Bookworm, no. 85
Emily Mernin reviews a Chrystia Freeland biography. Alyanna Denise Chua on Teresa Wong’s “All Our Ordinary Stories.” A cover artist Q&A. Poetry by Erin Wilson.
The Minister of Everything
Chrystia: From Peace River to Parliament Hill
Catherine Tsalikis
House of Anansi Press
360 pages, hardcover and ebook
Chrystia Freeland resigned as Canada’s finance minister on December 16. Four days later, House of Anansi Press published Catherine Tsalikis’s Chrystia, initially slated for a February release. Then Justin Trudeau announced his plans to step down as prime minister and head of the Liberal Party, and now Freeland is campaigning to replace him. Partial yet engrossing, this unauthorized biography imparts rare insight into the prospective leader’s diplomatic acumen and economic priorities.
Quoting colleagues, politicos, and family members, Tsalikis casts Freeland as a nimble, intelligent, and humble public servant who attends formal events in sneakers and takes meetings at her kitchen table. Raised by Ukrainian farmers in Peace River, Alberta, she studied Russian history and literature at Harvard. On a student exchange to Kyiv in 1988, she dabbled in journalism, publishing with the Independent and fixing for a New York Times reporter. Three years later, she deferred a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford to cover the Soviet Union’s collapse from eastern Europe. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, she made her name as a fierce reporter and editor for the Financial Times and the Globe and Mail. In the fall of 2012, after he announced his bid for the Liberal leadership, Trudeau attended the Toronto launch of Freeland’s Plutocrats, which went on to become a bestseller. The two “got along right off the bat.” By the following year, he had convinced her to enter politics, and after his election in 2015 she would become his “minister of everything.”
Whether complimenting the politician’s “feminine charm” or her role in the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, Tsalikis’s effusive praise can distract from the main narrative. Nonetheless, Chrystia is a comprehensive biography and an essential election year read—even if the vote this coming weekend doesn’t go Freeland’s way.
—Emily Mernin
Family Ties
All Our Ordinary Stories: A Multigenerational Family Odyssey
Teresa Wong
Arsenal Pulp Press
240 pages, softcover
In 2014, the writer and cartoonist Teresa Wong stood beside her mother’s hospital bed in Calgary. The doctor laid out a recovery plan for a minor stroke in English: physical and occupational therapy, along with support from a social worker. Wong, her “parents’ lousy translator” since childhood, fumbled in Cantonese: “Stay here few days and then go home.”
A graphic memoir, Wong’s All Our Ordinary Stories spirals outward from there. Through hundreds of black and white line drawings, she follows generations of displacement and movement. In 2005, with little explanation beyond wanting “to be free,” her father left Canada and returned to China. Three decades before that, her parents had fled Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, trekking over mountains and swimming to reach Hong Kong. Wong traces her patrilineage back to 1499, when her ancestors migrated south from central China to the coastal Taishan region, near the Pearl River Delta. She deftly pieces together fragments of personal and national history, as she grapples with her heritage alongside her deep resentment of her parents’ silence. In one revealing scene, she describes watching The Joy Luck Club, from 1993, with her mother. When its two main characters, a Chinese American woman and her daughter, finally connected onscreen, Wong sobbed. Meanwhile, her mom declared, “This movie isn’t very interesting,” and went to bed.
All Our Ordinary Stories is a visual meditation on how we inherit trauma as well as resilience. Wong maps the emotional distance between generations, with gulfs of white space between panels representing familial rifts. In the end, she arrives at a hard-won truth: the love we receive doesn’t have to be the love we pass on. Although she will never have her parents’ “whole hearts,” Wong intends to help her three children answer the all-important question “Where did I come from?”
—Alyanna Denise Chua
Cover Artist Q&A: Tom Chitty
How did you envision the image?
The editor and I discussed a “March of the Penguins” theme, which could feature waddling Penguin Classics. I like to create an element of surprise, so I kept the front simple and revealed the conga line on the back. That might not count as a big surprise, but it did make for a nice contrast. Book spines lined up on a shelf inspired the icy water. My first draft didn’t have the fish, but they later swam into my thoughts and onto the page. I drew the illustration by hand, with a fineliner pen over a light box, then I added colour and texture in Photoshop.
As you worked, did you hear Morgan Freeman’s voice from March of the Penguins?
I’ve seen the 2005 documentary, but when his voice is stuck in my head, he’s usually saying something from The Shawshank Redemption—even when I’m drawing penguins.
How does this cover differ from the others you’ve done for the magazine?
Typically, we only have loose conversations about themes, so the concepts take time to finalize. In this case, we had a solid idea and a clear image from the start. It was fun to work on a straightforward layout. Change is good.
Poet’s Corner
Wealth and Morality, a.k.a. the Good Stuff
Three-dollar thrift store sweater,
whom I fondly know as
“The Wedding Sweater,”
when we were first together,
I often pulled you blissfully over
my just-bathed-in-love-making skin.
Now, I wear you
against the harsh
Canadian elements.
Sensual touch
to jurisprudence,
you are a philosophy.
I give to you my life.
—Erin Wilson is the author of At Home with Disquiet and Blue. Find more of her work in a physical copy of the latest Literary Review of Canada, on newsstands now.
Inside the March Issue
“Braz maps out Riel’s evolution in modern times, mostly through culture and art, but his real purpose is to examine how the burnishing of Riel’s image has been a distraction for Métis artists and intellectuals for whom the mythology gets in the way of the contemporary story of their people.” Tom Jokinen on Albert Braz’s The Riel Problem: Canada, the Métis, and a Resistant Hero.
Ruth Panofsky reviews George Galt’s Line Breaks: A Writing Life.
“The book, as it reads today, reveals how much the discourse around homelessness has changed over the past two decades.” James Lindsay finally gets around to Lisa Moore’s February.
And much more!