My latest novel is set in the suburbs of Vancouver, where I grew up. Far Creek Road is like many first novels in being the story of childhood, a bildungsroman–except that it’s my sixth novel and ninth book.
As I wrote last time, I started trying to write my real first novel when I was 17. I’d dropped out of the undergraduate creative writing program at UBC, where I hated having to workshop so much lousy writing, meaning mine. Instead, I spent five years writing a very bad novel on my own while studying political science, where my senior paper was titled, “Factionalism in the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party, 1964-66.” That’s the only thing I can remember about either the course or the topic. The novel I would prefer to forget.
After publishing Far Creek Road last October, I started reading other books set in B.C., most of them centered on childhood and grappling with the issue of inheritance. Contrast and compare? Last time I wrote about The Double Life of Benson Yu by Kevin Chong and Greenwood by Michael Christie, both of whom studied creative writing at UBC far more successfully than I did.
Today, three more titles.
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Paper Shadows, by Wayson Choy, republished by Penguin Modern Classics
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I took Wayson Choy’s memoir off my shelves after reading Michael Christie’s novel Greenwood. Choy’s Paper Shadows: A Chinatown Childhood was published in 1999, and he died in 2019 at the age of 80. A great loss. Wayson Choy was a kind and caring man. I remembered admiring Paper Shadows when it was published, and re-read it last winter with a question in mind.
Michael Christie’s novel turns on the issue of unknown parentage, with the dramatic theft of a child lying at the heart of his story. As I read it, I wondered whether to call the theft drama or melodrama. I remembered that Paper Shadows opens with an equally-dramatic moment, in this case non-fictional, and reached for my 25-year-old copy wondering if you can write high drama going over the top. Or do the stakes make restraint impossible?
Choy’s story starts with a surprise. After appearing on a CBC Radio show in Vancouver, he’s asked to call a listener who had phoned in. Reluctantly, he does.
“I saw your mother last week,” the woman tells him.
Impossible, Choy replies. His mother has been dead for 18 years.
“No, no, not your mother,” the woman insists. “I saw your real mother.”
The phone call sends Choy down a rabbit hole, investigating his past in Vancouver’s Chinatown and his family’s history in mainland China. The woman on the phone turns out to be mistaken. His “real” mother is dead as well. But he quickly learns what most of his family already knows: that he was adopted. In this case, he wasn’t stolen but was probably bought—cash money—from a mother who gave birth to him while she was scandalously unmarried.
Choy learns as well that his birth father was probably a player in the Chinese opera, the member of a ragtag artistic crew. In exploring the family relationships, Choy’s slender book resonates with larger-than-life characters, perhaps as many as the 490-page Greenwood. Chief among them is a nuanced villain in the person of his grandfather’s second wife, his father’s stepmother.
Second Wife is loud, demanding and dissatisfied. She constantly complains about being duped into emigrating to Canada, where her husband can’t afford to hire the servants she was used to in China. It’s also true that her bound feet—three inches long—increasingly pain the poor woman as she’s forced to do the chores her servants used to handle. She’s a huge character, exasperating, destructive and unforgettable. Choy writes about her with great sympathy and restraint. (By the way, he studied creative writing at UBC, too.)
So is it possible to write heightened drama without being melodramatic? Wayson Choy’s memoir shows that it is. The book is beautifully written. As the publisher advertises, a modern classic. I suppose what’s changed since Choy wrote it is the emergence social media, where people tend to shout, posture and twirl their mustaches to be noticed.
Paper Shadows doesn’t shout. Greenwood does. But these days, maybe you have to.
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Five Little Indians by Michelle Good, HarperCollins
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Michelle Good is a member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation of Saskatchewan, and she worked for Indigenous organizations for 25 years. After getting a law degree, Good spent another 14 years advocating for residential school survivors while taking time to do her MFA at UBC. Yes, her, too. I had no idea all these books were written by UBC alumni until I checked the author bios when sitting down to write about them. (Michael Christie was also a professional skateboarder.)
