As this gentle and elegant Cary Grant persona sits under a magnolia tree in full bloom (as if it knew a lucky person would pass underneath it today), and he signs his book and hands out origami butterflies to his readers patiently waiting in line; in the simplicity of the day, one can’t help but wonder if this is all that matters………..   

By: Kindah Mardam Bey 

As a child Wayson Choy wanted to be a cowboy, Roy Rogers style, with belt buckle, spurs and white horse in tow. As Wayson Choy speaks to a group in lush Bayfield, Ontario, you can still see a hint of disappointment in this mature man at never fulfilling his childhood dream. Being a Chinese immigrant to Vancouver in the late 1930s, Wayson Choy was quick to learn that his Eastern roots and Western upbringing had him labelled as a ‘banana,’ white on the inside and yellow on the outside. He has reclaimed the word and made it inoffensive to himself ‘I am both, I can’t deny it, I had an upbringing that embraced both cultures.’ Wayson also tells to the crowd that he was approached by a Scotsman speaking Chinese once. When Choy asked him how he knew Chinese fluently, the man told of how his parents were Missionaries in China and how he was raised with Chinese children. The Scotsman said ‘And do you know what they used to call me? Egg!’ The crowd laughs at this statement as eggs are white on the outside and yellow on the inside. We all have our labels and names for cultural crossover it appears. As Wayson Choy stands in front of me I don’t see a John Wayne or a Roy Rogers, but what I am struck by is his old Hollywood heir about him, and he reminds me simply of a dashing and poised Cary Grant.    

Aside from his silver screen presence, Choy is an author, and more specifically a challenging and integral part of Canadian literature. Choy didn’t start writing his novels until he was in his fifties, but in a short, but relevant career, he has managed to be a best seller, a multicultural advocate, an equal adversary to Margaret Atwood and a man worthy of receiving the Order of Canada. Not bad credentials for someone who wanted to cross cultural barriers from an early age. Wayson Choy is the author of two fiction books The Jade Peony and All That Matters, he is also the author of his own book of memoirs called Paper Shadows; and he is currently writing his second book of memoirs after a life changing experience.   

However, before Choy is an author, or writer, he is foremost a storyteller, in the tradition of his ancestors. The day is sunny and a gentle breeze sways across the branches as a brunch concludes at the Bayfield Inn. With the establishment’s rustic chic quality, another Brunch and Author event setup by renowned bookshop owner Mary Wolfe, of The Village Bookshop, leads the literary conversation with guest, Wayson Choy. He is there to speak about his last novel All That Matters, a story of an immigrant family from China that moves to Canada. Like the book cover to his last novel, Wayson Choy’s life seems to have a similar theme of butterflies. He tells me of the scientific theory that when a butterfly flaps its wings it affects a hurricane miles away. Every action in life, he tells me, affects someone or something else, somewhere else, whether it is next door or thousands of miles away. Wayson Choy urges his audience to ask questions by promising them an origami butterfly should they decide to query. The butterfly again….and as he tells his stories about his own life and the ancestors that inspire him to write, he seems to have the sold out event and its audience enamoured; just like Cary Grant would.      

Choy is a storyteller because his own life is encapsulated in stories from his ancestors, and their stories of ghosts and demons. When he was a child his parents had to work, so he was raised for the most part by the community elders; these were the people who built the Canadian Railway. The elders told the children stories as a way of keeping them in line, Choy explains ‘my elders would say to me that I would have to be a good little boy in order to hear a story, of course I wanted to be a good boy to hear the story. I now have those voices of my elders both haunting me and protecting me, urging me to tell their stories.’    

