Disappearing Moon Cafe

by Sky Lee

  SK: Social formula perhaps in terms of the kinds of stories told and how they are told, their orality and the immediacy of the telling act, but also in the sense that this kind of storytelling and story sharing functions like a glue, creating a cohesiveness in the face of social isolation, mediating the longing for the familiar and the familial that often become eroded in immigrant communities.

  SL: In the venue of the barbershop, I discovered that social isolation does not necessarily mean that one is alone. On the contrary, there are small barbershop gangs of us everywhere that are busily exchanging ideas in our own creative ways because we are fundamentally curious about our human world that is so full of vanity and conceit. Inside my own barbershop was a photographer-poet-postman named Jim Wong-Chu who sidled up to me to say that he had a woman’s story for me. I was the “token” feminist of a newly founded, mostly male, group of young Asian Canadian writers, soon to imago into today’s Asian Canadian Writers Workshop and the Rice Paper collective.

  SK: So the story was given to you, a kind of gift. Perhaps this is one aspect of the genre of barbershop tales—passing it on, transplanting it, as it were.

  SL: It was more of a challenge for me as a young artist. Eventually the idea that Jim planted in front of Chinatown’s fresh produce markets became a part of the Canadian literary canon. Wow! Needless to say, Jimmy was a cunning social networker! How did he know that history has a mind of its own? Never mind that “herstory” is jam-packed with, oh, so many plots.

  SK: Herstory—Kae’s story, Kelora’s story, and the stories of Mui Lan and Fong Mei, not to mention all the other women in the novel, like Song Ang and Susie. Their stories are about shifting gender roles, female agency, migration. I would even say that they are about modernity and its ambivalences, especially when we think of modernity in the contexts of colonial and migrant relations, its putative promises of progress, and the resistances it generates.

  SL: Okay, let’s look at interpreting DMC as a much smaller part of a far larger historical momentum. We being human, with our constant shifts, whether personal or political or other (consider shape-shifting, for instance), are all about the confluence and convergence — even collision—of historical, cultural, and political forces. If so, did the characters in DMC have any sort of real say as they were swept along with the flow, so to speak? Many would argue that, yes, they did have a moral choice. Being human means we all have “free will” (read Sam Harris). I myself am not so sure but I certainly acknowledge that our belief in our human capacity to make choices pretty much forms the backbone of our code of ethics around good and evil, and shapes our self-absorbed notions of good and bad choices. In short, I see DMC as a first-time novelist’s study in all of the above: Mui Lan lived a lie so Fong Mei got sly. Suzie slipped away; Beatrice made to stay. Kae to tell the story, all that’s left of vainglory!

  SK: This is lovely—an abridged version of DMC in rhyme!

  SL: [Laughter] Of course in hindsight I wish I had been able to do it better at the time, but I did want to ask what if, in the messy flow of our human lives, we decided not to heap egocentric concerns of right or wrong, good and evil, onto ourselves and each other. It was a pretty big “what if.”

  SK: It remains a big “what if,” a “what if” that is at the heart of all metaphysical inquiry. And I think it relates somehow to the ways in which the various narrative threads in DMC get entangled with each other and unfold inside and outside Chinatown.

  SL: Then I would add here that DMC is an immigrant story of how the Chinese Canadian identity flows or blends into the cultural fabric of Canada. And to push this envelope a little further, I would ask the reader to deviate from the standardized story of how the nation was forged, and consider more of a mixed cultural legacy, which means following more than one story at the same time. More often than not, these multiple narratives vie with each other, make things more complicated and harder to make sense of, but ultimately they give rise to a more robust social entity with both the capacity and courage to formulate a more egalitarian future.

  SK: Absolutely—DMC was certainly a forerunner in this regard. There is an interesting irony in this, or perhaps it’s the opposite, a kind of symmetry: the sharing of stories in a Chinese barbershop versus the silencing of truths and stories and the secret plotting of events that take place at the Disappearing Moon Cafe restaurant, versus the construction of mis-truths in the dominant society. It’s all about right and wrong doings, albeit based on different motivations, about managing and containing difference, coming to terms with one’s sense of isolation, ultimately creating community.

