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Paper Shadows: A Memoir of a Past Lost and Found
From the author of the popular and widely acclaimed novel, The Jade Peony , comes this new autobiographical exploration of past and present, culture and selfhood, history and memory, immigration and family life--in other words, the modern-day collision of Eastern and Western experiences and worldviews.
Three weeks before his 57th birthday, Choy discovered that he had been adopted. This astonishing revelation inspires the beautifully-wrought, sensitively told Paper Shadows , the story of a Chinatown past both lost and found. From his early life amid the ghosts of old Chinatown, to his discovery, years later, of deeply held family secrets that crossed the ocean from mainland China to Gold Mountain, this engrossing, multi-layered self-portrait is "a childhood memoir of crystalline clarity" ( The Boston Globe ) that will speak directly and arrestingly to all students of Chinese immigrant history.
Three weeks before his 57th birthday, Choy discovered that he had been adopted. This astonishing revelation inspires the beautifully-wrought, sensitively told Paper Shadows , the story of a Chinatown past both lost and found. From his early life amid the ghosts of old Chinatown, to his discovery, years later, of deeply held family secrets that crossed the ocean from mainland China to Gold Mountain, this engrossing, multi-layered self-portrait is "a childhood memoir of crystalline clarity" ( The Boston Globe ) that will speak directly and arrestingly to all students of Chinese immigrant history.
352 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1999
7 people are currently reading
441 people want to read
About the author
Wayson Choy
5Ìýbooks85ÌýfollowersBorn in Vancouver in 1939, Wayson Choy has spent much of his life engaged in teaching and writing in Toronto. Since 1967, he has been a professor at Humber College and also a faculty member of the Humber School for Writers. He has appeared in Unfolding the Butterfly, a full-length bio-documentary by Michael Glassbourg, and was recently a host on the co-produced China-Canada film In Search of Confucius. His novels The Jade Peony and Paper Shadows have won several awards. Wayson Choy, and his book All that Matters was short listed for the 2004 Giller Prize. Choy passed away in his home on April 27, 2019, at the age of 80.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 35 reviews
April 29, 2019
RIP, Wayson Choy, 1939-2019. I interviewed him once, and he was the loveliest person: generous, articulate, full of sly gossip and so very talented. As an Asian writer and particularly as an out, gay Asian writer, he was a pioneer.
***
Wayson Choy’s Paper Shadows feels like a spiritual follow-up to his award-winning novel The Jade Peony.
***
Wayson Choy’s Paper Shadows feels like a spiritual follow-up to his award-winning novel The Jade Peony.
The book opens during the publicity tour for the earlier book, with Choy receiving a mysterious message from a Vancouver woman who claims she’s just seen his birth mother.
Choy, in his mid-50s, discovers he was adopted in childhood, a fact that sends him scurrying back through his life, remembering childhood details, interviewing friends and family and piecing together facts for the book.
What he remembers and discovers forms the bulk of this very readable memoir, which takes us through his magical childhood filled with ghosts and superstitions, his troubled adolescence where he longed to be white, and on through his political awakening and discovery of his true self.
The book is filled with remarkably drawn scenes, poetic yet never precious. We watch as Choy and his mah-jong-playing mom come home late one night to find his father in a drunken rage, possessed by an evil ghost. We see the young Choy discover the magic of books and the freeing power of words. We see him glimpse but not understand his emerging homosexuality.
And we see the true price that Chinese immigrants paid once they settled in Canada.
Choy makes Vancouver’s Chinatown seem a microcosm of the world, and his exploration of his own particular family history allows us to reflect on large themes like home, place and our own intergenerational secrets.
Paper Shadows is a healing book about life, death and coming to terms with our pasts, real or imagined. It’s haunting.
March 17, 2025
Paper Shadows: A Chinatown Childhood � A haunting memoir from the bestselling author of The Jade Peony.
This was a delightful memoir about family history in Vancouver and Victoria, B.C.; and how people left their Chinese cities and villages, arriving in Canada and starting new lives. Choy also reveals the intimate moments of leisure activities.
Vancouver's historic Chinatown has been in a serious state of decline (especially suffering from of the pandemic and the absence of tourists), so it is fascinating to learn more about what it was like in the 1930s and during the War.
