In Wolsak and Wynn’s new collection of stories by nine Chinese Canadian writers, the contributors use poetic language and powerful images to delve into the grim realities of the past, the facts of the present, and the hopes for the future of a diverse cast of characters connected by a common thread — the part traditional beliefs play in shaping their lives. There’s no shucking it off or outrunning it, no matter how far from the source one is. It continues to exist through eras, lifetimes and incarnations. It can be a source of strength, a catapult to new adventure, or a heavy burden weighing one down, or all of those things.
Editor Dan K. Woo has carefully balanced the book between story translated from Chinese to English and story written in English. And the works reflect the change in modern short stories Woo cites in his introduction: “a shift from ‘the mythic to the anecdotal,’ from impersonal storytelling where the narrator has a minor or invisible role to ‘storytelling that is intensely personal, self-conscious, and narrated with a distinctive voice.’”
We hear those voices and are transported from a comfortable chair in our living rooms to the places the writers take us. To the Lonely Face Club in Bingji Ye’s story of the same name on a bitter Valentine’s night where a woman waits in the cold for a lover she made a pact with 20 years earlier to meet again on this day. To the manmade park in a manmade compound in Alberta where the rebellious 11-year-old in Ellen Chang-Richardson’s story, Moonlight in the Palm of my Hand, takes her small dog on a fateful day to sit on the grass in spite of a clear warning sign to stay off the grass. Or to the tiny hostel in Beijing in Isabella Wong’s story, Coal Flowers, where coal workers’ families’ entire living spaces consist of a bunk bed and a shared window ledge in a room where privacy is defined by a thin curtain.
In Eddie Boudel Tan’s story, Egg Tart Deconstructed, we clearly see the food served in a restaurant — very unlike the food the protagonist ate as a child. She stares at noodles that remind her of “a nest of earthworms, or a bundle of elastic bands. …anaemic, unloved…” and the disinterest we’re told she feels toward the man sitting opposite her, proposing to her, is deconstructed and revealed more as revulsion than disinterest. But traditional pressure is strong. So what will her answer to his proposal be?
Author Yilin Wang takes us to Yibin, where Dai Ying, the protagonist in Fault Lines, stands outside a courtyard on New Year’s Eve with a ‘rented’ boyfriend, reluctant to enter and face her Nai Nai’s (grandmother’s) harsh scrutiny, criticisms and tedious questions about a possible pending marriage because at age 28 Nai Nai considers Dai Ying to be a ‘Leftover Woman’ who should have been married years ago. Nai Nai, who scarred Dai Ying irreparably when she beat her with a feather duster throughout Dai Ying’s childhood screaming, “hitting is caring, yelling is love.” Then Wang takes us inside Nai Nai’s house, where Dai Ying’s woe increases when she is forced to go into Baba’s old room to visit his shrine. If Baba’s spirit is near it, he will see through her lie. “It’s harder to lie to the dead than to the living.” Later, Dai Ying will learn something about her father that will change her life.
Sam Cheuk takes us to an eatery no one would know was there “if you’re not from Pol Fu Lam.” A village where no outsider knew how to get around and “nothing is ever mapped out except by rote.” A place where The Best Ham and Egg Sandwich on the Island (story title) was served. It was a simple, delicious sandwich, but the place Cheuk remembers from his childhood was far from simple. It was a place where, as a boy, the author felt like he was “always living in another era or an era that was someone else’s, or multiple eras happening simultaneously.”
In Anna Ling Kaye’s Red Egg and Ginger, a beloved cousin’s baby-naming ceremony in Hong Kong becomes a place that swirls the protagonist’s emotions into a tangle of worry, duty and fear. Culture cross, old beliefs, an unyielding Mother, and pressure for women to succeed at good jobs (at least management level in some company), and be married and have babies as well, run amok in Mei’s thoughts as she tries to decide whether to go to the ceremony, and what to reveal if she does. Though her cousin has followed the prescribed route of successful career, marriage and motherhood, nothing in Mei’s life is straightforward like that.