  SL: As you suggest, there is a form of community cohesiveness—even entanglement—in the face of social isolation. The silencing of truth is at any rate another attempt at social oppression by the powers-that-be. Folk inevitably shove back in any chaotic way they are able. Barbershop talk seems idle and personal, but the personal is political and becomes the seed for social revolution and cultural revelation.

  SK: Indeed. Barbershop tales are oral stories, a form of gossip residing, as one critic put it, in the borderland of oral tales that are not always sanctioned as legitimate literature. Yet they may very well hold the seeds of truths that have been suppressed for all kinds of reasons. What about that barbershop tale compelled you to take it on and run with it?

  SL: The basic storyline was interesting to me for two reasons: it had the potential to reveal how women might negotiate their way through an almost omnipotent Chinese patriarchy, and it provided an opportunity to reveal some of the socio-cultural history of the Chinese in Canada.

  SK: Potential that was fully realized, I must say. What exactly was the crux of the barbershop story that you were told?

  SL: Jimmy’s storyline: after too many years of waiting for a grandbaby, an affluent Chinatown mother-in-law meddles in her son’s happy marriage by hiring another woman to become the surrogate mother for the precious progeny. Jimmy wanted to turn this tale full of twists and turns into a modern Chinese Canadian opera of sorts.

  SK: A desire for a male heir that backfires, and which leads to a multilayered plot. Perhaps this is the reason that the first thing the reader encounters in the novel, before the narrative begins, is a genealogical tree. Beyond the fact that the genealogy of the Wong family helps the reader navigate through the plot’s complexity, the family tree also works to dispel some cultural myths, including the Canadian paradigm of multiculturalism that situates diasporic communities outside settler narratives and at a distance from Indigenous culture.

  SL: The settler society! I remember hearing this term many decades ago at a gathering of The Kootenay School of Writing where it was explained to me that a white settler society has to garrison itself. It took me a long time to develop a better understanding of how it applied to me as a child of poor Chinese immigrants to Canada. Or why the settler narrative was such an important Canadian literary theme. Forgive me, but if, in the modern context, by dint of Eurocentric imperialism, being an insider has led to a tightly garrisoned narrative at heart, then being an outsider surely meant that I naturally got to be as eccentric as I pleased in the vast metaphorical wilderness of fiction.

  SK: This makes perfect sense to me. Eccentric in the double sense of the word: what resides outside the centre, what “the centre cannot hold” and thus rejects, but also what resists containment. The family tree, then, serves as a frame that contains both what is sanctioned and what is deemed to be excessive, scandalous, ex-centric.

  SL: Right, but I provided DMC with a genealogical tree because my editor at Douglas & McIntyre, the late Saeko Usukawa, required it as a matter of course. Now that I think of this, there was another reason too: we needed a family tree to show the way to Suzie Wong’s ill-fated baby, the last male of the Wong lineage. Saeko was the first person I met when I walked into the Makara Feminist Magazine Collective. As a graphic artist myself, I soon joined in all the fun. After Canada’s only national feminist magazine folded, Saeko went into the business
of book publishing. In effect, she discovered my novel. She also helped me with its shape and form.

  SK: The entire novel can be read as a story that sets out to explore genealogy as both a matter of filiation—direct lineage, biological inevitability, family relations—and affiliation—a matter of choice, the kind of relationality that works against exclusion, that exposes how colonized subjects are linked to imperial structures, that establishes connections between cultures. There is tension between these two narrative thrusts, a tension that is applied as much to the Wong family as to what the novel invites us to reconsider about the nation, the nation as a supposed cohesive unit.

  SL: I really enjoy hearing about what can be read into DMC. I can definitely see how the Wong Family can be seen as a microcosm of a larger social and political continuum. But more particularly, I focused on the evolution of the family saga with its shift in the women’s lives in the novel, as you put it, from young Kae Ying Woo’s perspective.

