by Sky Lee
Some of my students write about how the assignment made them hyper-aware of their status as visitors and outsiders while others describe the jarring effect of visiting a place that they first encountered in a novel. This blurring of fact and fiction also heightens their awareness of what no longer exists, or never existed in the first place, but traces of which nevertheless saturate their experience of a place. Inspired by Gordon’s account of haunting, one student described her experience in this way:
Although Mui Lan is a fictional character, the pervasive plausibility of her narrative haunted our once-passive experience of the place. Being so haunted by the ghosts of DMC, we discovered in ourselves an impulse to pacify these very ghosts in our creation of the assignment. It was this experience of being haunted by the text and needing to pay our respects to fictional and tragic ghosts like Mui Lan that made us embark on a quest to explore what it means to be haunted and what it means, in turn, to respond responsibly to it.
The paradox of feeling responsible to a fictional story encapsulates the ways in which Disappearing Moon Cafe awakens readers to haunting as a social process. While “paying respects” might include a range of cultural, spiritual, and religious practices, it also turns into an ethical orientation toward erased histories.
Disappearing Moon Cafe extends the scope of “paying respects” beyond the boundaries of Chinatown by foregrounding the role of Chinese migrants in settler colonialism and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. This is another kind of haunting, one that affects my students and me as we work and live on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples. By opening and closing with the story of Gwei Chang and Kelora, the novel reframes Chinese Canadian histories that emphasize immigration and assimilation in order to highlight the colonial roots of the Canadian nation-state and the complicity of racialized migrants in the settler colonial project. The building of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, a key event in Canada’s national mythology, is reframed as one of a long series of projects designed to consolidate white settler power. As Larissa Lai writes, “we Chinese Canadians are indebted to the Indigenous peoples of the country some people call Canada. The early Chinese in Canada were exploited by the Canadian state and Canadian companies, yet they also participated in the colonial nation-building project that disenfranchised Indigenous peoples” (103). Consequently, the promise of citizenship and national belonging is no longer sufficient to redeem violent pasts. Rather, the entire project of nation-building can no longer serve as the horizon of emancipation for Chinese Canadians or First Nations peoples.
Gwei Chang’s abandonment of Kelora is an original transgression that haunts the Wong family for generations, a “pain of glass” that divides Chinese and Indigenous peoples. His decision is presented as an act of ethno-centrism (he leaves Kelora to fulfill his filial duty of marrying a suitable wife), a turning inwards that truncates his relationship with Indigenous peoples. Moreover, Chinese migrants are shown to harbour deep prejudices. The first time he sees Kelora, Gwei Chang considers her a “wild injun,” and in his delirious state he “spill[s] out . . . insults in front of her” until her “elegant rebuke . . . ma[kes] him feel uncivilized, uncouth; the very qualities he had assigned so thoughtlessly to her” (4). Later on, Ting An would be subject to similar ostracization as “[p]eople used to say that he was half-indian—his mother a savage” (65). Gwei Chang’s treatment of Kelora and Ting An functions as an allegory of the complicity of Chinese settlers in past injustices and their ongoing indebtedness to First Nations.
Disappearing Moon Cafe has been recognized as an important milestone for re-imagining the relationship between Chinese settlers and Indigenous peoples. For example, Rita Wong, who has written some of the most insightful work on this topic, sees in the Kelora-Gwei Chang plotline a “potential alliance between two people who were both excluded by the Canadian nation in historically specific, racialized, gendered, and classed ways” (162). For a time, Gwei Chang learns respect for native cultures and for the land itself but eventually returns to a “sino-centric worldview . . . [that] allows him upward mobility within the confines of the ethnic enclave of Chinatown” (163). The sorrow and regret he feels for the rest of his life reveals the emptiness of immigrant success as a substitute for fostering an ethical relationship with Indigenous communities. Lai suggests that the “grief of ingratitude” that haunts Gwei Chang can be extended beyond the novel to encompass the author and her readers. Lai explains, “Lee’s gesture of respect is her recognition of the wrongs committed by Chinese immigrants against the Indigenous people who helped them” (103). This is not to say that Disappearing Moon Cafe does not struggle with how to represent this relationship in respectful ways. As Wong notes, the absence of Kelora for most of the novel enables the plot to unfold in the way that it does, but does not signify a complete “shift in social relations” that would enable her to “move from absence to presence(s)” (165). Disappearing Moon Cafe depicts “temporary but strong affective bonds” that “promise” decolonization and political solidarity, although these promises remain partially unfulfilled (166).
