Bookworm, no. 120
Jadine Ngan reviews Rachel Phan’s “Restaurant Kid.” Mobólúwajídìde D. Joseph on “As the Earth Dreams,” edited by Terese Mason Pierre. A cover artist Q&A. Inside the November issue.
May Days
Restaurant Kid: A Memoir of Family and Belonging
Rachel Phan
Douglas & McIntyre
272 pages, softcover and ebook
Rachel Phan was three when her parents, Chinese refugees from postwar Vietnam, opened their first restaurant, in Kingsville, Ontario. The May May Inn represented Tran and Hy Phan’s path to the Canadian dream, but the demands of the business left their daughter starved for attention, as there was always a wok, dish, or customer to tend. In Restaurant Kid, she explores her lonely childhood and asks, How do our earliest recollections shape our lives?
From the start, Rachel struggled with belonging. She didn’t speak Cantonese, because her parents were too busy to pass it on; most local residents had never seen a Chinese person before; her classmates boxed her in as the “nerdy geek” and exoticized her. She developed a hazy sense of self, so she chased approval and morphed to fit expectations. That habit trailed her into adulthood, permeating her friendships and love life. In university, her white boyfriend joked that he was “ravaged by yellow fever.” She didn’t even blink.
The author is unafraid to confront her most wrenching memories, including when a suicide attempt landed her in the hospital at seventeen. “I remember feeling so low and worthless because my parents had always given so much,” she writes, “beginning with their journey to Canada, to give their children a better life.” She also holds her younger self—and her family—in tender hands. At thirty-five, she accompanied her parents on their first trip back to Vietnam, where they cracked open their past and her relationship with them deepened. She learned that her family was kicked out of the country for being Chinese. In China, they weren’t wanted. In Canada, they are forever foreign. In the end, she discovers that she belongs where she’s been all along: “Borders and language and citizenship shift and evolve, are lost and taken away, but this—each other—is completely ours.”
—Jadine Ngan
Futurama
As the Earth Dreams: Black Canadian Speculative Stories
Edited by Terese Mason Pierre
House of Anansi Press
288 pages, softcover and ebook
In her introduction to As the Earth Dreams, Terese Mason Pierre wonders, “What does it mean for Black people to tell stories with this history, and write ourselves into the future?” Her question inspired this collection of speculative fiction, in which ten writers render worlds that are futuristic, parallel, and ancient—yet always deeply human.
In Chinelo Onwualu’s “The Hole in the Middle of the World,” a poor mother sells a “cognitive asset” to a clinic. Struggling with dementia sometime later, she learns that the lab “harvested patient memories” to make them forget about their children, who were taken and sold. Suyi Davies Okungbowa’s “Peak Day” follows a “techno-capitalist slaver” who works at “Everything Co.,” a major retailer that puts implants in employees’ heads: “And you know what happens when they shut it off, right?” The protagonist in Zalika Reid-Benta’s “Paroxysm” isolates during a pandemic; the virus has killed her neighbour with “raspy, wheezy, uncontrollable laughing.” The garbage bags piling up in her living room illustrate her mental spiral: “They kept her from sleeping, they kept her from eating. Soon, she was sure, they would keep her from breathing.”
An important genre, particularly in Black literature, speculative fiction can highlight unjust political structures and, as Pierre observes, channel “the deepest well of imagination, declaration, and augury.” Indeed, As the Earth Dreams explores failed societies that, in some cases, bear an uncanny resemblance to the present.
—Mobólúwajídìde D. Joseph
Cover Artist Q&A: Alanna Cavanagh
How did you come up with the concept?
The editor and I agreed that a natty gentleman in autumnal tones, enjoying a book and a glass of wine, would make for a cozy November cover. After I sent him the initial black and white sketches, we decided to create a Droste effect (a picture within a picture), to feature our suave reader with a copy of the Literary Review of Canada.
What was your process?
I began by sketching ideas with a fine-tip marker on drawing paper. After we settled on one, I coloured the final illustration in Photoshop. Doing a cover for the front and back is a challenge but one I happily took on.
How has your style evolved?
When I started out, my figures looked more cartoony. They sported large heads and small bodies, for example. Over the years, they have become more stylish and sophisticated.
Inside the November Issue
“The author tells us about an immensely talented, multi-faceted gem of a man, and the linear approach provides necessary context for a cohesive narrative that builds upon itself every step of the way. We are invited to take in Candy as a whole, so that we come to appreciate who he was and why, as well as what his life and work meant to so many.” Amy Spurway on Paul Myers’s John Candy: A Life in Comedy.
Ruth Panofsky reviews Miriam Toews’s A Truce That Is Not Peace.
“These stories both capture and reinforce the way thoughts drift and memories flood in as you watch the world go by.” Pablo Strauss reads Sentence, by Mikhail Iossel.
And much more!