With the publication of his internationally acclaimed debut novel The Jade Peony in 1995, Wayson Choy emerged as one of the most exciting new voices on the Canadian literary landscape. The novel, which chronicles the struggles of the Chens, an immigrant Chinese family building a new life amid the poverty and racism of depression-era Vancouver, was hailed by critics for its compassion and insight, and was embraced by readers from coast to coast with an affection that is rarely bestowed upon a new writer and his or her work.

Choy followed up the success of The Jade Peony with Paper Shadows, his poignant memoir of coming-of-age in Vancouver in the lean 1940s. This beautifully wrought and moving journey into the mysteries of the past was shortlisted for every major non-fiction prize, including the Governor General’s Award, and reaffirmed Wayson Choy’s growing reputation as one of the country’s most gifted storytellers.

This fall, Wayson Choy returns with All That Matters, his eagerly awaited new novel that continues the saga of The Jade Peony’s Chen family from a new and revealing perspective. I recently sat down with Wayson Choy to talk about his latest work, as well as a number of other subjects, including the importance of paying tribute to tradition, the role of ghosts and spirits in his writing process, and the recent health scare that made him re-evaluate the direction that All That Matters ultimately took.

Q:Your first book, The Jade Peony, had an interesting path to publication. Can you talk a bit about the decades-long journey that the novel took to get into the hands of readers?
A: This is like a ghost story. When I was at UBC in 1958, one of my teachers was Earle Birney, who felt very strongly that Canadian voices needed to be published, but first new writers needed a place to learn the craft. Under his astute guidance, and working with dedicated teachers like Jacob Zilber and Jan de Bruyn, I wrote “The Sound of Waves” for PRISM magazine. The story was eventually anthologized in Best American Short Stories for 1962. The faculty thought that I should continue with my writing. But I found writing very hard and isolating — and I felt I had nothing to say — so I put aside that ambition for a later date.

Later turned out to be 1977, when my mother died. Humber College, where I taught English, allowed me a sabbatical to be with my father and to enroll again in the UBC Creative Writing program. As luck would have it, Carol Shields was the no-nonsense short story instructor. She believed that if you were going to be a writer, you should be able to create a story from any source. For one assignment, she tore up pieces of paper, each marked with a colour, and set the rule: whichever colour you picked up, that colour had to become a major part of your next short story assignment. I got pink.

Unknown to me then, my chance selection of pink proved to be a sign. Let me explain about ‘signs’. My immigrant parents were working all hours during my childhood in the 1940s, so I was partly raised by some of the last surviving pioneers of Vancouver’s Chinatown, the elders who originally sojourned from Old China villages. They imbued in me the folk wisdom of paying attention to signs; that is, to note events and coincidences that would prove meaningful to my fate. For example, I didn’t know what picking up ‘pink’ might mean. I sensed the colour had some significance, but I was stuck. It wasn’t until a few days before the assignment was due that I walked into the kitchen and my two aunts and my father were mulling over my mother’s pieces of jade. I overheard one of my aunts mention that as well as the usual green jade, there
existed a pink jade. I left the kitchen. After about an hour, I walked back in and they were talking about the peony bush blooming in my aunt’s garden. For some reason, the phrase ‘jade peony’ gripped me, and I immediately saw in my mind’s eye an elderly hand shakily pressing a piece of pink jade into a small boy’s open palm. The first sentence came to me. That night, I typed out . . . “When Grandmama died at the age of 83, our family held its breath.”

That story, “The Jade Peony,” was one of two selected by Carol and my classmates to be submitted to the UBC Alumni Chronicle writing contest. It won, and the story was published a year later. I thought that would be the end of things, but the story appeared at a time when multicultural voices were gaining attention. “The Jade Peony” became a favourite of anthologies; and then, in 1992, Patsy Aldana at Douglas & McIntyre offered me a contract to write a book. Three years later, the novel, The Jade Peony, was published. I’m amazed to think where my writing life would be today if, more than 25 years ago, Carol Shields hadn’t challenged her students by tearing up those pieces of paper. Her no-nonsense ghost must be smiling.

