By the bestselling author of Midnight at the Dragon Café A Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection Focusing on the Chinese community in Canada, these vivid and poignant stories tell us something about the place of home and memory in our lives. Whether her characters find themselves caught between the life they left behind and the lonely realities of their new life in Canada, or torn between the traditions of the past and a desire to shape their own futures, Bates captures their struggles and triumphs with compassion and insight. Among the eight stories: The arrival of a beautiful mail-order bride incites a treacherous mix of jealousy and suspicion between two brothers. After years of sacrifice, an elderly woman seizes a last chance for happiness when she moves into a home of her own. For the sake of her family, a young woman must navigate her way through the unfamiliar demands of Chinese tradition after she elopes with her Canadian boyfriend. Richly textured, China Dog reminds us of the universal yearning for understanding and acceptance.
Set in the 1960s, Judy Fong Bates’s much-talked-about debut novel is the story of a young girl, the daughter of a small Ontario town’s solitary Chinese family, whose life is changed over the course of one summer when she learns the burden of secrets. Through Su-Jen’s eyes, the hard life behind the scenes at the Dragon Café unfolds. As Su-Jen’s father works continually for a better future, her mother, a beautiful but embittered woman, settles uneasily into their new life. Su-Jen feels the weight of her mother’s unhappiness as Su-Jen’s life takes her outside the restaurant and far from the customs of the traditional past. When Su-Jen’s half-brother arrives, smouldering under the responsibilities he must bear as the dutiful Chinese son, he forms an alliance with Su-Jen’s mother, one that will have devastating consequences. Written in spare, intimate prose, Midnight at the Dragon Café is a vivid portrait of a childhood divided by two cultures and touched by unfulfilled longings and unspoken secrets.
Under the terms of the Chinese Immigration Act of 1885, Canada implemented a vast protocol for acquiring detailed personal information about Chinese migrants. Among the bewildering array of state documents used in this effort were CI 9s: issued from 1885 to 1953, they included date of birth, place of residence, occupation, identifying marks, known associates, and, significantly, identification photographs. The originals were transferred to microfilm and destroyed in 1963; more than 41,000 grainy reproductions of CI 9s remain. Lily Cho explores how the CI 9s functioned as a form of surveillance and a process of mass capture that produced non-citizens, revealing the surprising dynamism of non-citizenship constantly regulated and monitored, made and remade, by an anxious state. The first mass use of identification photography in Canada, they make up the largest archive of images of Chinese migrants in the country, including people who stood no chance of being photographed otherwise. But CI 9s generated far more information than could be processed, and there is nothing straightforward about the knowledge that they purported to contain. Cho finds traces of alternate forms of kinship in the archive as well as evidence of the ways that families were separated. In attending to the particularities of these images and documents, Mass Capture uncovers the alternative story that lies in the refusals and resistances enacted by the mass captured. Illustrated with painstakingly reconstituted digital reproductions of the microfilm record, Mass Capture reclaims the CI 9s as more than documents of racist repression, suggesting the possibilities for beauty and dignity in the archive, for captivation as well as capture.
"Here is my disconnect: the private and public self. My mind and body. The real person and curated spectacle. . . . Are there actual roots with which to fasten this performance to anything real?" As a transnational and transracial adoptee, Jenny Heijun Wills has spent her life navigating the fraught spaces of ethnicity and belonging. As a pan-polyam individual, she lives between types of family—adopted, biological, chosen—and "community"; heternormativity and queerness; commitment and a constellation of love. And as a parent with a lifelong eating disorder, who self-harms to cope with mental illness, her love language is to feed, but daily she wishes her body would disappear. These facets of Wills' being have served as the anchors she once clung to and the harsh parameters of what others now imagine she can be. Everything and Nothing At All weaves together a lifetime of literary criticism, cultural study, and a personal history into a staggering tapestry of knowledge. And though the experiences of accumulating this knowledge have often been shot through with pain, Wills spins these threads into priceless gold—a radical, fearless vision of kinship and family. Devastating, illuminating, and beautifully crafted, these essays breathe life into the ambiguities and excesses of Wills' self, transforming them into something more—something that could be everything.
