Born in Vancouver in 1939, Wayson Choy always believed he was the son of a cook on a Canadian Pacific ship. When he attended Strathcona Elementary School, he wanted to grow up and be a cowboy. Safe within the 'bubble' of his marginality, he accompanied his mother to her evenings of mahjong and watched Chinese opera. Later he became the first Chinese Canadian to enroll in a creative writing course (taught by Earle Birney). At UBC he began writing a short story that would turn into his first novel more than 30 years later. As an inter-generational chronicle of the Chens, an immigrant family struggling during the Depression, The Jade Peony (D&M) won the City of Vancouver Book Award and the Trillium Award in the mid 1990s. [It has been re-issued in a revised edition.] After a radio interview about the book, Wayson Choy received an unexpected phone call from a woman who had been his babysitter. At age 56, he learned he had been adopted. This revelation led him to write Paper Shadows (Penguin) a memoir set during the 1940s. Now Wayson Choy has returned to the saga of the Chen family with All That Matters (Doubleday), a prequel told through the eyes of eldest son, Kiam-Kim, who arrives by ship at Gold Mountain with his father and grandmother, Poh-Poh, in 1926. Neighbours-one Chinese, one Irish-are both racist. Flowers and teas are sent back and forth between the families, but they still don't want their sons and daughters to inter-marry. "Kiam-Kim must choose between becoming a bridge that connects the difference-or a wall,"; says Choy. "It's a choice we all must make."; The wise and spirited Poh-Poh is a compilation of the women who influenced Choy when he was growing up. He took the elements revealed by the elders to create Poh-Poh's secrets of abuse and rape as a slave girl in China. "Everyone in Chinatown cooperated in keeping secrets. They would buy, sell and trade children. Immigrant people do dreadful things to survive. The women who came to Canada from China were tough cookies, they were survivors. Often they came as waitresses when they were actually prostitutes and the pretty ones were bought by the rich merchants.";
The title All That Matters comes from Confucius. "He was asked by a group of young scholars what to say when they spoke to the poor, to the ordinary people,"; Choy says. "They likely expected a long dissertation, but instead the master said a few words: 'all that matters is to express the truth.'";

Although Choy has never had a family of his own, he depicts many domestic scenes with children, including the birth of a baby. "I grew up with a large extended family and I have two goddaughters who are so important to me, as are their families. When I was writing this book, dear friends gave me a great gift--the opportunity to witness the birth of their baby.";

For his writing, Choy says it is essential to trust the point of view of others. "My character, Kiam-Kim, is heterosexual which I am not. You have to risk everything to make a breakthrough. Be on the side of the monster. Until we can make someone understand that any of us could have been the guard at a Nazi concentration camp or the uncle that abused his niece or the soldiers that napalmed Vietnam, until we can make others see that, it is not literature. A writer has to reverse things to get at what they know.";

Although Choy has been teaching remedial English and creative writing at Humber College in Toronto since 1962, he remains haunted by the Chinatown of his youth. Ghosts and phantoms; omens and signs. They inhabit Wayson Choy's literary landscapes. Choy believes "that people who loved us still occupy and exist in our lives. I can talk to them and sometimes they talk to me. They are not gone.";

Matters 0-385-25759-7; Peony 1-55054-468-3; Shadows 01-40268197

--by Johanne Leach, a Vancouver freelance writer.

[BCBW Spring 2005]