Wayson Choy was a gifted sensitive communicator. His writing appears smooth and effortless but manages to evoke so much in simple, straightforward prose. This author wrote his novel about secrets in Chinatown, so it was a revelation, perhaps even karma, for him to then discover there were so many secrets in his own family that he did not stumble across until later in life.
More than a simple story of childhood, and intergenerational family dynamics, this book also touches on cultural history and the relationship between immigrant workers here in "Gold Mountain" (the West) and "Salt Water City" (Vancouver) and their families back in China who depend on remittances. Such relationships continue today for millions of workers all over the world.
This is a beautiful book about families, connections, and resilience.
This was a delightful memoir about family history in Vancouver and Victoria, B.C.; and how people left their Chinese cities and villages, arriving in Canada and starting new lives. Choy also reveals the intimate moments of leisure activities.
Vancouver's historic Chinatown has been in a serious state of decline (especially suffering from of the pandemic and the absence of tourists), so it is fascinating to learn more about what it was like in the 1930s and during the War.
Wayson Choy was a gifted sensitive communicator. His writing appears smooth and effortless but manages to evoke so much in simple, straightforward prose. This author wrote his novel about secrets in Chinatown, so it was a revelation, perhaps even karma, for him to then discover there were so many secrets in his own family that he did not stumble across until later in life.
More than a simple story of childhood, and intergenerational family dynamics, this book also touches on cultural history and the relationship between immigrant workers here in "Gold Mountain" (the West) and "Salt Water City" (Vancouver) and their families back in China who depend on remittances. Such relationships continue today for millions of workers all over the world.
This is a beautiful book about families, connections, and resilience.
March 27, 2014
Choy begins this book with the phrase "This memoir is a work of creative non-fiction." Choy's candor is appropriate since a major part of this book deals with his early life, and, as such, his memory could be coloured by early photos of himself dressed as a cowboy, or with the photo of the family's pet dog or early school and family photos. To what extent these photos were given a narrative context by his parents and to what extent he clearly himself remembers with specific detail, and to what extent his memory has become a poet for the sake of this book will remain speculative and illusive.
To me, that's the weakness of the book. How am I as a reader to approach this narrative? Should I believe his father drank as much as it was stated, did his mother really take Wayton out as a child for all-night visits and games with friends as is stated, and was he such a disruptive student at Chinese classes?
These issues might well be mine as a reader, and I may have totally misjudged and misread the book. But these issues create clouds of doubt and cast shadows on a very important issue in this book which is how the Chinese population of Vancouver were treated by the rest of the population. Further, how the extended family takes part in the raising of Wayton is a central motif in this book, and it is stated that this extended family was both very involved and very successful in helping Wayton navigate through the shoals of childhood. Am I to believe that?
I'm not sure if I am more disappointed with the book or my reading and understanding of it. Perhaps I deserve only one star.
To me, that's the weakness of the book. How am I as a reader to approach this narrative? Should I believe his father drank as much as it was stated, did his mother really take Wayton out as a child for all-night visits and games with friends as is stated, and was he such a disruptive student at Chinese classes?
These issues might well be mine as a reader, and I may have totally misjudged and misread the book. But these issues create clouds of doubt and cast shadows on a very important issue in this book which is how the Chinese population of Vancouver were treated by the rest of the population. Further, how the extended family takes part in the raising of Wayton is a central motif in this book, and it is stated that this extended family was both very involved and very successful in helping Wayton navigate through the shoals of childhood. Am I to believe that?
I'm not sure if I am more disappointed with the book or my reading and understanding of it. Perhaps I deserve only one star.
June 3, 2008
I liked this book because it takes place within my neighbourhood. The author actually lived in the same block and on the same side of the street where I currently live. The only difference is there used to be houses here in the 1940s and now there's just a gated co-op. The author bought hand-scooped ice cream at Benny's Market and I go to Benny's for their great sourdough bread. Same family, a different time.
I really liked reading about my neighbourhood and Vancouver's early Chinatown but this book isn't so mindblowing that I'd recommend it to others who've never stepped foot in Strathcona before.
I really liked reading about my neighbourhood and Vancouver's early Chinatown but this book isn't so mindblowing that I'd recommend it to others who've never stepped foot in Strathcona before.
November 26, 2021
*3.5. It took me awhile to get through this one. My interest waxed and waned: sometimes it was fascinating; others, it lost me. What I can’t stop thinking about is the multiple identities and effort to keep track of who was really who thanks to the restrictions on citizenship and immigration for Chinese at the time.
