Wayson Choy
Works by Wayson Choy:
From ABC BookWorld, "Wayson Choy became the first Chinese Canadian to enroll in a creative writing course (taught by Earle Birney and Jacob Zilber) at UBC. There he began writing a short story set in Vancouver's Chinatown that turned into his best-known novel, The Jade Peony, some 30 years later. He moved to Toronto in 1962. 'We are now sharing our stories,' he has said. 'I really think that when the stories are well told, they are human stories. They don't have any borders or racial barriers.'
Cared for in a variety of Chinese Canadian households in the Strathcona neighbourhood, Wayson Choy dreamed of becoming a cowboy. It was during a publicity tour that Choy received an unexpected phone call from a woman who had been his babysitter, during which, at age 56, he learned he had been adopted. This led him to write Paper Shadows (1999), a memoir of the 1940s.
Choy returned to the Chen family for All That Matters (2004), a prequel told through the eyes of eldest son Kiam-Kim, who arrives by ship with his father and grandmother Poh-Poh, in 1926. For his writing, Choy has said it has been essential to trust the point of view of others. 'My character, Kiam-Kim, is heterosexual which I am not. You have to risk everything to make a breakthrough. Be on the side of the monster. Until we can make someone understand that any of us could have been the guard at a Nazi concentration camp or the uncle that abused his niece or the soldiers that napalmed Vietnam, until we can make others see that, it is not literature. A writer has to reverse things to get at what they know.'"
He presented at the Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts in 1997, 2007, 2009, and 2012.