Disappearing Moon Cafe

by Sky Lee

  SK: This certainly makes sense; after all children are a novelistic convention often employed to gesture toward the future. But I must be honest with you. I’ve never thought of her son in these terms. For me, it’s always been the double fact that she leaves her husband and Canada to go to Hermia and Hong Kong that signals a different trajectory, a scenario that possibly distances her from her foremothers—and thus invites a recalibration of her familial ties—and from Chinatown and brings her (back?) to Hong Kong, a colonial site and one of global trade and all that this entails. This may be a digression, but I’ve always wondered about Kae leaving her husband behind and why Henry remains such a peripheral, almost invisible, character. Beyond fathering a son, his character seems to be inconsequential. His relative absence has always intrigued me. Does this relate to the kind of feminist Kae is?

  SL: Hmm, I don’t see Henry’s role like that at all. And Kae doesn’t leave him except to visit Hong Kong. And I hope that Kae’s marriage to him was described well enough for the purposes of the novel. Henry’s cameo appearance comes soon after the arrival of their newborn when he makes his way back to work, which pretty much sums up the gold standard of husbands whose masculinity is often interpreted by their fiscal worth as family providers. He asks Kae if she might need help being the trophy “wifey” and perfect mommy. And of course she does because it is a demanding role that is impossible to fulfill, but she defensively cuts him off as a source of help—and please note as well that he does not offer himself as such—and turns to the women in her own family that were already waiting and ready for her distress call. Perhaps marriage has always been less about the husband and more about the suburban nesting site and baby accouterment.

  SK: I see what you mean about what you call his “cameo” appearance. But it’s his eventual disappearance in the story that I find intriguing. The scene that you’ve just referred to is the only time he’s mentioned in the novel, but there are other, different kinds of marriage and male/female relationships portrayed in DMC.

  SL: I simply portrayed several marriages, whether conventional or unconventional, as examples of how human relationships must situate themselves within their social cultural historical context. For instance, I remember that in the late 1980s (when protagonist Kae was in her mid 30s or prime of life) there were references to the ideal marriage as “power couples” or “dinks” (double income no kids) that described the sort of ambitious partnership necessary to sustain the materialistic lifestyle at the time with the sedate homes and holidays abroad, a far cry from the marriages of our foremothers. Suffice it to say, marriage has always shifted, for better or worse, into myriad and alternate forms according to economic and social vicissitudes. Perhaps it’s got to do with the kind of post-feminist that I am, but I as writer just assumed that readers would take for granted that Kae would very likely take her prerogatives as a modern woman, whether in a relationship or not, to pursue an artistic career with all the plenitude and potential to land her in Kansas like Dorothy—no or all secret-coded pun intended—or Hong Kong or wherever she might meet up with a passionate friend to share her creative yearnings. Or the Wizard of Oz for that fictive matter! So I am a little perplexed by your interpretation. To me it’s akin to questioning why couples have two cars nowadays: so that she can go her own way whenever she chooses of course. And remember, she probably came with her own vehicle ever to begin with.

  SK: I don’t think we’re disagreeing actually. My comment about Henry wasn’t meant to question or undermine Kae’s choices. Of course she should pursue her artistic aspirations and explore different options, go places. What piques my interest about Henry is that we learn so much about virtually all the characters—minor and major—but know so little about him. He’s after all the narrator’s husband! But let’s get back to Kelora, if you don’t mind, a character that haunts the novel through her absence and silencing, qualities and conditions that ironically further reinforce her seminal role in the novel. She’s the character who guides Gwei Chang, who shows him how to read the landscape and thus fulfill his mission, finding the bones of the Chinese labourers so that they can be taken home and given an honourable burial. It’s his encounter with an Indigenous woman that makes all this possible, an Indigenous woman who is, nevertheless, mixed-raced. But unlike Ting An and his son Morgan, whose mixed race marginalizes them, Kelora’s mixed-race is fully accepted by her Shi’atko clan. What’s more, they bless her union with Gwei Chang.

  SL: Kelora was just an ordinary girl doing what she was meant to do when she happened upon a stray boy who was completely out of his element. She ultimately became the soul of the book because of her tragic role in the family saga. Her ghostly figure frames the novel; in her First Nations way—and by extension all our native roots—she represents something long lost in our original humanity, or perhaps something recently gained in our trauma survivorship. To me, she’s a bit of a Zen icon that reminds me to practice my mindfulness. It’s like the tree that I once bumped into. It was living on the roadside since time eternal, seemingly not doing a heck of a lot except offering up its excellent greenery to the world when I, in all my hectic clutter, ran my car into it, then blamed it for getting in my way. I even considered cutting it down for what I thought was sensible reasons but, instead, I’m happy to report that I changed my attitude.