August 12, 2015
I've heard the author speak at a few conferences and I finally bought three of his books. I read this one first. It has many endearing tales of his childhood that were nice to read. However, as a whole there are some stories that break the themes and flow of the memoir. After all, you can't possibly tell every cool story that ever happened (that's what bars are for). I could have lived without knowing about his difficult to train dog. The best stories were about his family. The ending was a whirlwind of "no way!" Exclamations from me. Seriously, people can be amazing and kind, and then some can be awful, and expect kindness from others. It reiterates, for me, that some people make this world a crummy place. But this is an amazing story if you like memoirs, Canadian Chinese history, and themes of family.
July 14, 2019
I have strong roots in Strathcona and am already a fan of the author but would still recommend this for people who aren't familiar with him or the area. He writes about his childhood using a dreamy, half-remembered style that captures the intensity of emotions that young people feel. From learning English from cowboy movies to hating itchy formal-wear to his earliest awareness of his sexuality, this book is vivid and charming.
August 30, 2009
Chinese-Canadian memoir in the style of Angela's Ashes. Recommended to my by my local librarian after I read Obasan, an account of a Japanese-Canadian woman born in Vancouver around the same time.
I have now read so many of Wayson Choy's memoirs I feel like we know one another - and I like him.
I have now read so many of Wayson Choy's memoirs I feel like we know one another - and I like him.
October 28, 2011
I wanted to like this book. I loved The Jade Peony, and I thought a memoir by Wayson Choy would be interesting. It had its moments, but there is a long stretch during which Choy describes his childhood, and some of the "events" he describes seem pointless and not particularly relevant. So what if he wet his pants? So what if his dog was hard to housetrain? I think this book could have used more judicious editing and a better overall sense of narrative. I almost gave up on it. I'm glad I didn't, because the story of his family's secrets, which he picked up again toward the end of the book, was interesting. However, I don't think I'd recommend this book to anyone.
June 11, 2013
The ongoing story of this boy and his family’s challenges trying to adapt to life in Vancouver. He relives experiences from his Chinatown boyhood, his encounters with bachelor uncles and cowboys, and his relationship with his parents, and their (at times) stormy marriage. He also learns, three weeks before he turns fifty seven, that he was adopted, a secret that had been kept from him, and had remained unknown despite the trip from China across the ocean to Gold Mountain.
The second in the series of this memoir by a Canadian author who articulately describes the experience of an immigrant trying to adapt to life in an adopted country.
The second in the series of this memoir by a Canadian author who articulately describes the experience of an immigrant trying to adapt to life in an adopted country.
August 21, 2010
I adored Choy's first 2 novels - Jade Peony and it's sequel, and the basis of this memoir sounded so intriguing- after discussing his first novel on the radio the author gets a phone call telling him heat his parents were not his real parents. What follows is is search for the truth, but first we get his memoirs. Sadly they are in dire need of an editor. There is too much repetition and too much time spent on boring details, on the other hand, intriguing details are given a bare mention and never elaborated upon.
January 30, 2008
If you like Amy Tan, Lisa See, or others in the same genre, you'll enjoy Wayson Choy's memoir of living in Vancouver's Chinatown in the 40s and 50s. He gives a clear picture of the struggles that the recent and not-so-recent Chinese immigrants faced back then. Growing up as an only child to hard working parents, Wayson learns much later on in life that he was adopted. He admits that he probably could have investigated further into the lives of his birth parents, but he chose not to.
March 18, 2025
Read this after enjoying Jade Peony and All that Matters. Opens with the fascinating revelation that at 57, Choy discovers he was adopted after a woman called him on a radio show. He picks this up again towards the end of the book but in between are a series anecdotes: some of them are charming and funny (the uncle who inadvertently took him to a burlesque show, but many just left me puzzled as to why they'd been included.
July 26, 2018
A memoir of Wayson's childhood in east Vancouver. Born 1938, an only child. Dad a chef on CPR ships, Mom played mah-jong all nite many nites a week. Book include lots of information about Chinese superstitions, culture, their lifestyle, paranoid thoughts, etc. Parents marriage in trouble. Dad away for months at a time.
At age 11 family moved to Toronto. Dad home every nite.
Wayson learns at age 56 that he is adopted.
An interesting read.