When I first began teaching Disappearing Moon Cafe more than a decade ago, my students were fascinated by how a Chinese Canadian novel could start with a story of inter-racial intimacy that casts doubt on the coherence of ethnic identities. The history of Chinese-Indigenous relations was not as well known then, and many were encountering this topic for the first time. But as this history has gained more visibility, my students have become more critical. They point to the novel’s use of aestheticized language and lush imagery to tell the story of Kelora and Gwei Chang, and debate whether the text idealizes their relationship. Others object to the eroticization of Kelora and her depiction as someone endowed with ageless wisdom and awareness of nature. These thoughtful critiques and the heated conversations that create reflect a slow but discernable shift towards a more widespread awareness of, and wrestling with, histories of settler colonialism. At the same time, they are also a legacy of the novel’s ground-breaking exploration of these issues, for what has changed since its publication is the emergence of an exciting body of literature, film, and critical writings that explore various aspects of the Chinese/Asian-Indigenous relationship. Films such as Cedar and Bamboo, All My Father’s Relations, and Elder in the Making, the online portal Chinese Canadian Stories, the special issue of Rice Paper on “Aboriginal & Asian Canadian Writers” and other literary collections, as well as sustained efforts by scholars, artists, and activists such as Wong, Lai, Dorothy Christian, Elder Larry Grant, Sarah Ling, Ashok Mathur, Jean Barman, Janey Lew, and Renisa Mawani continue to bring the cross-racial histories addressed in Disappearing Moon Cafe to the foreground. While the novel does not fully resolve the issues it raises, its nuance and sensitivity continue to make it an instructive model for working through these discomforting pasts.
This vision of a woman in her garden is to me a very important one. Ultimately, the vision of a woman tilling and cultivating her garden called earth is the only one I want to pass on unsullied to my great granddaughters. (Lee, Telling It 108–109)
The final recommendation issued by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2015), which was formed in response to the genocidal treatment of Indigenous peoples through the residential school system, is a call to amend the oath of citizenship in order to make the recognition of Aboriginal treaties one of the core duties of Canadian citizenship (see “Calls to Action” #94, 11). As one of the Commission’s recommendations for practicing reconciliation, this particular call is addressed to “Newcomers to Canada” and involves a thorough revision of how we understand national belonging. Disappearing Moon Cafe moves toward a similar re-imagination through its focus on a particular set of newcomers. Read in relation to each other, both texts gesture towards a future when a social ethic that seriously takes up the debts of the past can be put into practice.
In Disappearing Moon Cafe, this future stems from one of its central metaphors, that “in the end, entire
lives are nothing but stories.” As the novel comes to an end, Kae realizes that she is the “resolution” to her family’s vexed history. Liberating herself from the repetition of the past, she “give[s] this story some sense of purpose” (248). Embracing this future involves major decisions: she turns down a job at a think-tank and its promise of a successful career to become a “poor but pure writer” (255) and decides to take her newborn baby to Hong Kong and join her lesbian lover Hermia. If fiction is meant to convince us that characters like Kae are “real”—that they somehow have a plausible existence outside the confines of a text—then this ending creates the illusion that Kae’s life will somehow continue long after we have stopped reading. The novel withholds this future but it still exists, at least in theory, simply because time itself continues. Anchored in the historical past, Disappearing Moon Cafe posits a future in which its characters will break out of binds that have been in existence for generations. The novel plays with these expectations by constantly reminding us that if fiction is meant to imitate life, then the reverse might be true as well. As Hermia tells Kae via telegram, they will finally live “HAPPILY EVER AFTER” (256).
The re-publication of Disappearing Moon Cafe brings this novel into our present in a material and tangible way, into a present that is also, despite many divergences, a version of the future that it was trying to imagine. As I have suggested, Disappearing Moon Cafe needs to be read “with the times,” which means that it is neither stationary nor static: instead, it signifies differently with the passing of time, and with each new reader. Our readings and re-readings will ensure that it continues to have a transformative impact on contemporary culture and politics in Canada and elsewhere. For a novel that is simultaneously about haunting, history, the unfolding present, and alternate futures, its re-publication may turn out to inaugurate its latest chapter yet.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The insights of my students at UBC have shaped this Afterword in numerous ways; special thanks to Alyssa Sy de Jesus for allowing me to quote from her assignment. I would like to thank Smaro Kamboureli for inviting me to write this Afterword and for her careful editorial guidance, as well as Margery Fee for a timely conversation that helped me focus my reflections. Finally, I am grateful to SKY Lee for the gift of a novel that continues to infuriate, move, and inspire this reader.
WORKS CITED
Chow, Rey. The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Columbia UP, 2002.
Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997.
Kamboureli, Smaro. Scandalous Bodies: Diasporic Literature in English Canada. Toronto: Oxford UP, 2000; Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2007.
Lai, Larissa. “Epistemologies of Respect: A Poetics of Asian/ Indigenous Relation.” Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies.
Eds. Smaro Kamboureli and Christl Verduyn.
Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2014. 99–126.
Lee, Jo-Anne. “Gender, Ethnicity, and Hybrid Forms of Community-Based Urban Activism in Vancouver, 1957–1978: The Strathcona Story Revisited.”
Gender, Place and Culture 14.4 (2007): 381–407.
Lee, SKY. “Disappearing Moon Cafe and the Cultural Politics of Writing in Canada.” Millennium Messages.
Eds. Kenda D. Gee and Wei Wong. Edmonton: Asian Canadian Writers Workshop of Edmonton, 1997. 10–13.
____. “‘Is there a mind without media any more?’ Interview with C. Allyson Lee.” The Other Woman: Women of Colour in Contemporary Literature.
Ed. Makeda Silvera. Toronto: Sister Vision, 1995. 381–403.
