Paper Shadows: A Memoir of a Past Lost and Found($10.68Value)

Description

Shortlisted for the Governor General's Award A startlingly vivid memoir of a Chinatown childhood by the author of the award-winning novel The Jade Peony. Three weeks before his 57th birthday, novelist Wayson Choy received a surprising phone call during his publicity tour: a mysterious woman told him that he had been adopted. Inspired by this astonishing revelation, this beautifully-wrought memoir reveals uncanny similarities between the colorful secrets that enrich Wayson Choy's award-winning novel set in prewar Chinatown and the subsequently discovered secrets of his own life. Canadian novelist Wayson Choy is an only child of Chinese immigrants to Vancouver, reticent, hardworking people who struggled to keep him from losing his cultural identity and becoming a mo-no --"Chinese but not Chinese." At the age of 56, after giving a radio interview on the publication of The Jade Peony , his award-winning novel about Vancouver's Chinatown, a woman with an unfamiliar voice called to tell him that the people he had known as his mother and father had in fact adopted him. Why she chose to speak out to Choy when none of his family had ever shared the secret with him is unclear. Although this revelation prefaces Choy's memoir and cannot help but color it for the reader, his book is less a search for his birth parents than a loving and tender reconstruction of his childhood with his true, adoptive family. One of the highlights of his early years were his regular visits to the Cantonese opera at the Sing Kew Theatre on Shanghai Alley. Only later did he realize that the running translation his mother provided for him had been falsified, with all the tragic endings made happy. "I never saw the same opera that everyone else did," Choy muses, adding that her whispered narratives had constructed within him "a permanent barrier against pessimism, perhaps even against adversity... If I turn my head at a certain angle, I can still see Mother crying, her perfumed hankie above me, her face streaked with tears. And, in some other sphere, I see Mother laughing like the Buddha, her spirit unyielding, her mythic lies flying between us like bright pennants." As Choy realizes during his search for information, there is some knowledge that can't be gained from a merely true account. This haunting memoir serves better than a birth certificate to say who the writer is. --Regina Marler Adult/High School-Choy spent his World War II-era infancy and youth in Vancouver's Chinatown. His extended family included both blood relatives and courtesy elders. The community of Canadian Chinese (not even the North American born were permitted citizenship at that time) was bound together by language, history on two continents, artistic expressions-including Chinese opera and Western movies-and values. Nearly 20 years after the death of his mother, the author discovered that he was adopted. This discovery and his second discovery that he was virtually the only one in the community ignorant of the fact stand as slim bookends on either side of an involving and pungent memoir. Accessible and engaging, the account of Choy's first 10 years brings both the world of adults as he observed them and his own interior development into focus. Family photos are sprinkled throughout. Choy's experiences with reading are poignant, humorous, and admirable. This is a book for general-interest readers, ethnic-studies researchers, and those seeking a close companion to Gus Lee's autobiographical novel, China Boy (Plume, 1994). Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc. This introspective autobiography by the Canadian author of The Jade Peony, an American Library Association Notable Book of the Year, came into being as a result of Choy's learning, just weeks shy of his 57th birthday, that he had been adopted. This startling revelation takes Choy and his readers deep into the memories of growing up in Vancouver's Chinatown during the 1940s as the only son of his Chinese immigrant adoptive parents, Toy and Lily. Delving into his past, Choy never actually discovers the true identity of his birth parents, but he finds a rich past behind the little-discussed genealogy of his adoptive family and comes to understand certain aspects of his childhood. For example, when he learns that his birth father may have been a member of the Cantonese opera company whose performances he often attended with his mother and her friends, he is better able to rationalize his boyhood affinity for that colorful world. As a whole, Choy's story is both reflective and cathartic. Readers who liked similar memoirs by Adeline Yen Mah (Falling Leaves, LJ 2/1/98), M. Elaine Mar (Paper Daughter, Harperflamingo, 1999), and Ben Fong-Torres (The Rice Room, LJ 4/1/94) will enjoy this one. Recommended for larger public and academic libraries and Asian literature collections. [For more on The Jade Peony, see The Reader's Shelf, p. 144.DEd.]DShirley N. Quan,