At age 11 family moved to Toronto. Dad home every nite.
Wayson learns at age 56 that he is adopted.
An interesting read.
September 7, 2011
this book is a memoir. it gives you an insight into the china town of the the mid to late nineteen forties. for a memoir this book has lots of twists and turns. i would recomend this book higher but i feel to do so the book would have to be streched a bit.
Read
March 21, 2012I enjoyed this book and learning about being Chinese
during WW2 in Vancouver and insights to what it was like for
his father and grandfather. The Chinese were not always treated well.
I particularly liked his stories of when he was quite young.
during WW2 in Vancouver and insights to what it was like for
his father and grandfather. The Chinese were not always treated well.
I particularly liked his stories of when he was quite young.
March 17, 2009
Wonderful memoir. I read it so long ago, I need to go back and re-read it.
April 12, 2009
A great memoir of growing up in Vancouver's Chinatown.
July 27, 2010
I love Wayson Choy's writing. I enjoyed reading the history about Chinatown and the Chinatown families more than I enjoyed some of his memories. Also loved the details about Vancouver.
November 20, 2012
Choy is a writer of gentle artistry who can evoke the sounds, smells and experience of long vanished places with craft. Can't wait to read more.
May 10, 2014
I didn't really get into this book. It was a rambling non-story.
May 2, 2014
It was fascinating to follow the details of life in Vancouver's Chinatown.
June 22, 2015
I am not overly fond of memoirs anyway, but learning about life in Chinatown in early years was quite interesting.
Read
September 30, 2021Paper Shadows Is Compelling Personal History
Back in 1995, Wayson Choy published his first book, The Jade Peony, a fictional story of a Chinese family in 1930’s and 1940’s Vancouver. It became a bestseller and award-winner and catapulted Choy to literary fame.
And upended his life in another massive way as well.
After a radio interview, he received an urgent phone message from a woman. He called back and heard the following:
“I saw your mother last week.�
But that was not possible, Choy’s mother had passed away almost twenty years ago.
A conversation was had, and Choy started realizing what this woman said was true. As Choy puts it:
“The past, as I knew it, began to shift.�
This is the starting point for Choy’s 1999 memoir Paper Shadows A Chinatown Childhood, and once we get the 1995 revelation done, he flashes back to his beginnings and his mother and father and growing up. And how he had no idea about his biological parents.
Choy, who passed away in 2019, fills in massive detail about his life and times, with relatives and family friends all featured prominently. You definitely get a real sense of his early life in Vancouver’s Chinatown, and he soaked it all in along with a heavy doses of western culture of movies and serials and comic books. Reading does become a passion for him, as you can see the budding writer being born.
Troubles still exist of course. Racism is one, but closer to home is fights between his parents, with his fathers alcohol fuelled rage being parts that some might have problems getting through. Their is also an implication his mother had some gambling issues around the same time. But Choy, being so young, knows he may not have understood this part of his nights. Or maybe not want to understand.
He also goes into detail of being sent, very much against his will, to Chinese school on the weekend. It is strict and not a happy place and he really does not learn as much as his parents wish him to. He rebels, than sees change happen that shows how right he was. This may have the start of Choy’s teaching career, as a gem of an idea, that compassion is good.
The story travels along over the years, ending with his family moving to Ontario to start a new life and business. Maybe they hoped to get away from the past, the hidden and not so hidden.
Through all this, Choy has definite love for his parents, faults and all, differences and all, and worries and all. They are who they are, trying their best. He also acknowledges at the very beginning of Paper Shadows that this is a memoir, all based on his memory of events and people and places which might differ from others involved. This could be to help keep his rose coloured glasses on about his parents, or to stop other busybodies from trying to cloud the facts of what happened.
By the end of Paper Shadows, Choy circles back to 1995 and asks questions of surviving relatives and friends, since his father also passed years back. He finds out many knew, even a friends father. It was an open secret. But the woman recants about his mother being alive. What he does find out is that his biological parents were performers in the Chinese Opera. The one he went to many many times as a child with his mother, who knew this.
As someone who has done his fair share of family investigations, Paper Shadows rings very very true about the past shifting, and people even decades later, trying to obscure it. I got my answers. Choy decides to stop asking even after some answers don’t ring right.
His parents were his parents and they loved him and tried their best. My grandparents were my grandparents and they loved my mom and tried their best.