English words and Chinese expectations crowd the mind and constipate the body of Sheun-King’s protagonist in a place called Tung Chung. In Sheun-King’s story, July Has Nothing to Do with Gods, we’re told China is a place where “public-school kids do not play in the fountain after school; they play the piano,” something the protagonist sucked at as a child. He was good at running. And ”mindlessly running ahead is what he’s good at” now.
He’d graduated in economics from UBC, spoke English well, and is tall, which had landed him a job as a cabin boy with Cathay Pacific. For two years he’d flown between Vancouver and Hong Kong, but he’d lost his job six months ago due to the pandemic, and for the past two months has spent much of his time having sex with a woman who tells him, “I stole something of yours.” “I understand you’re mad,” she says, “so I’ll give you a deadline.” ‘Deadline’. The English word barely makes sense to him. Nor does his sex partner’s declaration of theft. What, exactly did she steal? She, who was a former international student and now lives in a penthouse. He doesn’t really care. What bothers him is live T.V. images of protestors marching through the streets of Hong Kong island; then students in gas masks running from tear gas. The complete destruction of the MTR station he lives above by protestors and the fact the MTR is fixed and fully functional by the next day.
His sex partner’s issues are different from his. Hers is based on stories that aren’t real. Like running, he’s good at stories and English words. At using them to reduce mystery to something that can be explained in his real world.
In the final story, Foggy Days, Foggy Ways, author Lydia Kwa takes us to a place beyond. Nine-year-old Vanessa lost her life to Covid but is unable to leave because there’s something she needs. How to get it? In the wee hours of the morning, she slips through the fog that has blurred the land for days and into her house, where she checks on her twin brothers and her parents. She’s relieved they’re all still breathing, but they don’t know she’s there. She can’t ask them for help. Reluctantly, she leaves.
Later that day, a chance encounter with an opera singer who’s singing as she walks through Gaston Park gives Vanessa momentary hope. The singer can hear her and see her, and converses with her readily. Turns out she’s from Singapore, where Vanessa’s parents are also from. However, when the singer realizes what Vanessa is, she quickly disappears, and Vanessa realizes the singer might be afraid she’s a pontianak—a spirit that eats men’s entrails. Vanessa has never liked entrails. With the singer’s exit, the girl’s hope fades and she’s left feeling very alone and anguished. As Woo says in his introduction, that’s a place everyone on this plane of existence can relate to. We’ve all been there at some time or other. Still, Vanessa’s problem remains to be solved.
These are stories of place and the influences places have on the characters’ beliefs, thoughts, actions and inactions. They’re about the influences the characters’ pasts and the people in their lives, living or dead, exert on their lives. Readers who have no or little knowledge of Asian culture will learn a lot about it from them. But they’re also about more than that. They reveal and explore universal human conditions: love, loss, celebration, sorrow, courage and cowardice. They are about the here and now, and transcending the here and now. They are enlightening and thought-provoking works.
Dan K. Woo‘s family came to Canada in the 1970s. His grandfather was a fire captain and the first firefighter to die on duty in British Hong Kong, partly a result of the British colonial system. In 2018, Woo won the Ken Klonsky Award for Learning How to Love China (Quattro Books). His writing has appeared in such publications as the South China Morning Post, Quill & Quire and China Daily USA. A Toronto native, he lives with his partner in the city and writes in his free time.
- Wolsak and Wynn, May 23, 2023
- 152 PAGES
- ISBN 978-1-989496-67-1
Since graduating from the Banff Centre Book Editing Program in 1996, Jocelyn has explored all facets of book-making. She is a published author of fiction and non-fiction, an editor, and the founder of two presses established to produce three anthologies that together contain the work of 66 British Columbia writers and artists. Since 2012, she has also written book reviews of children’s books for Canadian Materials Magazine. You can see more about her on her website: