"I close my eyes: older, long-ago faces, a few of them barely smiling, push into my consciousness. I hear voices, a variety of Chinatown dialects, their sing-song phrases warning me: 'You never forget you Chinese!'" -Wayson Choy, Paper ShadowsWayson Choy's memoir Paper Shadows opens with the startling discovery that he was adopted. The woman whom he buried eighteen years earlier turns out not to be his mother - sparking a series of vivid flashbacks. Sometimes idyllic, other times frightening, his childhood growing up in Vancouver's Chinatown appears a mishmash of half-remembered fragments: a violent father, who was away for long stretches building the Canadian Pacific Railway; a vivacious mother, who liked to play mah jong until the wee hours, despite her husband's dark moods; and bachelor uncles and aunties who claimed to be family, for lack of any real blood ties in Canada. As the secrets of this community come to life in Choy's memory, the past appears ever more mysterious, estranged. Despite the warnings of the Chinatown elders, what it means to be "Chinese" seems to be slipping away, even as they speak.
Mother, motherland. Both are elusive. The woman he thought was his mother appears in his memory as a ghost - "a length of warm shadow stretched out along the far edge of the bed." She was his last tie to his ancestral homeland, but even that tie turned out to be based on a concealment, a lie.
Although I'm not adopted, Choy's feelings of loss and disorientation are familiar. There must have been a moment when I came to view my Asian heritage with this mix of fascination and fear. Growing up in Toronto as a fourth-generation Japanese-Canadian, my connection to Japan never seemed to go much further than dinners at sushi bars - where California roll was always my favourite - and the annual Japanese New Years celebration when we would all crowd around the Formica table in my grandmother's tiny kitchen, the oily stink of tempura and daikon radish filling the air.
And yet, my grandmother insisted that I was Japanese. We all were, in her mind.
The idea of our Japanese homeland was replete with meaning for her. I could sense it in her excitement, as she talked about growing up in Vancouver's Japantown, where she had run her father's restaurant and grocery store, before the place was razed during the Second World War. As she reminisced, her black curls quivered over her pointy ears, the skin smeared with indelible streaks of dye. She longed for the rugged beaches of the Queen Charlotte Islands, where she had been born, shortly after her father immigrated to Canada working as an "explorer" for the Japanese government. Supposedly, the government wanted information about the ways and lives of the Haida Indians.
Years later, I thought back to her stories and wondered whether they were entirely true, but at some level it didn't matter, for her words had caught hold in my imagination. Her memories were charged with the sadness and magic of a place that no longer existed.
Photo from: here