Scoopriches
Back in 1995, Wayson Choy published his first book, The Jade Peony, a fictional story of a Chinese family in 1930’s and 1940’s Vancouver. It became a bestseller and award-winner and catapulted Choy to literary fame.
And upended his life in another massive way as well.
After a radio interview, he received an urgent phone message from a woman. He called back and heard the following:
“I saw your mother last week.�
But that was not possible, Choy’s mother had passed away almost twenty years ago.
A conversation was had, and Choy started realizing what this woman said was true. As Choy puts it:
“The past, as I knew it, began to shift.�
This is the starting point for Choy’s 1999 memoir Paper Shadows A Chinatown Childhood, and once we get the 1995 revelation done, he flashes back to his beginnings and his mother and father and growing up. And how he had no idea about his biological parents.
Choy, who passed away in 2019, fills in massive detail about his life and times, with relatives and family friends all featured prominently. You definitely get a real sense of his early life in Vancouver’s Chinatown, and he soaked it all in along with a heavy doses of western culture of movies and serials and comic books. Reading does become a passion for him, as you can see the budding writer being born.
Troubles still exist of course. Racism is one, but closer to home is fights between his parents, with his fathers alcohol fuelled rage being parts that some might have problems getting through. Their is also an implication his mother had some gambling issues around the same time. But Choy, being so young, knows he may not have understood this part of his nights. Or maybe not want to understand.
He also goes into detail of being sent, very much against his will, to Chinese school on the weekend. It is strict and not a happy place and he really does not learn as much as his parents wish him to. He rebels, than sees change happen that shows how right he was. This may have the start of Choy’s teaching career, as a gem of an idea, that compassion is good.
The story travels along over the years, ending with his family moving to Ontario to start a new life and business. Maybe they hoped to get away from the past, the hidden and not so hidden.
Through all this, Choy has definite love for his parents, faults and all, differences and all, and worries and all. They are who they are, trying their best. He also acknowledges at the very beginning of Paper Shadows that this is a memoir, all based on his memory of events and people and places which might differ from others involved. This could be to help keep his rose coloured glasses on about his parents, or to stop other busybodies from trying to cloud the facts of what happened.
By the end of Paper Shadows, Choy circles back to 1995 and asks questions of surviving relatives and friends, since his father also passed years back. He finds out many knew, even a friends father. It was an open secret. But the woman recants about his mother being alive. What he does find out is that his biological parents were performers in the Chinese Opera. The one he went to many many times as a child with his mother, who knew this.
As someone who has done his fair share of family investigations, Paper Shadows rings very very true about the past shifting, and people even decades later, trying to obscure it. I got my answers. Choy decides to stop asking even after some answers don’t ring right.
His parents were his parents and they loved him and tried their best. My grandparents were my grandparents and they loved my mom and tried their best.
Scoopriches
November 30, 2020
Why I am so distraught to have just found out that Wayson Choy died last year? Perhaps it is because I would have loved to sit and have tea with him just to hear him tell me more about his life; more about growing up in Chinatown; more about Chinese culture and folklore and dialects and languages and how the diaspora settled here amidst the everyday racism. This engaging memoir just made the news all the more disheartening.
Even though I grew up in Canada, I had never heard of Wayson Choy or his books before a few weeks ago. An astonishing fact since I am a voracious reader who turns 30 next year, and he is allegedly a Canadian best selling author with many accolades who was actively writing my entire life. So I had to ask myself: why? Why had I never even heard his name in passing before?
Maybe it is because I am from New Brunswick where the public school system is ranked one of the poorest and most flawed in the country due to our outrageous dual school system. French children and English children are not allowed to ride the same bus together, even if they are neighbors, to protect language rights for two officially established and predominant languages. We have separate French and English hospital systems, separate school systems, separate churches and towns and villages. We claim we're a bilingual province, but it is only bilingual insofar as road signs. It is honestly a system of duality and discrimination. It's 2020. I wish I was making this up. We have got to stop fighting each other over language and culture. Both communities have lived here for hundreds of years now, and both communities still ignore Indigenous peoples and languages in all of their arguments and legal battles, let alone peoples and languages from other ethnic backgrounds.
