Guernica Editions, November 1, 2024.
This story smoothly sets the 1970s stage for a second generation Chinese immigrant’s son, a CBC or Canadian born Chinese. Johnny’s whole life has been steered by the previous, more traumatized immigrant community, seen as a precious hope of the future to not only his own parents but to lonely old-timers who got cut off from their families back in Asia during the Chinese Exclusion Act and never managed to reconnect after it. High school is as casually racist as you expect (or recall) from the 1970s. Jocks pick on all immigrants and every other person of minority background must decide every time whether to keep silent and avoid notice or intervene and risk being beaten up too. Mostly Johnny keeps his head down, works in his family restaurant and pals around with Leo, who works the door at Auntie’s gambling den, where Johnny’s own mother spends far too much time.
The theme of family loyalty runs throughout. Does Johnny have the right to walk away from the family restaurant and go away to college, to chase his own dreams and aspirations? The stakes rise fast when he learns his family’s restaurant may be lost to debt, and his increasingly elaborate stratagems to raise money create correspondingly greater complications for his schoolwork, his home life, and his budding relationship with the girl of his dreams.
This deceptively simple teen story is really a complex tale of family and friendships, philosophy versus the hard choices of reality, and how Canadian immigration law and practice screwed over early generations of Chinese people who were doing their best to survive, paying their lives forward to give their children (indeed all Chinese Canadian children) opportunities that had remained beyond their own reach.
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