Paper Shadows (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit

Write a ridiculously simplified synopsis.

Quotes edit see section history

• “P.44-45: In my excitement, I took big breaths and caught in my nose the exhaled puffs of the men's Export or Bull Durham, the women's Black Cat or Sweet Caporal. The tobacco smell was seasoned by the aromas of salt-sweet savoury dumplings and roasted red or black melon seeds. Whenever hunger pangs hit me, I nudged Mother, or her lady friends on either side of us, and the smoky air was made sweeter by yellow-eyed egg tarts lifted up from B.C. Royal Café pastry boxes.”

• “P.91: The uncles and I ate lunch at Chinatown cafés such as the White House Chop Suey; on the way from one corner to the next, we lingered in stores where they displayed toys, and dropped into grocery stores where they sold paper-wrapped, dried and salted plums or red ginger. One of my favourite places was Kwong Man Sang; I liked to smell the dried shrimp in the glass-covered bins, inspect the packages of red coin-shaped sugar candies, watch the clerks push scoops into barrels and tip weighed measures of seeds and spices into paper cones, and hear them sing-song the prices and tabulate with demon speed the totals on the clicking beads of an abacus. I also liked any general stores that sold stationery, like Lucky Star Drugs or Sun Lee Tobacco, where Uncle might pick up a free pencil stub for me, or even buy me a new pencil and a Five-Cent Big Tablet of notepaper.”

• “P.96-97: Of course, I know now that "mo li" meant much more than "no manners." It meant having no Confucian manner. Being "mo li" branded someone as having no sense of the Right Way or Right Behaviour — the "Tao". Having "mo li", you were marked as someone ignorant and crude; in short, you were someone destined to fail in life, fated to become life's fool. A loser. A bum.”

• “P.123: As I chewed on the red-coloured candy, sugarcane sweetness bursting onto my tongue, the herbalist would dip his brush into a jar of red ink and dance it across the front of the medicinal parcel. Calligraphy dashed onto the packet like windblown grass. This scripted writing was surely part of the cure, mysterious to me, and unspoken.”

• “P.124: My picture books were living things, like my rubber Gumby or my Cracker Jack prizes with pressed-tin faces, my rag doll and lead soldiers, my tanks and planes — each illustrated pig and tiger quickening into life the instant I, and everyone else in the house, fell asleep.”

• “P.142-143: Each night I had to go into my room and look at the old man and say I hoped he would have a nice sleep. Grandfather always patted my head and said, "Thank you. G'night, Way Sun." Sometimes he could barely raise his hand and would just touch my shoulder, but I always heard his "G'night", and my Chinese name, however softly he whispered it.”

• “P.215: Checking a list written in Chinese, Father bought me new pencils and two pointy-tipped brushes, a sealed bottle of soot-black Chinese ink and an ink stone, three thin writing books with pages stitched back to accommodate a master sheet from which to trace Chinese characters with pencil and brush. All of these I placed inside my brand new briefcase."Looking like a real student," Father said to me one day.”

• “P.235: There, one fateful day, I ran into a Chinese boy <Larry Wong> with a crew-cut and thick glasses. I remembered him from my kindergarten class. We met on the third floor when I interrupted his intense study of the scale model of the Canadian Pacific liner the "Empress of Asia."”

• “P.236: Larry's father, Wong Quon Hua, made and sold expertly hand-tailored shirts. He had a crew-cut like Larry and wore a plain Chinese-style shirt. His customers liked the idea that he was a tailor of the old school, perhaps too humble to wear his own first-class work.”

• “P.289: I never questioned Father's long absences from us. That was the way things were. Nor did I ever question why he never left us for good, or if he ever wanted to. Until fifteen years after his death, I never knew my father had kept from me his desolate and grief-ridden secret.And I never would have known, except that something in me does not like the dark. Something pushes towards the light.”

• “P.326: The brittle mulberry paper opened crisply. Out fell an oval, ring-sized piece of rare Burmese jade. It was apple green and semi-translucent. A milky cloud sat at its centre. Back when I was eight or nine, Third Uncle showed off his jade pieces in our kitchen on Keefer Street. He asked me to look them over. A half-dozen green and white jade stoned glowed in the afternoon light. I instinctively reached out for one of them, perhaps this one, and held it to the light. Then they were put away and nothing more was said.”

• “P.327: Third Uncle firmly believed that the world was inhabited by unseen presences. Many of Chinatown's citizens believed in ghosts. They spoke discreetly around non-believers, of course. pretending the wind was only the wind, the shadow only a shadow, however it moved. But among themselves, the Old China citizens talked quite naturally about the ghost-inhabited universe. They often heard the moaning spirits of departed men and women drifting in rooming-house hallways and glimpsed them lingering beside dank portals.”

• “P.330: We shared the Old Chinatown attitude that you could talk about anything as long as you had food to eat, tea to drink — a pause to catch your breath — as long as you knew you would never starve, never thirst...and therefore, never surrender. We drank. We paused.”

• “P.332: Like a good mystery novel, I thought to myself, one's life should always be read twice, once for the experience, then once again for astonishment.”

• “P.337: And that time when Sum Sook picked me up and threw me bodily into the air, how could I have known how deeply and sensually I would respond to his touch? Forever after, I knew — without shame — something about my sexuality that I was not able to fathom until fifteen years later. I love, as Dante wrote, the other stars.”

• “P.338: There's nothing to be done about the unknowable — the intricate shadows and silences between the facts that one feels so certain of — except to pause and be astonished. All lives are ten times ten thousand secrets. Even those who are quite sure of themselves, they, too, are made up of mystey, defined by secrets told and untold.Whose life, I wonder, is not an endless knot?”

First Sentence edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Wayson Choy (Author)

Awards edit see section history

• Edna Staebler Award (2000)

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 813.54

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Nonfiction › Social Sciences › Special Groups › Ethnic Studies
• Books › Biographies & Memoirs › Regional Canada › Maritime Provinces
• Books › History › Americas › Canada
• Books › History › Asia › China
• Books › Nonfiction › Social Sciences › Sociology
• Books › Biographies & Memoirs › Arts & Literature › Authors
• Books › Biographies & Memoirs › Ethnic & National › Chinese
• Books › Biographies & Memoirs › Historical › Canadian