Wayson Choy

Told through the reminiscences of the three young children of an immigrant Chinese family, an uplifting novel captures the realities of prejudice, the mishaps of adolescence, and the horrors of an impending world war, in Vancouver's Chinatown during the early 1940s. Reprint.

A Novel

The Jade Peony

From the author of the popular and widely acclaimed novel, The Jade Peony, comes this new autobiographical exploration of past and present, culture and selfhood, history and memory, immigration and family life--in other words, the modern-day collision of Eastern and Western experiences and worldviews. Three weeks before his 57th birthday, Choy discovered that he had been adopted. This astonishing revelation inspires the beautifully-wrought, sensitively told Paper Shadows, the story of a Chinatown past both lost and found. From his early life amid the ghosts of old Chinatown, to his discovery, years later, of deeply held family secrets that crossed the ocean from mainland China to Gold Mountain, this engrossing, multi-layered self-portrait is "a childhood memoir of crystalline clarity" (The Boston Globe) that will speak directly and arrestingly to all students of Chinese immigrant history.

A Memoir of a Past Lost and Found

Paper Shadows

An exploration of the importance of family, which for Choy is constituted not through blood but through love. He provides a quiet manifesto for embracing life, and seeing how lucky we are for each day that comes.

A Memoir of Living and Almost Dying

Not Yet

All That Matters

A Chinatown Childhood

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.

In Vancouver before World War II, Liang, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, befriends a retired railroader who encourages her to tap dance, while her adopted brother, Jung, trains as a boxer and learns to accept his sexuality, and Sekky, their brother, r

Framed by Wayson Choy’s two brushes with death, Not Yet is an intimate and insightful study of one man’s reasons for living. In 2001, Wayson Choy suffered a combined asthma-heart attack. As he lay in his hospital bed, slipping in and out of consciousness, his days punctuated by the beeps of the machines that were keeping him alive, Choy heard the voices of his ancestors warning him that without a wife, he would one day die alone. And yet through his ordeal Choy was never alone; men and women, young and old, from all cultures and ethnicities, stayed by Choy’s side until he was well. When his heart failed him a second time, four years later, it was the strength of his bonds with these people, forged through countless acts of kindness, that pulled Choy back to his life. Not Yet is a passionate, sensitive, and beautiful exploration of the importance of family, which in Choy’s case is constituted not through blood but through love. It is also a quiet manifesto for embracing life, not blind to our mortality, but knowing how lucky we are for each day that comes.

Coming to Canada at the age of three, Kiam-Kim is confronted by the difficult job of balancing his responsibility to maintain the family honor, his need to set an example for his younger siblings, and his growing awareness of the world outside of Vancouver's Chinatown, in an evocative novel about growing up Chinese in Canada, by the author of The Jade Peony. Original.

All that Matters

Set in Vancouver's Chinatown in the 1930s and 1940s, Choy continues the story of the Chen family household, this time narrated by First Son, Kiam-Kim. We first meet Kiam-Kim at the age of eight, staring at the yellowed photograph of his mother, who died in China when he was just a baby. Kiam-Kim, Poh-Poh (his larger-than-life grandmother) and Mr. Chen, his demure and honest father, journey to a new life in Vancouver's Old Chinatown. Following the dream of finding gold and then one day returning to China -- wealthy -- they, like many Chinese families around them, find themselves in a country on the brink of the Second World War, struggling to survive in a foreign land and keep alive the traditions of an older world. Finely crafted, and rich in historical detail, All That Matters depicts 1930s Vancouver in the haunting hues of memory, and sees in the Chen family a fragile miniature of a larger world. Dwelling on Kiam-Kim's sense of responsibility to his community, Choy unfolds the Chen family's secrets in thoughtful and luminous prose, leading the reader to a breathtaking conclusion that far transcends the limits of its time and place, and gestures towards all humanity.

Wayson Choy

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