Paper Shadows: A Memoir of a Past Lost and Found

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