Synopses & Reviews
Three weeks before his 57th birthday, novelist Wayson Choy received a surprising phone call during his publicity tour: a mysterious woman told him that he had been adopted. Inspired by this startling revelation, this beautifully-wrought memoir reveals uncanny similarities between the secrets that enrich Wayson Choy's award-winning novel The Jade Peony, set in prewar Chinatown, and the subsequently discovered secrets of his own life.
Review
"Lyrically blends the mature adult voice and perspective with the fully realized persistence of memory in childhood." (Seattle Times)
Review
"With striking narrative immediacy...[Choy] has evoked from memory and imagination a childhood memoir of crystalline clarity." (Boston Globe)
Review
"The author's narrative gifts make this book an extraordinary and intimate account of life in the Chinese Diaspora." (Booklist - starred review)
Review
"A deceptively charming return to a painfully isolated Chinese émigré culture in which the magical and the mundane conceal heroic complexities of the heart." (Kirkus Reviews)
Synopsis
In this remarkable first novel, three young children -- a sister and her two brothers -- come of age in an immigrant Chinese family in vancouver during the early 1940s. Intertwined with the stories of the children are the experiences of their elders, Old Wong and Poh-Poh. Side by side, the five family members survive hardships and heartbreaks with grit and humor, discovering a new land -- without forgetting their common ground.
About the Author
WAYSON CHOY's novel The Jade Peony was selected as an American Library Association Notable Book of 1998 and shared the Trillium Book Award with Margaret Atwood. Paper Shadows was shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award, the Charles Taylor Literary Nonfiction Prize, and the Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize. Mr. Choy is a full-time professor at Humber College in Toronto.