When Wayson Choy and his family immigrated to Canada his passport was stamped ‘alien,’ he tells the audience it makes him feel like ET. Almost a full twenty years later, when Wayson was at the University of British Columbia, in 1958, that he became an official Canadian resident. Since then Choy believes Canada has made leaps and bounds towards a mosaic of cultures to be celebrated. Wayson Choy explains that his stories are Canadian ones about human survival ‘we as Canadians had a strong focus towards assimilation, and no one wanted to talk about the past. All families have a layering of secrecies; they have to in order to move on. As Canadians we need our stories, they are all that survives. We can leave behind our furniture, our clothes, our stocks and bonds, but you don’t leave behind your stories.’   

That celebration of culture is seen in Choy’s writings, without preach or pretence, he tells his stories of Chinese immigrants from that human level, to which any cultural group can prescribe. Choy discusses his own growth, ‘you mature into the idea that you are in between cultures; you are neither this nor that. That in fact, you have more than a simple choice of one background, one culture, or one rigid form of seeing the world. You have a great deal of choice and now I see I have the best of both worlds, and I feast at a banquet of cultural groups, and not just the two I was brought up thinking I was a part of.’ He thinks for a moment and then comments further ‘Fundamentalism is one of the biggest dangers of thinking today. By saying ‘this is how I was raised, this is how I live, this is what everyone is supposed to believe, and everyone else is wrong’ is unrealistic. Being multi-cultural you know that one can believe different things, we are all part of a central humanity that is true, and that will transcend those barriers. More than anything I hope that Canadians with their stories will unite and build bridges instead of walls.’   

After realizing that Wayson Choy was to be a storyteller, and after having a great University course with Carol Shields as his teacher, he then had school project that became a published work. However, it would not be in his twenties that Choy would start his writing career, it would be three decades later that he would find his true purpose as a writer ‘I was published in my twenties and writing was very hard. I made many excuses that I had no life experience and of course I soon realized that the history, or experiences I had was the immigrants who told me stories. I could write their stories, and when the Jade Peony came to me, then decades later I was asked if I would write a book and it simply came to me that I do have things to say. My parents were gone and the elders were vanishing. It was time, I knew that, and it was the consciousness of Canada in general, we were ready to hear all different stories.’   

An American-Chinese author known for own stories about Chinese immigrants is Maxine Hong Kingston and particularly her book Woman Warrior was a great inspiration to Wayson Choy ‘Maxine Hong Kingston was a great influence on me because she was able to talk about the past and weave the mythologies in her stories about growing up. For me I felt that same connection to tell those stories, and was also able to weave the mythologies that gave my elders the strength to live. We always have the present to live with and the past to scare us into more life; because we have to be careful, if we know the path and the dangers of the past, then we also know they lurk in the present. Like Kingston, and myself, we are part of that mosaic of that kind of literature, and in this case the Asian North American literature, but all cultures should and are telling their stories and legends. We all have much to learn from them.’   

The present day is not all beauty and butterflies though, and Wayson Choy is fully aware of the slow decline in cultural stories. ‘As a little boy I was scared into being interested of those stories about ghosts and demons, and as you grow older you see beyond those simple restrictions, into the value of those stories and what they were telling us besides good rules to live by, like what is the nature of good and evil? Or what is the process of making choices, and what is the process of making the right choices? We always have signs that guide us, I think in a very real way one thing that worries me most about younger generations is that they have one storyteller in common, the story teller has become the television. Their elders are sitting watching television instead of engaging in storytelling, so no one enriches the imagination of their own family members the way I was fortunate enough to have been told. Now Walt Disney and a brand of hallmark cards are making everybody homogenized. Now survival appears to be a sentimental game, a mellow-drama, and it isn’t in reality…..it is more then that.’   

