Wednesday, Oct 06

JAMIE ZEPPA

Saturday, October 2, 1999

PAPER SHADOWS: A Chinatown Childhood

By Wayson Choy
Penguin, 256 pages

'Like a good mystery novel, one's life should always be read twice," Wayson Choy concludes in his memoir, Paper Shadows, "once for the experience and then once again for astonishment."

Choy has ample reason for astonishment. After the 1995 publication of The Jade Peony, his novel about growing up in Vancouver's Chinatown in the 1940s, he received a phone call from a mysterious woman named Hazel, who claimed to have just seen his mother. Choy told the woman she was mistaken: His mother died 18 years ago. No, the woman insisted, not that mother. His real mother. Choy was dumbfounded:

"How could I have written a novel about the secrets of Chinatown, and if Hazel were right, failed to notice my own Chinatown secret?" Turning to family members for confirmation, he discovered, at the age of 56, what everyone else has known all along. Looking back, he sees signs of his adoption everywhere, even, eerily, in his own fiction.

In Choy's world, there are two kinds of stories -- documented facts and the "intricate shadows and silences between the facts," and it is hard to say which is the less reliable guide to the past. Documents are full of "false-paper names," histories bought, borrowed or invented to circumvent racist immigration laws. An official certificate lists Choy's mother as Nellie Hop Wah. Further investigation reveals that Nellie Hop Wah was a Canadian-born woman who died on a visit to China and whose papers carried Choy's Chinese-born mother to Canada. False as they are, though, paper names still have enormous power over everyday reality. After the real Mr. Hop Wah died, his paper bride was expected to mourn publicly -- lest suspicious immigration officials or, worse still, the ghost of Nellie Hop Wah -- return to trouble her.

Shadows and silences are equally difficult. No one speaks of Grandfather Choy's first wife, and his grandson assumes that she died of some terrible illness in China. Although the real reason for her disappearance can be silenced, the consequences cannot be, and they trail Choy's father until his death.

This is a haunted memoir, full of phantoms and secrets, but it is also full of rich historical detail and sharp, clear descriptions of daily life. Choy is exceptionally good at childhood, evoking perfectly the unbearable itch of tweed trousers, the discomfort of having someone else sleep in your new bed, the abiding terror of nightmares. He remembers how children fit puzzle-pieces of the world together, often with bewildering results. On his first day of kindergarten at the United Church Chinese Mission, he threw himself screaming to the floor, convinced that if his mother has left him in a church, it must mean he is dead. Later, an older boy's explanation of sex -- the penis goes into the Regina -- leaves him wondering about the geography of Saskatchewan.

For his parents' generation, home was always Old China, "where they still wanted you, even dead; where you belonged. Forever." For Choy and his school friends, home was Chinatown, where belonging was far more complicated. Although the children absorbed the values of the community, such as respect for their elders, they inevitably absorbed other ideas as well. Cowboy movies replaced Chinese opera, a 26-letter alphabet won out over 10,000 complicated ideograms. Their parents called them "mo-no," brainless, both Chinese and not Chinese, but they were discovering that there were "other ways to be Chinese."

Paper Shadows gleams with Choy's gentle humour, but the stories he tells are not all sweetness and light. His father smashes his mother's treasured china collection, a child is almost fatally assaulted, and the daily impact of racist laws and attitudes is everywhere in evidence. And then there is the past, which refuses to lie down and be over. In this delicately structured work, earlier memories are transformed as more secrets are uncovered, becoming darker and heavier with grief and loss. Choy's childhood obsession with Chinese opera, for example, takes on an unexpected meaning when he learns that his biological father performed in it. In another recollection, the 11-year-old Choy watches his mother burn his grandfather's journals and diaries, excited by the spectacle of fire. Years later, trying to understand the mysterious coldness between his grandfather and father, he returns to that burning, wondering what answers those ashes carried to the sky.

Much of the past remains lost. People forget, papers get burned up, some memories are too painful to be spoken. "Don't you want to know everything?" a friend asks. But Choy's need to know is balanced by his respect for the needs and sorrows and limitations of others. Anyway, more information does not necessarily equal more truth. The unknown is always an alluring prospect, but this book suggests that what counts in the end is a more ordinary reality, the patience and forgiveness and sense of responsibility that make daily family life possible. Who are Choy's "real" family if not the known parents and aunts and uncles who loved and raised him? "There is nothing to be done about the unknowable," he writes, "except to pause and be astonished." If we pause long enough, we may realize that we know enough already.

In the era of the talk-show memoir, in which telling it all passes for telling it well, Paper Shadows stands out as a thoughtful, luminous and very finely crafted work.
Jamie Zeppa's memoir of her years in Bhutan, Beyond the Sky and the Earth, was published earlier this year.

Related Reading

The Jade Peony, by Wayson Choy (Douglas & McIntyre, 1995).

The Concubine's Children, by Denise Chong (Penguin, 1995).

Eating Chinese Food Naked, by Mei Ng (Scribner, 1998).