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Product Description
Chinatown, Vancouver, in the late 1930s and 40s provides the setting for this poignant first novel, told through the vivid and intense reminiscences of the three younger children of an immigrant family. They each experience a very different childhood, depending on age and sex, as they encounter the complexities of birth and death, love and hate, kinship and otherness. Mingling with the realities of Canada and the horror of war are the magic, ghosts, paper uncles and family secrets of Poh-Poh, or Grandmother, who is the heart and pillar of the family.
Wayson Choy's Chinatown is a community of unforgettable individuals who are neither this nor that,” neither entirely Canadian nor Chinese. But with each other's help, they survive hardship and heartbreak with grit and humour.
Amazon.com Review
The Jade Peony, Wayson Choy's first novel and a RUSA Notable Book, is a genre-bending, memoirlike collection of stories about a family in Vancouver's Chinatown before and during World War II. Three siblings tell the stories of their very different childhoods in a world defined by change, each in their own way wresting autonomy from the strictures of history, family, and poverty. Sister Jook-Liang aspires to be Shirley Temple; adopted Second Brother Jung-Sum, who struggles with his sexuality, finds his way through boxing. Third Brother Sekky, who never feels comfortable with the multitude of Chinese dialects swirling around him, becomes obsessed with war games, and learns a devastating lesson about what war really means when his 17-year-old babysitter dates a Japanese man, with terrible consequences.
One of Choy's most compelling subjects is the fluidity of the extended family. The shadowy woman everyone calls Stepmother is a house servant and concubine who moves into the role of mother, giving birth to two of the siblings but never quite achieving full status. Many chapters focus on the powerful effects friends and neighbors have on the family and the importance of their names and titles. Choy's evocations of life in Depression-era and wartime Vancouver are especially memorable: the bewildered air of Little Tokyo during the first Christmas after Pearl Harbor, a burned-down church that Sekky and his grandmother pick through for bits of the stained-glass windows--a metaphor for the family's task of sorting out what to keep and what to abandon as it moves into the future. Like the jade peony of the title, Choy's storytelling is at once delicate, powerful, and lovely.
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