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Shortlisted for the Governor General's Award
A startlingly vivid memoir of a Chinatown childhood by the author of the award-winning novel The Jade Peony.
Three weeks before his 57th birthday, novelist Wayson Choy received a surprising phone call during his publicity tour: a mysterious woman told him that he had been adopted. Inspired by this astonishing revelation, this beautifully-wrought memoir reveals uncanny similarities between the colorful secrets that enrich Wayson Choy's award-winning novel set in prewar Chinatown and the subsequently discovered secrets of his own life.
- Sales Rank: #2807174 in Books
- Published on: 2000-11-11
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.58" h x 1.20" w x 6.76" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 352 pages
Amazon.com Review
Canadian novelist Wayson Choy is an only child of Chinese immigrants to Vancouver, reticent, hardworking people who struggled to keep him from losing his cultural identity and becoming a mo-no--"Chinese but not Chinese." At the age of 56, after giving a radio interview on the publication of The Jade Peony, his award-winning novel about Vancouver's Chinatown, a woman with an unfamiliar voice called to tell him that the people he had known as his mother and father had in fact adopted him. Why she chose to speak out to Choy when none of his family had ever shared the secret with him is unclear. Although this revelation prefaces Choy's memoir and cannot help but color it for the reader, his book is less a search for his birth parents than a loving and tender reconstruction of his childhood with his true, adoptive family. One of the highlights of his early years were his regular visits to the Cantonese opera at the Sing Kew Theatre on Shanghai Alley. Only later did he realize that the running translation his mother provided for him had been falsified, with all the tragic endings made happy. "I never saw the same opera that everyone else did," Choy muses, adding that her whispered narratives had constructed within him "a permanent barrier against pessimism, perhaps even against adversity... If I turn my head at a certain angle, I can still see Mother crying, her perfumed hankie above me, her face streaked with tears. And, in some other sphere, I see Mother laughing like the Buddha, her spirit unyielding, her mythic lies flying between us like bright pennants." As Choy realizes during his search for information, there is some knowledge that can't be gained from a merely true account. This haunting memoir serves better than a birth certificate to say who the writer is. --Regina Marler
From Publishers Weekly
Eighteen years after he sat by his mother's hospital bed watching her die, novelist Choy (The Jade Peony) received a disturbing phone call from a woman who claimed to have recently seen his "real mother" on a streetcar. In this memoir, after briefly contemplating the shattering possibility that he had lived his 57 years without any suspicion that he might be adopted, Choy quickly moves on to relate the story of his boyhoodAat times, it appears, to reassure himself that it actually took place as he'd believed ("These are the documented facts that I have known all my life: I was born Choy Way Sun, on April 20, 1939...."). A well-rendered picture of a closely knit enclave at a dramatic timeAin Vancouver's Chinatown during the WWII eraAChoy's narrative has been shortlisted for Canada's Governor General's Award. Depicting memories of his childhood from as early as age three, he tells of his first run-ins with kwei, the ghosts that drift through homes; of his mother's habit of playing mah-jongg until morning and his attraction to the flash and clamor of the Cantonese opera. He also dwells on more familiar coming-of-age terrain, describing his aspirations to become a cowboy and the ups and downs of caring for a puppy. Though drawn in finely wrought prose, the memoir's 26 chapters and four parts are fragmented further into vignettes, some as short as a page, which works against cohesion. And, disappointingly, Choy does not return to the mysterious call that began these reminiscences until near the book's end, at which point he quickly explains how he finally uncovered the secret surrounding his birth. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From School Library Journal
Adult/High School-Choy spent his World War II-era infancy and youth in Vancouver's Chinatown. His extended family included both blood relatives and courtesy elders. The community of Canadian Chinese (not even the North American born were permitted citizenship at that time) was bound together by language, history on two continents, artistic expressions-including Chinese opera and Western movies-and values. Nearly 20 years after the death of his mother, the author discovered that he was adopted. This discovery and his second discovery that he was virtually the only one in the community ignorant of the fact stand as slim bookends on either side of an involving and pungent memoir. Accessible and engaging, the account of Choy's first 10 years brings both the world of adults as he observed them and his own interior development into focus. Family photos are sprinkled throughout. Choy's experiences with reading are poignant, humorous, and admirable. This is a book for general-interest readers, ethnic-studies researchers, and those seeking a close companion to Gus Lee's autobiographical novel, China Boy (Plume, 1994).
Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Growing up in Vancouver's Chinatown in the 1940s
By Linda Linguvic
Now a respected professor and novelist in Canada, Wayson Choy was 57 years old in 1999 when he learned that he had been adopted. This memoir is a result of that discovery and, even though some family secrets do get discovered, by the end of this 342 page-book, he and the reader understand that much of his suppressed family history will never be completely uncovered.
I did enjoy the story itself, however, which deals almost exclusively with his childhood years. Born in Vancouver in 1939, his memory of those early ears and his simple descriptions put me right into the young boy's mind.. He's the only child of hard-working Chinese immigrants in the land they refer to as Golden Mountain. Chinatown in those years was a world unto itself, and the young boy was loved and cherished by his parents as well as a large assortment of "uncles" whose own families were still back in China.
Through his eyes we see the elaborate Chinese operas, which were transported to Canadian soil, and which his mother always enjoyed. We see his early encounters with English books and his strong will to learn to read. We see him go to a Canadian nursery school and learn about the Christian religion. We understand his Chinese roots and the many ghosts and spirits that are part of his Chinese culture. We meet his dog and have to laugh at the way this loving pet took over his life. Chinatown becomes real for the reader and so does the boy's obsession with cowboys and refusal to go to a traditional Chinese school. Most of the book was devoted to this very detailed portrait. Basically, this childhood was filled with love and little trauma.
It was only in the last couple of chapters when we join him in his quest for his family secrets. This is written in the same simple style and delves deeper into the history of his family's experience in China as well as the new world. We'll never know most of the story. But we do get to share his growing-up years and learn about the forces that shaped his world.
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
Mo-no juk sum Makes Good, Eloquently
By Larry Mark MyJewishBooksDotCom
In anticipation of the lunar new year, I picked up this book. The author had me under his spell by the second page. In his memoir of growing up in the 1940's, as the son of Chinese immigrants in Vancouver's Chinatown, the reader learns that Mr. Choy, while on a promotional book tour in 1995, received a call from a woman who says that she just saw his mother. But his Toisanese mother died nearly two decades earlier, he tells the mysterious caller. No, the caller replies, she means his `real mother.' And so the memoir and the mystery begin. In descriptive language that is hypnotic and nearly as haunting as a ghost filled home his family lived in, an extremely detailed portrait of his life as a young boy is drawn. In Part 1, his pre-school years are filled with family, Chinglish, mah-jong, lots of single "uncles" to take him for ice cream, nightly Chinese operas (his mother's version are a permanent barrier against pessimism), cowboy films, and his assertively willful tantrums. In Part 2, the author writes of his school years, English and Chinese lessons, stubbornness, truancy, confusion, helplessness, his pet dog, the humiliations his father endured at work, and the other concerns of children. In the last third of the book, Mr. Choy returns as an adult to the mystery of his and explores the hidden secrets of his family. Upon close reading, one learns about the stress of living as an Asian in North America during the War, a time when burials were only allowed in Asian-only cemeteries, when sick Asians were housed in the basement of the hospital, when Asians were offered payments to return to Asia if they promised never to return, and when men were not allowed to bring their families or wives over to the Gold Mountain from across the Pacific. On even closer reading, one can discern how different Chinese identities were crafted in North America by his grandfather, his parents, and finally himself in an in-between'ness third generation.
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