Paper Shadows A Chinatown Childhood

Wayson Choy's Paper Shadows A Chinatown Childhood is a vivid and moving memoir of Choy's childhood in Vancouver's Old Chinatown. It is also a beautifully wrought portrait of a child's world.

One commentator remarked that Choy "writes like an angel." Another noted that Choy waited until he was 60 to tell us his childhood, "all in all, it was absolutely worth the wait."

Choy was 57 before he found out he was adopted. A startling revelation. "All those years that I had taken "home" and "family" for granted ... A long drawn-out sigh escaped from me. I had become a kind of orphan three weeks before my fifty-seventh birthday."

Choy added: "Suddenly, nothing of my family, of home, seemed solid and specific. Nothing in my past seemed to be what it had always been." "Half a century later, like shards of glass in a kaleidoscope, old patterns of memory shifted, bringing strange shapes and shadows into view."

More vividly:

"The couple I had called Mother and Father died believing their son would never find out that he had been adopted. I didn't spend much time wondering why they decided not to let me know, nor did I wonder too long why, in a family of eight surviving blood-relatives, not one of my five step-uncles and four step-aunts ever told me anything about my adoption. As for all the other Chinatown aunties and uncles who took care of me, who knew the truth and kept their silence - Well, I thought, that was the way things were. The past was another country, where they did things differently. There was nothing more to know."

Choy's grandfather had been educated as a scholar, but would work most of his life as a laborer. But whether peasant, merchant or scholar, the secrets of old Chinatown families were said to have been buried among the hundreds of assumed names that were "left behind to be hidden or forgotten, in shame or humiliation."

As Choy surmised: "Like a good mystery novel, I thought to myself, one's life should always be read twice, once for the experience, then once again for astonishment."