Q: The Jade Peony explored the life of the Chen family through the eyes of Kiam-Kim’s siblings, while All That Matters deepens and develops the story through the experiences of First Son Kiam-Kim. Did you always imagine the Chen saga as being two books, with Kiam-Kim eventually picking up the story?
A: The Jade Peony was written in four parts, with the fourth part being First Son Kiam-Kim’s story. But Patsy Aldana and Saeko Usukawa, my editor, felt that the Chinatown seen through the eyes of the three youngest children formed a complete, composite novel: their stories reflected upon the maternal qualities of Chinatown. And since First Son, Kiam-Kim, was raised and tutored by the paternal side of traditional Chinatown — that is, mainly by his father and Third Uncle — Kiam’s story felt like a separate book. So those 75 pages were dropped.

However, I sensed that one day I might have the opportunity to explore Kiam-Kim’s maturing into a man. And Maya Mavjee from Doubleday Canada encouraged me to write that second book. For six years, First Son’s character, his family members, had grown and deepened inside my writer’s mind. Finally, under the sensitive guidance of my editor, Martha Kanya-Forstner, Kiam’s history grew into a novel about the boundless power of love and decency.

Q: In All That Matters, Kiam-Kim is caught between two very distinct cultures. His family is determined to honour their Chinese heritage, yet Kiam-Kim is also fascinated by all things North American. Did you draw on your own experiences of childhood to create Kiam-Kim’s view of the world?
A: Absolutely. If you’re a first- or second-generation North American child of immigrant parents, then you’re going to be caught growing up between cultures. In my day, for example, Canadian-born children like myself were often called ‘bananas’ — we were yellow on the outside and white on the inside. But that tension is actually part of a generation’s new becoming. When I was a child, I first dreamed of becoming a sword-slashing warrior in a Chinese opera; soon after seeing my first cowboy movie I changed my mind. But both dreams became a part of me.

For many young people from minority immigrant families, those early in-between tensions can be bitter and difficult to bear. But I now know from my own experience that those of us struggling between cultures, well, we’re really at a kind of banquet table, a childhood place where we can eventually choose to be nourished by the best from all cultures. Kiam-Kim, like me, had internalized so many oppressions and racist attitudes. Like me, he would have to choose between becoming a bridge that connects the differences, or a wall. That problem faces all of us today.

Q: Poh-Poh, Kiam-Kim’s indomitable grandmother, is unforgettable in terms of her feistiness and wisdom.Where did the inspiration for this extraordinary character come from?
A: The inspiration for the character was the elderly people who shared a vital part of my Chinatown childhood. They were the ones who couldn’t afford the fare back to China; or they stayed so that they could send remittances back home. As they retired, some became extended members of settled working Chinatown families, and helped to look after children like me.

These elders were tough people. They had to be to survive their bitter histories. They were also tender in a way that was startling. One moment they were telling you how they were going to chop you to death (their village language was blunt), and the next moment they were hugging you, afraid to let you out of their sight. I trusted their intensity. Many of them had been treated so badly, they raged with past injustices; yet, I remember their profound dignity and decency. And their stories.

To me as a child, there was nothing more compelling than having one of the elders say, in their mix of Chinese and English grammar, their Chinglish, “Sit still, I tell story.” I held my breath. Their folk tales and life histories passed on to me the meaning of ghosts and signs. These old men and women inspired the spirit and wily character of Poh-Poh.

Q: Your award-winning memoir Paper Shadows offered a remarkable portrait of life in Vancouver’s Chinatown in the 1940s. How similar or different is the Chinatown of memory and the one of the imagination that is depicted in your fiction?
A: Between memory and fiction, it is paradoxically the same Chinatown and not the same. As a writer, I have to know as much as possible about the actual events and places, but when I move into the realm of re-creating that past world in literary terms, that is, from the three-dimensional vision of a character relating the story (whether it’s from me as a child or from a fictional character), the paradox results. The details, even if inexact, must be felt as being true to a particular character’s point of view. My Chinatown of Paper Shadows is the same one, yet not the same one, as the setting for All That Matters; paradoxically, both are similar yet different again from documents, surveys and histories. For me, the living truth of any place — the moral truth — exists between memory and fiction.

