A long journey back
Wayson Choy returns to the Ottawa Writers Festival
Choy: "I wanted the reader to feel that I'm giving you the details that are essential"
It’s an ironic curiosity that the events that inspired Wayson Choy’s latest memoir, Not Yet, were initially caused by his troubles breathing, given the double meaning of the word “inspire.” In 2001, asthma and a heart condition conspired to almost kill Choy, in fact he was forced to miss his appearance at that year’s Ottawa Writers Festival. Placed in a medical coma, Choy survived the attack but underwent a long and painful convalescence. During this difficult time his friends and loved ones closed in around him like petals, and it is this celebration of the powerful, fused quality of their impromptu family that comprises Not Yet.
“At the end of the book, shorn of all the sentimental stuff, there’s a thing that says ‘your friends matter,’ and what they do, as all friends might do, make them family.” Not Yet isn’t a story about the power of blood and lineage, in fact none of Choy’s blood family even makes it into this book (save as literal spectres that are later sent packing in a Buddhist exorcism). It’s an oddity for an author who, like many renowned Canadian voices, finds tension in his work by exploring the threads pulled taut between identities. Many of his main characters are “in-between people” or “bananas: you know, yellow on the outside, white in” he says engagingly. They simply seek belonging. “I finally understand that’s what I’ve always been writing about. I understand two things now – family is who loves you, and love has no rules.”
It’s a beautifully clear and lucid piece of non-fiction. Choy has deliberately kept the idea of embellishment in fiction far from this piece and, as such, it reads with elegance, like pure, clear water.
“I wanted the reader to feel that I’m giving you the details that are essential,” he explains, “a kind of signpost to you, because we will each, in some ways, meet our own end.”
As appeared in the Ottawa XPress – Apr. 09, 2009
http://www.ottawaxpress.ca/books/books.aspx?iIDArticle=17040
