One Book, Two Reviews: Johnny Delivers by Wayne Ng

Carrie Stanton’s review:

Johnny Delivers by Wayne Ng is a top read of this year for me.

Johnny Delivers by Wayne Ng is a top read of this year for me. Well-suited for a wide range of audiences, age groups, and cultures, this book has it all in spades. We find out at the very beginning that Johnny, as the first-born male, has his future planned from day one. His family believes he will continue to work in their Chinese restaurant, to support his parents, honour them and his culture, and build an entrepreneurial empire. That’s a lot of pressure for an 18-year-old who is also finishing high school, hoping to meet the girl of his dreams, and growing to manhood knowing his place in his family is within the family business. With deft skill, Ng takes his reader deeper and deeper into the story as secrets and schemes are discovered and revealed.

Johnny Delivers is set in the late 1970s and readers will find out quickly that there’s more to Johnny than meets the eye. Johnny has the spirit of his hero, famed martial artist and actor Bruce Lee (who died in 1973) tucked into his brain. Bruce pops in and out, offering frank statements, often in the form of riddles and short conversations, that both support and challenge Johnny. Johnny finds himself questioning his life, the expectations of his family, and his own dreams. With this pressure weighing on him, Johnny goes along knowing that he wants to call his own shots in his almost adult life, but how?

Johnny’s mother is hands-on at the restaurant, The Red Pagoda, along with his father. Mama enjoys a good game of mahjong at his Auntie’s community club, the Association. When Mama lost “she would return smelling like Johnnie Walker”, when Mama wins, she returns “carrying wonton soup and humming opera”. Right at the beginning, we learn his father has returned from a long absence with a younger half-sister, Jane. She is a pest who has ways to get what she wants and to get under Johnny’s skin. Johnny’s relationship with his family is strained but keeping them together is foremost. Plus, he has more weight on him: after a turn of events, Johnny has to devise a plan to promote business in the cafe without alerting anyone that there’s a necessity for money. This is high stakes with plenty of tension, all riding on Johnny’s shoulders. But, can he pull it off? And, at what cost? What can he ‘cook up’ to get the money rolling in?

This story takes place in Toronto, and I felt as I read that on the sidelines — in the margins — were the ghosts of the early Chinese settlers that Wayne Ng writes about. The early days of his parents, Auntie, and the many real people from China and Hong Kong who immigrated to Canada, arriving to a vast unknown territory. A new, strange, and at times unwelcoming world. I thought of what it took for them to remain, and how they had survived, against very tough odds. The snippets of documented history, so finely spun into the story, speak of how lives were built, destroyed, and recreated. There is no shying away from the sting of discrimination Johnny encounters nor how the government openly discriminated against those coming to Canada with hopes for a better life. Ng touchingly dedicates Johnny Delivers: “For all the paper families and their untold stories.”

This is a highly entertaining, brilliantly paced, fall-in-love story.

Johnny Delivers makes it impossible not to cheer for Johnny. I love Johnny Wong and the other characters that Ng paints with his deliberate strokes, shaping, forming, culling, with masterful precision and perception. At its heart, it is about growing up and establishing independence, while maintaining a balance between family love and duty, and being true to one’s dreams. Johnny Delivers is a story ripe for reading if you’re a reader who likes unique, sharply-written characters; coming-of-age adventures; sparks of history woven throughout; ingenuity, and lots of humour. This is a highly entertaining, brilliantly paced, fall-in-love story. How do you know when you’ve read something exceptional? For me, it’s because it enters my soul. Johnny Delivers by Wayne Ng did just that — do not miss it!

Read about when Carrie Stanton met Wayne Ng on our Patreon here.

Ian Colford’s Review:

Family tensions dominate the action in Wayne’s Ng’s pulsating novel, Johnny Delivers.

Set in 1970’s Toronto, this is the story of teenager Johnny Wong, whose family runs The Red Pagoda, a struggling Chinese restaurant in Toronto’s Chinatown district. The Wongs — Johnny, his parents and his smart but irresponsible half-sister Jane — occupy a small apartment above the restaurant. It’s not easy to keep secrets in such cramped quarters, but that doesn’t stop everyone in the Wong family from trying.