Knowing a little more than the average person about youth, Wayson Choy was a teacher for many years. Of course the old adage of ‘those who can’t do…teach’ becomes a complete fallacy under the example of Choy as he both taught writing and became a successful writer as well. ‘I chose to teach students who needed up grading because you had to be a real teacher in order to connect with those students who didn’t want to read or write, or were fearful of that process. I taught at the college level, literature and psychology, but really I taught learning processes and coping skills. I had some learning disabilities of my own that I didn’t fully understand until I was able to teach. The students gave me as much as I gave in return. You know, when I ask my students to tell me what they knew about the past, they all cohesively remember TV shows in common, but I say to them, that they all came from a specific kind of family. I would ask what was your grandmother’s life like? They would say ‘I don’t know, we watched TV we didn’t talk.’ What I see know is that new writers are reclaiming the landscape away from their childhood television. They are putting TV in its place by showing its dangers and how it has erased their past. I think people are trying to reclaim that history now.’   

As Choy’s life progressed he would be on the board of the Cahoots Theatre (www.cahoots.ca) in Toronto as another creative outlet ‘my father was a member of the Cantonese opera theatre. didn’t know that until I was in my 50s, and as I was growing up I always felt a connection to the Cantonese opera or longing for things that were theatrical. Cahoots theatre is a wonderful place that promotes multi-cultural theatre. We have writers of different colours, we need more of it; theatre is so much more wonderful with integration of technique, colours, dialogue, etc. Before Cahoots, I directed a high school production of The Music Man and read in Rolling Stone many years later their was a member in the audience who was brought by her brother. When she saw the actors on stage she said ‘I want to do that,’ and it was Katherine O’Hare. What I love about all art is that you don’t know where it will touch somebody and matter.’   

It wasn’t truly until Wayson’s fifties that his life appeared to catapult into great ebbs and flows, but all experiences are considered of value to Wayson ‘every Chinese child has a naming ceremony where they pronounce a theme for your life, and at mine it was proclaimed ‘this child will be a lucky child.’ Recollecting the course taught by Carol Shields, Choy says ‘see how lucky I’ve been!’ Although Wayson Choy has had great success with his writing, he also discovered in his mid-fifties that he was adopted. Both his parents had passed away by that time and he had no recourse. He soon discovered that he was a lucky man because of this new information bestowed upon him. He now realized how much he was loved and treasured by his parents. Choy tells the audience of a time in his youth when he was upset at his Mother for her unpolished English, he shouted that he wished he had another Mother other then her. Hurtful words from the cruel mouth of immaturity, that time sticks out to Wayson as his Mother merely cried silently without him knowing why. Choy says that he understands now that his Mother could have turned to him and said ‘you do you little bastard!’ Wayson Choy seems to have found the fortune in luck and the beauty in a butterflies’ wings ‘we are all lucky in different ways. You have to be patient when things are good and you have to acknowledge that this too shall pass when things are bad.’   

A pertinent concept in Wayson Choy’s current memoir he is working on comes from this knowledge of luck, and patience. In the beginning part of this century, Wayson Choy had a quadruple heart bypass, and what he considers to be his near death experience. He says his family went through most of the agony as he was heavily sedated most of the time! He believes that after near death experiences wonderful things seem to happen, and although I’m sure he does not wish to test this theory often, out of this experience, Choy will tell another universal story through Chinese immigrants’ eyes. He seeks to write more clearly in the future, simpler he says ‘I’m trying to express my sense of humour more; in a memoir I feel this is especially vital.’ As an author he doesn’t prescribe to self-censorship and admits ‘I know when I’m shaking that I’m writing something universal.’    

As this gentle and elegant Cary Grant persona sits under a magnolia tree in full bloom (as if it knew a lucky person would pass underneath it today), and he signs his book and hands out origami butterflies to his readers patiently waiting in line; in the simplicity of the day, one can’t help but wonder if this is all that matters………..   

Some of Wayson Choy’s Favourite Authors Are:‘Whenever I have a writer’s block I go to them to solve my own writing problems, easily among the top is Alice Munro – she unfolds a resonance like a fan, with all kinds of possibilities. Truman Capote for his lyricism, Richard Wright for his powerful stories about racism and of course, Maxine Hong Kingston, I could go on and on, as all writers find that their best teachers are the books they love to read. Read like a writer, find out how they did it and then copy it until you learn to make it yours.’