Q:You recently went on a trip to China. Did that experience influence the writing of the new novel?
A: Initially, I didn’t think so. I was in Qufu making a documentary about Confucius. The crew and I were in a two-thousand year old, noisy marketplace that reminded me of the heat, the windstorms, and the hard work that the old timers back home had told me about in their stories. On one level, it was a landscape very similar to the Canadian prairies under a boiling sun. But there stood temple walls and tombs that were two or three thousand years old. I could see where the elders’ pride to survive had come from, the pride of surviving as a Chinese, a person who belonged to these ancient structures. They had in their memory the dignity of their culture, of their history and mythologies. Later, when I saw myself in the film standing beside towering stone pillars carved with dragons, I suddenly realized that they belonged to me, too. It was the oddest and most wonderful feeling, because I suddenly thought proudly, paradoxically, of those exquisite Haida totem poles. I could only feel this way because I had been given the burden and gift of many cultures; and so, too, those gifts and burdens are given to my characters.

Q: You speak quite openly about the ways in which ghosts and spirits are very much a part of your creative process. Can you explain how they played a part in the writing of All That Matters?
A: I need to confess that, although I don’t believe in them, ghosts occupy my mind. I think there is a place in the human brain inhabited by people who have loved you, or who have become a vital part of your life, for better or worse. They occupy a dynamic part of you as — for lack of a better word — ghosts. I guess I have a creative mind, and that partly helps, but these ghosts from the past still speak to me. They talk to me; sometimes I think I see them dart around corners. For example, I’ll be sitting in the car and I’ll hear the voice of one of my dead friends saying, Be careful . . . and I’ll drive more carefully. Sometimes I buy a lottery ticket, sensing those voices, and I’ve been very lucky.

Visions of my adopted mother and father still come back to me. They are still a living part of me. As I grow older, I realize more and more how much they achieved in their life-times, which I didn’t think much of when they were alive. I know now how much they achieved in their survival and their decency. My love for them hasn’t changed, but it has grown in depth. I think that’s the gift of growing older (I’m 65)—I’ve arrived at a time when I can understand how precious the love of people who have loved me and are now gone has been, as a sustaining, living quality. Saying that, I think I see both my parents smiling at me. Not surprisingly, ghosts haunt the pages of All That Matters. In fact, I believe all of us are, in so many ways, haunted.

Q: The new novel opens with a quotation from Confucius, which says that “with words, all that matters is to express the truth.” Can you reflect on how recent events in your own life have deepened your understanding of the Master’s words?
A: It has taken me more than six years to write the new novel. Three years ago, I felt I was moving towards the end of the book; the story was concluding when I had a medical interruption. Because of my own stupidity, I went into a severe asthma attack. The doctors at St. Michael’s Emergency induced a coma in me so that a ventilator could be inserted into my semi-paralyzed lungs. I was kept in a coma for 11 days, and stayed in the Intensive Care Unit for more than 20 days. During that period, I had two or three heart attacks, so I almost didn’t make it. I was four months in the hospital,
including my rehab at Bridge Point, and had to rest at home for about a year. I had to learn again how to walk and to grip a pair of scissors, which was amazing because my brain would say, “Here’s how you do it,” but my limbs and fingers wouldn’t co-operate. But throughout this time, the book stirred about in my head.

Finally, I was well enough to look again at the manuscript. But it was not the one I could finish. After my near-death traumas, and my having experienced the love of so many people calling my name through that darkness, I had grown to feel more intensely about life. Frankly, I would have surrendered to that darkness, except for the expert attention of the medical staff and the vital embraces of my family and friends. I thought, as one does in such situations, I must have come back for a reason. That felt like an expression of truth to me, the kind of bare truth that Confucius said was all that matters.

As my health improved, I quickly realized that some of the themes and storylines for the book had been changing . . . deepening. I rewrote the book almost from the beginning, and that took another three years. But I had nothing to lose. I sensed that these characters could be pushed to the brink and pulled back, felled by tragedy and struck by elation. Like me, they would discover truths about their lives. And my words would attempt to express those truths. I feel that it’s essential in literature to discover what matters. I can’t say enough about the power of stories to give meaning to one’s life. And I guess that every writer hopes that he or she might one day write a story that can do that.