Having attended UBC's Booming Ground Summer Writing Program, food writer and poet Jen Sookfong Lee, as a member of the writing group SPiN, has published her debut novel, The End of East (Knopf $29.95), another family saga about three generations of Chinese Canadians within Vancouver's Chinatown. In this New Face of Fiction title, Sammy Chan returns to Vancouver to care for her aging mother due to her sister's upcoming marriage. While managing a dangerous love affair and coping with her difficult mother, she begins to record family stories dating back to the Canadian arrival of her grandfather, Seid Quan, at age 18 in 1913. History repeats itself as personal ambitions are sacrificed in favour of family goals.

Born in Vancouver on August 12, 1976, Jennifer Lee was raised on Vancouver's East side (she now lives with her son in Burnaby). She says she always knew she would be a writer despite her father's observation that she should become a lawyer because "she likes to talk back" and her mother's lingering disappointment that none of her bookish daughters entered the Miss Chinese Vancouver beauty pageant. She has edited two online magazines, Schema and Wet Ink. Jen Sookfong Lee has also been the voice behind "Westcoast Words," a weekly writing column featured on CBC Radio One's On the Coast and All Points West. She is also a frequent co-host of the Studio One Book Club.

Part of a two-story novel for young adults, Shelter (Annick, 2011) is Sookfong Lee's story about a girl named Abby who has a father who works two jobs and a mother who frequents nightclubs. Abby falls in love with an older man, and finds solace at an animal shelter.

In The Conjoined (ECW Press, 2016) Jessica Campbell sorts through her dead mother's belongings and makes a shocking discovery - two dead girls curled into the bottom of her mother's chest freezers. These girls were Casey and Jamie Cheng, two troubled teenaged sisters from Vancouver's Chinatown who lived with the family as foster children in 1988. Everyone had simply assumed they had run away but as Jessica learns more about the girls, she unearths dark truths that force her to confront her own life and who her mother really was. The Conjoined was shortlisted for a 2017 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize.

Drawing on the Chinese zodiac, Jen Sookfong Lee's The Animals of Chinese New Year (Orca, 2019) follows twelve animals as they speed across a river, competing to represent the imminent new year in a race held by the Jade Emperor, the most powerful Chinese god. Each animal competes in its own unique way. The ox works hard, the tiger is brave, the dog smiles kindly, but who will win? Photographs of babies demonstrating the same traits as the animals in the text, complemented by traditional Chinese graphic elements, accompany the bilingual text, with a translation by Kileasa Che Wan Wong.

Sookfong Lee co-edited Whatever Gets You Through: Twelve Women on Life After Sexual Assault (Greystone, 2019), a collection of personal stories about how women survive after the trauma of sexual assault. Fowles, Stacey May, and Jen Sookfong Lee. Whatever Gets You Through: Twelve Survivors on Life after Sexual Assault.

BOOKS:

Living with Prenatal Drug Exposure (Groundwork Press, 2003) 9780914539209

The End of East (Knopf Canada, 2007) 9780676978384

Dead Time/Shelter (Annick Press, 2011) $9.95 978554512867. With Christy Ann Conlin

The Better Mother (Knopf, 2012) $29.95 9780307399519

The Conjoined (ECW Press, 2016) $18.95 9781770412842

Gentlemen of the Shade: My Own Private Idaho (ECW Press, 2017) $12.95 9781770413139

Chinese New Year: A Celebration for Everyone (Orca, 2017) $24.95 9781459811263

The Animals of Chinese New Year (Orca, 2019) $9.95 9781459819023. Translated by Kileasa Che Wong.