  SK: It’s interesting that you’ve just used the word “evolution.” Evolution suggests a particular kind of movement that in Western modernity is taken to be synonymous with progress, with linear continuity. This kind of movement, though, can be both threatening and desirable. What exactly do you have in mind when you talk about the evolution of the Wong family?

  SL: I mean evolution by whatever means each generation of Wong might avail itself in order to develop and diversify to whatever end. Even though we like to believe that this movement can be politely shaped or strictly contained by human hands, it’s more of an energetic form of pure unadulterated chaos—something that many no doubt dread. Nonetheless, chaos has all the potential and should be respected.

  SK: One of the things that seems to propel Kae’s telling is her anguish about her filiation—the mixed-up blood lines of the Wong family, what she calls “the whole messy truth about anything” (25).

  SL: Kae’s anguish may be more about the incest that often results in isolated or claustrophobic social settings, similar to those that might have doomed the Wong lineage. She is also irked by the unforgivable taint of an adulterous ancestress. But I also see her first-person narrative as her way of looking for, and at the end embracing, an alternative, more compassionate, way of relating to what might be considered shameful and illicit. And in the end, as wise woman Chi chides, what is truth anyways? Human truth, despite its good intentions, is at best incomplete and circumstantial, if not altogether flawed. I have my own favourite saying around it, “Truth lies where sympathies lie.”

  SK: Your mentioning of Seto Chi, Kae’s nanny and family confidante, reminds me of yet another interesting aspect of the novel that relates to mobility. Chi is not from south China where most of the Chinese migrants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came from, as is the case with the Wong family; she’s already part of the Chinese diaspora in South Asia before she finds her way to Canada.

  SL: Oh yes, and the really interesting thing about Chi is that she was cast away from her Chinese family and adopted by a Tamil family in Malaya—talk about social mobility.

  SK: And then we have Song Ang, a fascinating character who says very little but plays such an important role; Song Ang is Hakka.

  SL: She is. I must mention here that I recently went to a very well organized annual Hakka Conference in Toronto where the discussion turned ever so naturally to the historical and, hence by inference, future continuum of a specific filiation/affiliation of Chinese people. Therein I found Finding Samuel Lowe by Paula W. Madison, an interesting memoir of an American black woman from Harlem who very singularly found her Hakka roots.

  SK: Wasn’t this memoir based on a documentary film? I’ve seen the film. An extraordinary account of a family’s history in the Caribbean and eventually in the U.S., a family of mixed Chinese and black heritage.

  SL: Well, I read the book so tend to think the documentary film was based on the memoir. Okay, so my point is Madison’s story can be compared to Kae’s search for family in DMC and is related to your point, with one all-important caveat: the social oppression that resulted from colonialism and slavery in Madison’s book has had the long-term effect of amputating family roots and structure, leaving people to cope with the resulting global toxicity of isolation and alienation as they are able in their own vulnerable way. One can only imagine how Madison, armed with a romantic notion of her beautiful Chinese Jamaican mother and only limited information on how to proceed with her genealogy, negotiated the personal tensions of the wide divisions in her racial heritage.

  SK: I can certainly see the connections between Madison’s journey from Harlem via Jamaica to China and Kae’s own search in DMC. Her going to Hong Kong to be with, or perhaps just visit, Hermia proposes, perhaps, an alternative to bloodlines, but also to normative paradigms of marriage. Yet it’s certainly not a coincidence that the word “kinship” appears in the opening of the novel’s first chapter. In some respects the novel reveals that the traditional notion of kinship—the kind of “authenticity” that Kae desires (154)—is not so much about blood lineage but about recognizing one’s affiliations with others. And this of course also relates to Kelora, a pivotal character in the novel, as well as to how gender relations are constructed in particular cultures, and the patriarchal mindset in general.

