Wayson Choy

Wayson Choy was born in 1939. He is a Chinese, but born Canadian. He spent his childhood in Vancouver’s Chinatown. Choy is the novelist, memoirist and short-story writer. He attended the University of British Columbia where he studied creative writing under tutelage of Early Birney. In 1962 he moved to Toronto. He taught at Humber College from 1967 to 2004. After that he continues to teach at Humber School for Writers. He was president of Cahoots Theatre Company of Toronto from 1999 to 2002.

He is the author of the novels “The Jade Peony” and “All That Matters” and the memoir “Paper Shadows: A Chinatown Childhood”. He won Trillium Book Award and the City of Vancouver Book Award for his novel “The Jade Peony” and the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction for the memoir “Paper Shadows: A Chinatown Childhood”. He was nominated for a Governor General’s Award and the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Choy’s writing is adept, subtle, wry, and humane. In it he explores racism, politics and violence, all with the deep understanding. He also explores the themes of maturing, belonging, death, revealing the real self, etc. One of the themes which he also explores in the book is the signs. He believes in signs. . “He patiently unfolds the secrets of his past and searches for meaning in coincidence.”

The setting of his novel “The Jade Peony” is actually the setting of his own life. In this book he has a lot of similarities with the second brother Jung-Sum. Both of them are adopted and both had to deal with their sexuality. Many things from his books are connected with his life, but he doesn’t show that. Everything that he writes is fictional, as he says.

Choy found out that he was adopted when he was 56, long after his adopted parents died. He found out from a mysterious phone call from Hazel Young. His biological parents were dead as well, but he learned a lot about his past from Hazel’s mother. He also found out that his father was a member of the Cantonese Opera Company in Vancouver. “I was amazed because for half a dozen summers before, I had been researching in the archives of the Museum of Anthropology at UBC where they have all the theatre stuff. In looking at all those photos I must have glimpsed a picture of my father.” He now thinks that his adoptive mother took him to the opera so that his biological parents could see how he was growing. What he learned from this