Dionne Brand

In the 1970's, a family flees Vietnam, but they tragically lose their six-year-old son, Quy, in the process. Years later, Quy's sister, Tuyen, and her friends live in Toronto while Quy, now a dangerous criminal, makes his way to Toronto.

A Novel

What We All Long for

Anonymity is the big lie of a city. You aren't anonymous at all. You're common, really, common like so many pebbles, so many specks of dirt, so many atoms of materiality.

Lam and Ai had become shadows; two little girls forgotten in the wrecked love of their parents. At times Lam had felt wrong for surviving, wrong for existing in the face of her parents' tragedy.

Tuyen felt a surge of resentment for the [brother she had never met], a familiar feeling. One that embarrassed her now, but one that had become a reflex to any image of him. Not that she hated him, she didn't know him, he had simply been an impediment to. . . to what? To things she no longer needed, had never needed, but observed as missing.

She felt outside of herself, outside of them.

In my heart, sometimes, I feel a lightness, a nonexistence. . . I have these moments, very dangerous, I feel scattered.

She had overused these memories, wrung everything from them.

I didn’t have a hard life. It was simply a life. A life like millions of lives.

As disturbing as all they were living was, they felt alive. More alive, they thought, than most people around them. They believed in it, this living. Its raw openness. They saw the street outside, its chaos, as their only hope. They felt the city's violence and its ardour in one emotion. 

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