Johnny is a typical teenager, lusting after Angie — one of very few female students at Central Technical High School; and idolizing sports and entertainment figures — specifically former Maple Leaf Dave Keon and recently deceased martial-arts hero Bruce Lee. But Johnny is also hyper-sensitive to the moods of the people around him, and where his mother is concerned, he senses something is seriously wrong. Johnny’s parents often argue, and his mother spends much of her free time away from the restaurant at various social spots playing mahjong — behaviour that feeds Johnny’s fear that the family might splinter apart (as it did once before). His father is resentful of his wife’s absences, and as the eldest child Johnny bears the brunt of his Baba’s ire. In the novel’s opening scenes, Johnny is sent out to find his Mama and tracks her down at the Wong Association, a social club run by Johnny’s “Auntie”— a woman intimate with the family’s history but who, despite sharing the same last name, is not in fact a close blood relation. When Johnny learns that his mother has run up a $5,000 gambling debt owed to his Auntie, and put up the restaurant as collateral, and that the debt is being called in, he goes into full panic mode.

Keeping knowledge of his mother’s debt from the rest of the family, Johnny informs his Auntie that he will pay it off himself. But how? That is the burning question. Then by chance he re-connects with a friend from his past, Barry, who is trying to unload a stash of marijuana. Together they devise a scheme to sell the weed through the restaurant’s food delivery service, and in a short time have attracted a devoted and loyal clientele. Initially the deliveries go according to plan, and the money starts rolling in. But nothing is forever, and with success comes unwanted scrutiny. When Barry disappears and Johnny finds out where the stash of weed originally came from — and then one of Johnny’s teachers discovers what he’s been up to — Johnny sees that he’s in way over his head. The solution, he realizes, resides with his family, which is where he should have gone for help in the first place.

A taut page turner, Johnny Delivers is also a moving coming-of-age story crowded with indelible characters, the chief of whom is Johnny, a young man the reader roots for and will not quickly forget, who finds trouble through trying to save people from themselves. In Johnny Wong, Ng plumbs the depths of the anxiety ridden, insecure teenage male psyche to great comic and dramatic effect, exposing his protagonist’s deeply held passions, biggest fears and most embarrassing fantasies, and doing it in a manner that inspires huge empathy.

Ng’s novel succeeds as entertainment, but also addresses the rampant discrimination of an earlier era, the vast impediments faced by people from minority races striving for acceptance in a white man’s world. But the book is memorable for Johnny, who narrates his own story with grit and verve.

Johnny Delivers is a wild ride filled with memorable moments both poignant and hilarious. In this, his third novel, Wayne Ng delivers big time.

Read why Wayne Ng wrote Johnny Delivers here.

Wayne Ng was born in downtown Toronto to Chinese immigrants who fed him a steady diet of bitter melons and kung fu movies. Ng works as a school social worker in Ottawa but lives to write, travel, eat and play, preferably all at the same time. He is an award-winning author and traveler who continues to push his boundaries from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Author of The Family Code, Letters From Johnny, and Finding The Way: A Novel of Lao Tzu. Connect with him at waynengwrites.com

Publisher: Guernica Editions (October 31, 2024)
Paperback 8″ x 5″ | 200 pages
ISBN: 9781771838900

Carrie Stanton

Managing Editor

TMR’s Managing Editor Carrie Stanton has a BA in Political Science from the University of Calgary. She is the author of The Jewel and Beast Bot, and picture books, Emmie and the Fierce Dragon and The Gardener. Carrie loves to write stories that grow wings and transport readers everywhere. She reads and enjoys stories from every genre.

Ian Colford

Website

Ian Colford’s short fiction has appeared in many literary publications, in print and online. His work has been shortlisted for the Thomas H. Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award, the Journey Prize, the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, and others. His latest novel, The Confessions of Joseph Blanchard, was the winner of the 2022 Guernica Prize and was published by Guernica Editions in 2023. He lives in Halifax.