Building a Practical Past: Wayson Choy's Paper Shadows

Abstract

The childhood memoir of Chinese Canadian author Wayson Choy, Paper Shadows, made its first appearance more than twenty years ago. Having played a prominent role in the emergence of Asian Canadian literature that took place toward the end of the last century, Choy is best remembered for his first novel, The Jade Peony, published in 1995. Set in Vancouver’s Chinatown during the 1930s and 1940s, the novel depicts the life of a Chinese immigrant family from the point of view of its three youngest, Canadian-born children. In the memoir Paper Shadows, Choy portrays the lived experience that went into the writing of what would become his bestselling work of fiction. In April 2019, Choy died in his Toronto home at the age of eighty. It was in the fall of 1995, at the age of fifty-six, while in Vancouver to promote the release of The Jade Peony, that Choy learned in a rather abrupt way from an unknown Chinatown woman that he had been adopted as a child. The discovery would lead to the writing of Paper Shadows, and the story of this moment and the author’s subsequent delving into his family’s past frames the main narrative of the memoir. Choy was never able to uncover the identity of his birth parents, although he was eventually told that his father was a member of a Cantonese opera company that was active in Building a Practical Past: Wayson Choy’s Paper Shadows