Maybe it is because a majority of the population in this province is overwhelmingly caucasian, unlike the rest of the country where there are large groups of immigrants who have formed their own diverse ethnic, cultural and linguistic communities within the major city limits of provincial capitals and important townships. We don't have a Chinatown or a Little Italy in our scant cities and villages. We have French communities, English communities and Indigenous communities; we have people who look white and people who don't; we have cultural restaurants and groceries; but we don't have large pockets of diaspora that have given their name to a subsection of town. The books promoted here are mostly by white people for white people. WASP American and British literature usurp Canadian literature in both the market place and English class.
Maybe I will never know the reason why such a great author isn't mentioned in class or put on the front shelves of the bookstores around here, but he should be. We need more diversity in literature. More representation.
Regardless, I accidentally stumbled upon The Jade Peony while perusing the library stacks a few weeks ago and decided I liked the title and cover enough to throw it on top of the precariously balanced pile in my arms. Ever since then I have been ordering every Choy novel and memoir from the library I can get; his style is that appealing to me. A work of "creative non-fiction" this certainly is, and an extremely enjoyable one from a not often heard from perspective at that. You will learn, you will laugh, you will think, and you will feel your heart squeeze at the colourful childish innocence of it all over and over again.
Even though I grew up in Canada, I had never heard of Wayson Choy or his books before a few weeks ago. An astonishing fact since I am a voracious reader who turns 30 next year, and he is allegedly a Canadian best selling author with many accolades who was actively writing my entire life. So I had to ask myself: why? Why had I never even heard his name in passing before?
Maybe it is because I am from New Brunswick where the public school system is ranked one of the poorest and most flawed in the country due to our outrageous dual school system. French children and English children are not allowed to ride the same bus together, even if they are neighbors, to protect language rights for two officially established and predominant languages. We have separate French and English hospital systems, separate school systems, separate churches and towns and villages. We claim we're a bilingual province, but it is only bilingual insofar as road signs. It is honestly a system of duality and discrimination. It's 2020. I wish I was making this up. We have got to stop fighting each other over language and culture. Both communities have lived here for hundreds of years now, and both communities still ignore Indigenous peoples and languages in all of their arguments and legal battles, let alone peoples and languages from other ethnic backgrounds.
Maybe it is because a majority of the population in this province is overwhelmingly caucasian, unlike the rest of the country where there are large groups of immigrants who have formed their own diverse ethnic, cultural and linguistic communities within the major city limits of provincial capitals and important townships. We don't have a Chinatown or a Little Italy in our scant cities and villages. We have French communities, English communities and Indigenous communities; we have people who look white and people who don't; we have cultural restaurants and groceries; but we don't have large pockets of diaspora that have given their name to a subsection of town. The books promoted here are mostly by white people for white people. WASP American and British literature usurp Canadian literature in both the market place and English class.
Maybe I will never know the reason why such a great author isn't mentioned in class or put on the front shelves of the bookstores around here, but he should be. We need more diversity in literature. More representation.
Regardless, I accidentally stumbled upon The Jade Peony while perusing the library stacks a few weeks ago and decided I liked the title and cover enough to throw it on top of the precariously balanced pile in my arms. Ever since then I have been ordering every Choy novel and memoir from the library I can get; his style is that appealing to me. A work of "creative non-fiction" this certainly is, and an extremely enjoyable one from a not often heard from perspective at that. You will learn, you will laugh, you will think, and you will feel your heart squeeze at the colourful childish innocence of it all over and over again.
March 27, 2022
Perhaps as far as memoirs go, I enjoyed it quite a bit. I find autobiographies and memoirs hard to rate or even think of without emotions involved, hence the high rating. I picked up this book for a 1 dollar (or even less I can’t remember) at a garage sale in my town and we’ll I’m not one to turn down a good deal. I didn’t have much expectations but I really loved the writing along with the personal stories. As someone who grew up as an immigrant within Canada, I found his stories touching and relatable. From the survival years of a whole group of people adjusting to a new country that could be hostile and the stories of aunties and uncles always present. The way he wrote from the perspective of his childhood self and would comment on his own thoughts it opinions of those time were pretty funny. I felt there was comedy interjected every once in a while which made the sometimes sad recounts a lot easier to take it in. I appreciated this especially because I read this on a road trip with my brothers where an opening for teasing was optimal.