Whatever Gets You Through: Twelve Women on Life After Sexual Assault (Greystone, 2019) $22.95 9781771643733. Co-authored by Stacey May Fowles

Finding Home: The Journey of Immigrants and Refugees (Orca, 2021) $24.95 9781459818996

The Shadow List: Poetry (Wolsak & Wynn, 2021) $18 9781989496282

Superfan: How Pop Culture Broke My Heart (M&S, 2023) $24.95 9780771025211

Good Mom on Paper (Book*hug Press, 2022) $25.00 9781771667470. Co-authored by Stacey May Fowles

[BCBW 2023]

 

REVIEW


Whatever Gets You Through: Twelve Survivors on Life after Sexual Assault
by Stacey May Fowles and Jen Sookfong Lee (editors), with a foreword by Jessica Valenti


Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2019
$22.95 / 9781771643733

Reviewed by Kimberly Webster and Chris Montoya

*

This book will piss you off. Who wants to be the perfect -- or worse, the imperfect -- victim? Who wants their loved one to be a victim? Further, who wants to be known for surviving sexual assault? It isn't exactly a glorious claim to fame. This book makes you want to mentally bury the people who hurt you in a red anthill and never look back.

The stories paint a vivid, sometimes stomach-churning, picture of the torment that follows survivors of sexual assault. Whatever Gets You Through will draw those who have similar stories and provide a sense of inclusion. It may help some to realize that they are not alone in their battle. Those in relationships with survivors may gain an understanding of the daily internal and external struggles endured by the abused. As real and painful as a heart attack, many are never able to put their story of sexual assault into words.

As a survivor of abuse, I felt anxious when I opened the book. I was fearful that I would relive my experiences once again in full dying colour. I was met, however, with words that rang with such raw emotion (rage) and honest clarity that I felt an immediate common bond and a jigsaw-like jagged connection with the twelve survivors. There was no condescension or degradation knitted into their words, thoughts, and feelings. Only bare text woven on the tapestry of tragedy; sincere, straightforward threads of how they died and then survived the most savage and ruthless invasions of personal space I know.

Editors Jen Sookfong Lee and Stacey May Fowles pictured in Toronto, April 2019. Photo courtesy of Nathan Denette, Canadian Press

When I first picked up the book and flipped through the pages, I got angry, and then defensive. "I am not these women!" I thought. I fought with my thoughts.

In my mind: I was not broken. I was fine. My demon was denial and it had me. As I read the stories, page by page, I felt as though I had been repeatedly kicked and punched in the stomach. The first story left me angry, wondering why there were so many similarities between this "broken survivor" and myself. I almost threw the book in the trash.

The stories that followed that first account only reinforced one piercing, undeniable truth. Our thoughts are eerily synchronous. Why, in the presence of angry men, did I continue to sway to my demon's music and to dance a dance I/we had never wanted to dance (ever)? I am these women. I am broken. But I am also like them in another way: I survived. My mind, like theirs, betrays me more than I would like to admit. I made it but so did they.

From the perspective of violated and discarded women, the effects of rape frequently manifest as physical symptoms of pain and fatigue, within, on, and throughout our minds and bodies. The minds and bodies of abused women have been screaming the same message across millennia. With that burning realization came the disgusting pungent stench of violation, all over again. Whenever I heard the atonal demonic music of my abusers, my mind would shut off and I would dance. Though my body ached and my feet bled I was pre-set to dance. Freud would term this defence mechanism societal sublimation. Then, just as I was about to sublimate things under the proverbial "I am a good survivor" rug (as per usual), I saw the bigger picture and thought perhaps I should direct the anger outward. "Fuck this." These perverted men from my past are not holding onto MY BODY or MY MIND for one more year, one more week, one more day, one more HOUR. I will not let the demons win. I will get up. I will live again.

You've gone out too far from shore in your boat. Rape is the storm that hits, sudden and inescapable. God is the lighthouse. This book can be one map to help get to shore. They can violate your body, but they can't touch your soul. Joy always prevails. May I suggest two other books that should be read in conjunction with this nasty piece of pithy narrative? The first is Battlefield of the Mind: Winning the Battle in your Mind, by Joyce Meyer (Warner Books, 2002), and Bounce Back Creating Resilience from Adversity, by Reva Nelson (Words.Worth, 1997). At first blush both opposing camps may be horrified by the stark contrast; however, having lived through the personal hell of abuse I feel that both sides have something to bring to the table.

[BCBW 2023]