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
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