The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature provides a broad-ranging introduction to some of the key critical fields, genres, and periods in Canadian literary studies. The essays in this volume, written by prominent theorists in the field, reflect the plurality of critical perspectives, regional and historical specializations, and theoretical positions that constitute the field of Canadian literary criticism across a range of genres and historical periods. The volume provides a dynamic introduction to current areas of critical interest, including (1) attention to the links between the literary and the public sphere, encompassing such topics as neoliberalism, trauma and memory, citizenship, material culture, literary prizes, disability studies, literature and history, digital cultures, globalization studies, and environmentalism or ecocriticism; (2) interest in Indigenous literatures and settler-Indigenous relations; (3) attention to multiple diasporic and postcolonial contexts within Canada; (4) interest in the institutionalization of Canadian literature as a discipline; (5) a turn towards book history and literary history, with a renewed interest in early Canadian literature; (6) a growing interest in articulating the affective character of the "literary" - including an interest in affect theory, mourning, melancholy, haunting, memory, and autobiography. The book represents a diverse array of interests -- from the revival of early Canadian writing, to the continued interest in Indigenous, regional, and diasporic traditions, to more recent discussions of globalization, market forces, and neoliberalism. It includes a distinct section dedicated to Indigenous literatures and traditions, as well as a section that reflects on the discipline of Canadian literature as a whole.
Diverse Spaces: Identity, Heritage and Community in Canadian Public Culture explores the presentation and experience of diversity and belonging in public cultural spaces in Canada. An interdisciplinary group of scholars interrogate how ‘Canadian-ness’ is represented, disputed, negotiated and legitimized within spaces, media and institutions. The volume begins with contributions that draw attention to contested and exclusionary places within official public culture, and then offers alternative narratives that assert voice and remap public spaces. Contributors take a close look at actually-occurring engagements with culture, heritage and community, and the erasures, conflicts, compromises, failures and successes that have emerged. Special attention is paid to ‘multiculturalism’ as a central concept in the ideal of ‘diverse spaces’ in Canada, and the perspectives of people from many cultural backgrounds who seek to engage with cultural, historical and social knowledge within these spaces. The authors in this book examine, analyze and theorize why and how Canada’s diverse peoples have publically expressed or contested different histories, different identities and different forms of community. Places of official culture inspected in this volume include national, provincial and local museums and monuments including the Canadian National Museum of Immigration and Windsor’s Underground Railroad monument. Alternative spaces addressed by contributors look at (re)presentations and (re)mappings through public art and performance, both individual and community-based, such as the photographs of Jeff Thomas, the personal narratives at the Sikh Heritage Centre, and the chalk memorializing of politician Jack Layton. These chapters will resonate with a broad range of scholars examining how nations and citizens address culturally the liberty, equality and solidarity implied by the concept of ‘diverse spaces’. Though primarily intended for graduate students, researchers and professors in cultural studies, sociology and Canadian studies, the interdisciplinary nature of the questions raised will also appeal to international scholars in cultural policy, arts and cultural management, performance studies, museum and heritage studies, and cultural geography. Importantly, this book will be of interest to professionals and practitioners in institutions, agencies and associations of the public arts and culture sector both in Canada and internationally.
Cultural Grammars of Nation, Diaspora, and Indigeneity in Canada considers how the terms of critical debate in literary and cultural studies in Canada have shifted with respect to race, nation, and difference. In asking how Indigenous and diasporic interventions have remapped these debates, the contributors argue that a new “cultural grammar” is at work and attempt to sketch out some of the ways it operates. The essays reference pivotal moments in Canadian literary and cultural history and speak to ongoing debates about Canadian nationalism, postcolonalism, migrancy, and transnationalism. Topics covered include the Asian race riots in Vancouver in 1907, the cultural memory of internment and dispersal of Japanese Canadians in the 1940s, the politics of migrant labour and the “domestic labour scheme” in the 1960s, and the trial of Robert Pickton in Vancouver in 2007. The contributors are particularly interested in how diaspora and indigeneity continue to contribute to this critical reconfiguration and in how conversations about diaspora and indigeneity in the Canadian context have themselves been transformed. Cultural Grammars is an attempt to address both the interconnections and the schisms between these multiply fractured critical terms as well as the larger conceptual shifts that have occurred in response to national and postnational arguments.
Based on findings from menus, cookbooks, government documents, advertisements, media sources, oral histories, memoirs, and archival collections, Edible Histories offers a veritable feast of original research on Canada's food history and its relationship to culture and politics. This exciting collection explores a wide variety of topics, including urban restaurant culture, ethnic cuisines, and the controversial history of margarine in Canada. It also covers a broad time-span, from early contact between European settlers and First Nations through the end of the twentieth century.
Eating Bitter, a Chinese American Saga is a richly textured biography charting the long lives of Paul and Sonia Ho. It is about survival of the Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese occupation of Taiwan, the Communist Revolution and the prejudices the family encountered as immigrants to the United States. It is about memory - and conflicting memories. Eating Bitter is, above all, an American success story. It was Paul and Sonia’s eldest son, David, whose groundbreaking work on AIDS made him Time Magazine’s Person of the Year in 1996 and, a few years later, won him the Presidential Citizens Medal.