What makes Five Little Indians especially impressive is Good’s ability to write in the quiet voices of people ruined by the residential school system. They’re kidnapped and alienated from their home cultures, yet left without skills that will help them navigate a different, very racist society. We join Lucy, Kenny, Maisie, Howie and Clara when they’re taken to a school on the coast of B.C., levered from their Indigenous families with hollow promises and unveiled threats.
There, the religious order that runs the school oversees their abuse and humiliation in an effort to make them conform to settler society. It isn’t the same, but I thought about Second Wife in Wayson Choy’s memoir as well as other women brought to Canada against their will, including one of my grandmothers. They’re all people from whom power and confidence are relentlessly drained, and they fight back in ways that can be self-destructive. Michelle Good is particularly acute in showing how reaction follows action as we follow the children in Five Little Indians into their adult lives. It’s an affecting and clear-sighted look at the way trauma resonates through Indigenous lives.
While I was moved by all of the survivors, it was Kenny who touched me most. As an adult, Kenny can’t stop moving from job to job, learning the dodges as a logger, picking fruit, or working on a fishing boat, trying to outrun his demons as he moves restlessly in and out of his partner Lucy’s life.
What I found especially moving was the way Kenny tries to be a good person. Not to say the others don’t, or that he doesn’t succeed in his own way. But Kenny is also something like Sisyphus in being condemned to push a boulder uphill only to watch it roll down again. He can’t get ahead of his pain, and he’s unable to accept help when it’s offered—a tragic figure in this heartbreaking and important novel.
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Gin, Turpentine, Pennyroyal, Rue, by Christine Higdon, ECW Press
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Christine Higdon’s latest novel centres on freedom of choice. Like other narratives revolving around political issues, Gin, Turpentine, Pennyroyal, Rue deploys a large cast of characters, allowing Higdon to address a complex situation from many angles. The four McKenzie sisters in her novel—Georgina, Isla, Morag and Harriet-Jean—live in 1920s Vancouver. They’re adults as the story begins, although Harriet-Jean is still a teenager and flailing a little, as teenagers do.
Unlike the other B.C. books I’ve been writing about, no children are central to this novel. There’s a reason for that. As the story opens, Isla on the brink of dying after undergoing a back street abortion. Abortion is illegal at the time, so women like Isla who wish to terminate pregnancies are forced to use unlicensed practitioners.
In this case, the abortionist is a man who has left his signature on the inside of Isla’s thigh: a bruise from a vicious pinch he gave her after the procedure. Police have recently found the same bruise on the legs of several women found dead around the city. Yet the police go after Isla rather than the male abortionist. Since she’s unmarried, the cops regard her as a fallen woman, fair prey for shaming and harassment even as she lies near death in hospital.
But Isla isn’t on her own. She has her sisters, and they’re a formidable crew. Georgina is married to a businessman who bores her, having made a calculated decision to enter a safe marriage after the boy she loved was killed during the First World War. She’s a suffragist, the woman warrior in the family, and a serious drinker.
Meanwhile, feisty teenage Harriet-Jean is beginning to discover her attraction to women, while Morag starts the novel expecting her first child. We soon learn Morag’s husband is the man who got Isla pregnant, and it turns out that Llewelyn loves both sisters. Speaking of conflicted: he’s also a policeman and a part-time rumrunner, moving liquor illegally to the U.S., where Prohibition reigns. It’s a complex story with many moving parts.
Yet the McKenzie sisters are ultimately strengthened by their bonds as they try to navigate their way toward freedom–this at a time when women are just beginning to sense the possibility of choice, and men are trying to claw it back. No, not last week. Not in Texas, but in Vancouver 100 years ago. The novel is an intricate mesh of hopes and expectations played out among the sisters, and to leave you with a cliffhanger, not all of them survive.
By the way, Christine Higdon didn’t go to UBC. She studied creative writing in the continuing education department at the University of Toronto. And the Rue of the title is an astute and observant dog with opinions of her own. You may find you often agree with her.
Last February, I was asked by The 49th Shelf to write about the novels I’ve been reading in a post called Childhood in British Columbia. I’ve taken the five reviews in my two most recent posts from there.
You can order Far Creek Road here.