I would recommend this to most anyone. I’m not one for non-fiction but I think the natural story-telling aspect of Watson Choy’s writing helped with it feel more of an actual story and not just a simple re-telling of life events. I found that there was always an opening that perhaps his own recounts may be wrong or coloured by his childhood views which made it all the more interesting. Especially with the ever-prevalent secrets that seem to be present in old Chinatown that seem to be hidden forever. His recounting made me feel like I knew his own family and mourn them. Overall, one of the better memoirs I’ve read.
I would recommend this to most anyone. I’m not one for non-fiction but I think the natural story-telling aspect of Watson Choy’s writing helped with it feel more of an actual story and not just a simple re-telling of life events. I found that there was always an opening that perhaps his own recounts may be wrong or coloured by his childhood views which made it all the more interesting. Especially with the ever-prevalent secrets that seem to be present in old Chinatown that seem to be hidden forever. His recounting made me feel like I knew his own family and mourn them. Overall, one of the better memoirs I’ve read.
June 8, 2019
That it should take me two months to finish a short book is perhaps the best criticism of this autobiography.
It just goes on for an interminable length with no real purpose.
This might be my own fault, a friend gave it to me and said it was a continuation of The Jade Peony. With that, I began reading with high expectation. Not bothering to read the dust jacket or the blurbs, I can only blame myself for not realizing it was a memoir. Which is to say, much, much more boring and digressionary than fiction ever ought to be.
Rarely do I ever get such a strong impression as I did reading this, of a literary agent calling a writer and asking when the next book will be ready to publish.
'Wayson, how's the new book coming? Lots of words?'
'Coming along kinda slow.'
'Just make sure there's about 300 pages and that should be enough.'
'Well, I've really only got about 100.'
'Just throw in a couple of extra chapters about, I don't know, childhood stuff, we really need something at least 300 pages, alright?'
'OK, I'm trying, I'm just worried it's kinda boring.'
'Don't worry about that, you're Canada's first Chinese-Gay writer, you can get away with anything after The Jade Peony. Just fluff out some of those chapters and make sure it's ready in time for the Christmas sales.'
'Alright.'
It just goes on for an interminable length with no real purpose.
This might be my own fault, a friend gave it to me and said it was a continuation of The Jade Peony. With that, I began reading with high expectation. Not bothering to read the dust jacket or the blurbs, I can only blame myself for not realizing it was a memoir. Which is to say, much, much more boring and digressionary than fiction ever ought to be.
Rarely do I ever get such a strong impression as I did reading this, of a literary agent calling a writer and asking when the next book will be ready to publish.
'Wayson, how's the new book coming? Lots of words?'
'Coming along kinda slow.'
'Just make sure there's about 300 pages and that should be enough.'
'Well, I've really only got about 100.'
'Just throw in a couple of extra chapters about, I don't know, childhood stuff, we really need something at least 300 pages, alright?'
'OK, I'm trying, I'm just worried it's kinda boring.'
'Don't worry about that, you're Canada's first Chinese-Gay writer, you can get away with anything after The Jade Peony. Just fluff out some of those chapters and make sure it's ready in time for the Christmas sales.'
'Alright.'
June 23, 2019
I wanted to read this autobiography of Wayson Choy, who has recently died, to see what Vancouver's Chinatown was like in the 20th century, and found that it was much as San Francisco's is described. As in the US, Japanese-Canadians were rounded up and interned but the Chinese Vancouverites, whose land of origin was suffering under a cruel occupation by the actual Japanese, seemed to feel safer without them around. In any case, Choy's grandfather had immigrated decades before that war to the place known among Chinese as Gold Mountain. The book is filled with details fascinating to me, such as the attitude toward ghosts and the near impossibility of carrying out genealogy research where people blithely took assumed names to escape shame or for economic advancement. Many parallels with things I've been told of my own Italian family history. Wonderfully readable, unique voice.
November 6, 2021
As always, Wayson Choy crafts his stories with vivid prose that brings the earlier days of Vancouver's Chinatown to life. It is hard to know where real memory ends and careful research begins in many of the vignettes because I doubt most 60-year-olds have such complete memories of events from their early childhood. For that reason, I found it hard to feel immersed in the tales that Choy was telling. Some scenes were incredibly moving, especially the incident with his mother's tea cups, but most were hard to connect with. It is also the reason that I found the last few chapters, which take place in his later years, to be much more compelling. They had the visceral quality of more well remembered events. Enjoyable, but not as immersive as his fiction books.
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