____. “Sharon Lee.” Jin Guo: Voices of Chinese Canadian Women. Eds. The Women’s Book Committee, Chinese Canadian National Council. Toronto: Women’s P, 1992. 91–98.
Lee, SKY, Lee Maracle, Daphne Marlatt, and Betsy Warland, eds. Telling It: Women and Language Across Cultures.
Vancouver: Press Gang, 1990.
“Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: Calls to Action.” http://www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/File/2015/Findings/Calls_to_Action_English2.pdf.
Wai, Hayne. Vancouver Chinatown 1960–1980:
A Community Perspective. Seattle: Canadian Studies Center, Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, U of Washington, 1998.
Wong, Rita. “Decolonizasian: Reading Asian and First Nations Relations in Literature.” Canadian Literature 199 (2008): 158–80.
Tian xia wei gong:
ALL UNDER THE HEAVENS BELONGS TO ALL
SMARO KAMBOURELI IN DIALOGUE WITH SKY LEE
SMARO KAMBOURELI : When Disappearing Moon Cafe first came out, it broke new ground in many ways. It was the first contemporary Chinese Canadian novel, a novel that challenged the politics of representation about race relations, that made visible what Canadian history of immigration and labour had rendered invisible. It was also a feminist novel that turned a compassionate gaze onto the passions, strengths and sins of its female characters as they negotiated their ties to patriarchal control. And it was, too, a narrative that portrayed Chinese culture in Canada by offering an intimate portrait of different generations of a family that tried to cope under racial oppression. Finally, it was also a story that recast the script about First Contact by inscribing Indigeneity into the immigrant experience, and vice versa. These are only some of the reasons that have made the novel a classic. I would like us to unpack some of these story elements. Let me start by asking you how you read your novel at this point in time.
SKY LEE : The novel is at heart a social form. No matter how socially isolated a writer may feel, she can expect that the reader will be able to see right through her and her story. DMC basically articulates my personal experience of historical oppression as a young Chinese woman. At the time I was keen to address the particular forms of sexism and racism that had accumulated in Canada in the 1980s and ’90s. Nowadays I despair over the dearth of progress in eliminating the social imbalance that I experienced in my day. In fact, if seen in terms of our times’ beyond-the-pale capitalistic greed, then I suspect the social divide that young folk face today is far worse. In sum, the writing of the book quickly adjusted itself into a consideration of how I saw myself. It became my response to social injustice. Moreover, it began to draw, for my own benefit, upon the experiences of young people from past generations as well as my own.
SK: That little has changed, at least in some respects, with regard to such systemic issues makes DMC all the more relevant today. Can you talk about what it was like growing up as a young Chinese Canadian woman in the 1950s and 1960s?
SL: I was lucky in so many ways. Growing up in the ’50s and ’60s, I was part of the first wave of what I call “mass educated” Canadian women. I was a child of the public library. No matter how poor or down and out I was, there was that public space of knowledge and learning, one of the most essential bastions of democracy. Nowadays so much of our public space has been eroded. Public education has become less accessible and more of a big-ticketed hurdle in order to get at a corporate-sponsored job. And then even that avenue has narrowed considerably. Nonetheless, it was at the University of British Columbia in the early ’70s when I began to appreciate the full particulars of my rural mill town upbringing surrounded by wilderness.
SK: What was it like growing up in Port Alberni?
SL: One can opine that as a child I was both neglected and had a lot of freedom to wander wherever. I walked to a nearby farm to buy eggs for my family. I went to see my friend Aileen at the “Indian reservation.” I often walked home alone along the railroad in pitch darkness, once followed by the snuffles and footsteps of an unseen creature, perhaps a wild dog or somebody’s dog. Had it been a cougar, I would have never realized it. All the fathers worked at the sawmill or plywood plant or pulp mill. My mother still cooked on a wood stove. We still had what were called chimney fires. My mother taught me to bake the bread for the nine of us in my family. We didn’t even have
a TV. Although it was a solitary existence, in many ways it gave me a lot of opportunity to read and draw and daydream. I was actually sorry when my parents sagaciously moved my teenaged siblings and me out to Vancouver for better opportunities and education.
SK: We see this shift in the women’s lives in the novel, with the third and fourth generations of the female characters who move beyond their households’ domains. Perhaps it’s not just a coincidence that Kae, the novel’s first-person narrator, meets Hermia, her life-long friend, while at school in Asia. I’ll come back to these important characters, but first I’m curious about the origins of the story. I remember you referring to the story as a barbershop tale. Such tales are common in many immigrant communities, stories shared primarily among first-generation immigrants. What was the barbershop tale culture like for the Chinese in Canada?
SL: Embedded in the story of DMC is a small barbershop tale. One can easily imagine the young Chinatown bachelors of a bygone era, gathering anywhere they could to make the best of a gloomy existence as Gold Mountain sojourners. One humble way of coming in from the cold was to take a bench in a barbershop warmed by an upright wood stove. And therein was the chance to shoot off one’s mouth, knowing that someone would care to listen, for a little while at least. After all, the barbershop tale, like the novel, is just another social form. And when I say “social form” I wonder if I also mean “social formula.”
