The Jade Peony

Literature & Fiction

Wayson Choy

Contemporary

Penguin

All That Matters

Penguin Books Australia Ltd.

In 1995, during the publicity tour for his much-acclaimed first novel, The Jade Peony, Wayson Choy received a mysterious phone call from a woman claiming to have just seen his mother on a streetcar. He politely informed the caller that she must be mistaken, since his mother had died long ago. “No, no, not that mother,” the voice insisted. “Your real mother.”     Inspired by the startling realization that, like many children of Chinatown, he had been adopted, Choy constructs a vivid and moving memoir that reveals uncanny similarities between his award-winning first novel and the newly discovered secrets of his Vancouver childhood. From his early experiences with ghosts, through his youthful encounters with cowboys and bachelor uncles, to his discovery of family secrets that crossed the ocean from mainland China to Gold Mountain in the form of paper shadows, this is a beautifully wrought portrait of a child's world from one of Canada's most gifted storytellers.

Paper Shadows

Biographies & Memoirs

hardcover 1st edition; like new dust jacket (amhbx17)

Literary

Doubleday, Canada

Chinatown, Vancouver, in the late 1930s and '40s provides the setting for this poignant first novel, told through the vivid and intense reminiscences of the three younger children of an immigrant family. They each experience a very different childhood, depending on age and sex, as they encounter the complexities of birth and death, love and hate, kinship and otherness. Mingling with the realities of Canada and the horror of war are the magic, ghosts, paper uncles and family secrets of Poh-Poh, or Grandmother, who is the heart and pillar of the family. Wayson Choy's Chinatown is a community of unforgettable individuals who are "neither this nor that," neither entirely Canadian nor Chinese. But with each other's help, they survive hardship and heartbreak with grit and humor.

Jade Peony, The

Audible Studios on Brilliance Audio

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Books by Wayson Choy