnic-oriented gangs originated as self-defence units to protect individuals from the racial bullying immigrants endured. Despite Toronto’s welcoming spirit to immigrants now, there was a time when it was routine to hear racial slurs openly, on the streets. Racist violence was not uncommon. Even when I was a kid in Toronto public schools, in the nineties, I heard the slur “Paki” more times than I would have liked. White boys used it with special fervour. The N-word, too, was used. We were kids, yet we all knew these were racist slurs, and the white boys also knew it. I later wondered where they had learned it from.

But my Scarborough was much more than gangs or racism or the police. No memory need be reduced to its worst elements, and there are lessons even – especially – in the harshest places. Scarborough was a first crush, a first crossover, a first kiss. Scarborough was beef patties and chicken curry. Scarborough was the ball court and the soccer field and street hockey with cousins swerving like brown-skinned Gretzkys. Scarborough was hot summer nights and crisp spring mornings, boys and girls coming of age together with our immigrant parents, growing up, parents who struggled to give us better lives. All the way out in Scarborough, it was like being on another planet, far from the centre, put out in a corner and forgotten. Yet it was here, in Scarborough, where we also laughed together, where so many hopes were born.

When I grew up, went to law school in the U.S., worked for the foreign minister, became a writer, I understood there was a reason the polite white people had a touch of condescension when speaking about Scarborough. It was not because of what we did, or any criminological reports. It was because of who we were and what we represented. Scarborough was truly multiracial, truly multicultural, truly a mosaic of different vernaculars and heritages, a blend and fusion of different faces, backgrounds and accents. It was a collision of creativity and beauty. But there was a fear, latent in some hearts out in the real world, that the rest of the country might one day look like us.

It was a tough pill to swallow: that the very thing we celebrated, they feared.

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One afternoon in March, I got in my car and drove back to Scarborough. I had left when I was 13, and had not gone back enough – I was off in the world, writing and working, travelling through big cities, and yet always thinking of Scarborough. It was a chilly day and the sun was shining as I got on the 401. Despite limited time in Toronto, something was pulling me back to Scarborough.

Old Drake played in my car. “I take Eglinton to 401 East and exit at Markham Road in the east end,” Aubrey Graham raps in Connect. I took roughly the same route but got off at Victoria Park, driving into the borough as apartment buildings and corner stores came into view. The bungalows passed me by, with glades of shadow and light glinting upon them.

Scarborough today is certified cool. From the immigrants came creative collisions that spawned artistic geniuses. The diversity of Scarborough ultimately served as the greatest incubator of talent on the planet.

It used to be Mike Myers was the only real homegrown star. No longer. Abel Tesfaye, better known as the Weeknd, went to Birchmount Park Collegiate up the street from me. Lilly Singh is Scarborough-born, as is legendary hip hop producer Boi-1da. Domee Shi, the filmmaker whose animated film Turning Red was nominated for an Oscar this year, also grew up in Scarborough. The city-within-a-city now even has its own basketball team, too – the Scarborough Shooting Stars, part of the Canadian Elite Basketball League. It’s been quite the turn of events – from the margins to the centre of culture.

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I drove back to my old neighbourhood. Some old houses had renovations going, the tidal wave of gentrification reaching the suburb. Parkway Mall had grown sixfold; gone was the cute little mall we walked to as kids, in its place was a multiplex of shopping and entertainment. Weed dispensaries seemed everywhere. The Old Karachi Bazaar had a FOR RENT sign up out front. I saw the house we had lived in, so solitary now, and the second house where we crammed into the basement. Only love and dreams had held us together.

There was one last stop to make. I drove up Warden Avenue to go to Annapurna’s sweet shop. This was the same store where, 30 years prior, my mother had worked as a new immigrant. I had been three years old at the time, and money had been tight. My mother would take care of my brother and me, then leave us with our grandmother and walk to work. It was the story of so many immigrant mothers, leaving their young kids behind, in a new country with unfamiliar mores, to keep the dream alive.

And now the dream was coming back around as I walked up to Annapurna’s. An elderly woman in a hijab was working at the counter. I explained to her that I wanted to buy a box full of mithai or sweets. She obliged, but looked at me for a second, because in our culture, a box of sweets was something we purchased only on special occasions.

“My mother, Salma, used to work here,” I said. “A long time ago.”

The same restaurant where Amma, my mother, laboured while I waited, I now stood in as a grown man, back from Harvard, buying her a box of sweets.

The woman, who could have been my auntie, did not recognize the name. The business had opened in 1992, and in 2019, had sold to new ownership. She introduced me to her husband. An uncle shook my hand. His name was Zulfikar, and he told me they were a Muslim Canadian family who had bought the shop from relatives. They had continued the same recipes, served the community – and business was good, Alhamdulillah.

I told the man that this store had given my mother her first job in Canada, back when she was scared and I was scared, back when we never knew what might happen, back when the life I lead now would have felt unimaginable. I ended up buying two boxes of sweets.

When I walked back to my car, dusk was settling. I understood something then, that it was our mothers who had made Scarborough what it was, where they had worked and struggled, where they had been away from us in our tender years so that we might have a chance at life – and our fathers, too, who went out and made their own sacrifices. But even when our fathers failed, our mothers persisted. They were the beating hearts of Scarborough, of every immigrant home found among the multitudes. No matter what the outside world said, our mothers had given us a world we could call home, even in the basement.

I got on the 401 highway and the city faded behind me in a bluish haze. Scarborough was all love. That’s what it was. Scarborough was the underdog, the engineer, the artist imagining new worlds. And I knew something else, something that gave me hope as the city buildings passed, that in that very moment, other kids were imagining their own dreams out in our remote island, and soon, whatever they created would define all of our tomorrows – sending even more shooting stars across the galaxy for the whole world to see.