  SL: Like Madison in reality, the fictive character of Kae inherits the task of finding and telling the elusive tale behind her family’s anguished history. But over all, I think her task has little to do with bloodline—despite the flippant way that I used the term in the novel—at least in terms of how bloodline is established and utilized often enough in imperial ways to denote elite entitlement or patriarchal purity. I believe the Euro-colonialist way of global expansionism—and I have in mind here your earlier point about modernity and colonialism—needed to racialize swathes of categorized others in order to dominate, enslave, and decimate them. But in the small ghettoized situation of DMC, one wonders about how the Chinese in particular would vet blood ties and/or birth right. As a reader of DMC I would say that they did so very differently. The Chinese mindset around patriarchal authority over the family is so deeply ingrained, it almost looms beyond the scope of my book about old overseas Chinese, both men and women, that are only too self-aware of themselves being as vulgar and far away from the party central notion of Chineseness as one can get. And yet the obligations of filial piety remain pretty much unshakeable. One can only imagine what it was like for the first generation to uproot and come to Canada. They had the miserable understanding that they were not able to survive at home and yet they had to live under the humiliation of racialized attacks in Canada. Under such difficult circumstances it’s small wonder that it took until Kae’s generation to finally make a point of “recognizing one’s affiliation with others,” as you so finely put it.

  SK: What you’ve just said about Euro-colonialist global expansionism is certainly inscribed in your novel, at least in terms of how I read it. There is a strong historical connection between the Chinese diaspora in relation to labour migration and British imperialism that underlies the narrative, especially when we consider the nineteenth-century circumstances that prompted the Chinese exodus from South China. I have in mind here the two Opium Wars and the rise of the kind of global trade the British practised that was synonymous with colonial domination in China and elsewhere, and which, of course, was linked to the gradual demise of the Atlantic slave trade. Many of the Chinese labourers at that time went to the Caribbean as indentured workers. From slavery to indentureship—trading one evil for another. I can see why you’ve found Madison’s book so relevant and evocative, beyond the Hakka connection.

  SL: Exactly, there is such a definite historical parallel between the two. In fact, I venture to say that the ongoing economic slavery and ecological destruction, although presented in a different light today, is still common ground for all of us to resist. In DMC I look at the Gold Mountain sojourners described as “derelict” and “orphan” mostly for their poignant s
tories of trauma survival against the same injustices.

  SK: We keep coming back to the persistent power of patriarchal values. Some of these values are embodied, for example, in Mui Lan’s character; she’s so keen to maintain her status and the Wong name in Vancouver’s Chinatown that she exercises her sense of entitlement in more harmful ways, at least at some level, than her husband does. But we also see the equally persistent Euro-values and racism. For example, there is that scene that takes place in 1924, when the Chinese men gather at the Disappearing Moon Cafe to decide how to deal with Janet Smith’s murder and the police force’s favourite suspect, Wong Foon Sing. They huddle “nervously . . . at the back” of the restaurant, their “memories . . . flickering back to the white mobs of 1907” (85). Such a tiny reference to the past but one that is very important because it draws attention to these men’s internalized trauma, their embodied knowledge that they remain racialized and thus vulnerable to racism.

  SL: And may I add that the supple tone of Kae’s herstory of the Wong family relies heavily on the aforementioned caveat: all individual responses to affiliation and authenticity may be evaluated under the historical filter of social oppression. And as such, forgiven but not forgotten! So, to get back to your point about Kae’s decision to go to Hermia, seen and admired as an ideal model for women of that generation, was not so much an escape from bloodline or untidy family affiliations. To begin with, Kae could be seen as somewhat pampered and affluent. She may have been sensitive to but had not suffered firsthand the anguish of social oppression until she met up with Morgan Keung Chi Wong, the cynical survivor of multiple past wrongs. Ultimately, I saw Kae’s flight to her beloved friend Hermia as symbolic of the esoteric journey that she had to make as a self-reflexive writer. She was very aware of becoming the success story hard-won from the bitter inurement of previous generations. In that sense she fully acknowledges the heavy responsibilities of family and cultural affiliation above and beyond the normal call of duty. Another reason for the trip was her wanting to show off her own little progeny, a representative of the hopeful future.