  SK: An affective metaphor—the tree compelling you to see with fresh eyes, to take notice of what has always been there but rendered invisible. An encounter that forces you to acknowledge both the tree and your own mindfulness—or lack of.

  SL: I don’t mean to romanticize, mythologize or anthropomorphize it, but I do often use the tree metaphor to remind myself to pay attention to my own human nature that is especially contrary to itself. Admittedly, for the fictional character of Kelora, I cannot resist romanticizing her, perhaps in part as the emotional intelligence of humans that is able to resist the persistent ravages of our own imperial delirium on our home and planet. As you suggested, there’s been a lot that has been said about Kelora. With her aura of mystical union with nature, she is seen as indigenous or mixed-race of some sort or other. Some folk saw her racial heritage as key to the story, and as such kept calling my attention to the confusion as to whether Kelora was Chen Kwok Fai’s biological offspring or the dying white man’s. At the time I based my vague manner of settling her patrilineage on two cultural factors. First of all, her own people had a time-honored system of matrilineage. Secondly, I made Chen Kwok Fai refer to being Kelora’s father in the same way that any old self-effacing Chinese laborer might refer to this—as if he was merely a third person to it all. At least this is the long-suffering way my own dad often spoke with his cohorts. Nowadays I see I can add a third reason for the subliminal, if you will, slip-up. I felt Kelora got a lot of love and acceptance by her Chinese father and her First Nations people and that was not only enough but also exemplary in terms of what you referred to earlier—bloodline, filiation and affiliation—what was basically her humanity.

  SK: Yes, the way her family accepts Gwei Chang, a complete stranger to them, is wonderful, truly exemplary, as you say. We learn a lot from their generosity of spirit. In fact, I think in some ways it’s their hospitality, their receptiveness, that plants the seed, as it were, for the family saga we read. And this is of course ironic when we see it in the colonial context, the settler society’s treatment of both Indigenous people and immigrants. But perhaps Gwei Chang is not exactly a complete outsider, is he? There is the connection he shares with Chen Kwok Fai, who has already been accepted—we could even say adopted—by Kelora’s people as her father, and the bones of the Chinese labourers buried in their land.

  SL: Lovely point to bring up. In DMC I imagined the Chinese railroad labourers’ encounters in a pure and pristine wilderness with its gentle inhabitants and their power to heal because the reality of desperate young Chinese men that starved, froze and slaved to death under the fallout of the white man’s greedy expansion through First Nations territories
was just too horrendous to leave be.

  SK: This is certainly one major aspect of history that DMC invites us to re-visit. But there is another related issue that the novel raises, namely, why Gwei Chang leaves Kelora. In a flashback at the end of the novel, he recalls that one thing Kelora and he have in common is famine. His realization comes immediately after she tells him that, despite all the salmon her people have harvested, they might still face “famine later in the winter.” It’s the word “famine” that makes him “recoil” (277) from her because it brings up memories of his own hunger, what brought him to the Gold Mountain in the first place. But it’s also his sense of filial duty that takes him away from her because he’s just received a letter from his mother asking him to go home. Duty versus love. Kae’s casting of Gwei Chang’s look at the past surely complicates things. What are the forces that are competing with each other at this moment of Gwei Chang’s reckoning?

  SL: In fact I tend to see Gwei Chang as he “began his trek back home to Kelora” (21). Try as hard as he did, it’s apparent that he did not make it but got very lost in the trees, as they say. The details you mentioned are just incidental to the waxing and waning of any fiery love (or life) story. Yes, I leave a lot unexplained, but then I prefer to leave it out there in the universe. It will come to DMC’s readers as it will—a bit like the Polynesian seafarers of yore when they did not think that they had come upon an island but that the island had come to them. Such was their way of being with oceanic confluence, convergence, and conveyance that who can say otherwise? But I will say this. The First Nations folk and their lands have suffered at the hands of imperialism. Even though Gwei Chang thought their ancient ways were strong, and as powerful as they were for healing him, so much of that, including Kelora herself, was not able to survive a militant assault upon it. But, in fact, the flow continues, and it’s by no means the end of the First Nations’ story.

  SK: Kae can speak through her Chinese foremothers’ voices—Fong Mei’s, Mui Lan’s—but when it comes to her Indigenous great-grandmother, she renders her alive, albeit in a haunting way, only through male memory—Gwei Chang’s and Ting An’s memories.

  SL: Oh, but the ghostly one is the most powerful voice of all. There was a way that I as a young creator hardly dared speak for it at the time. No, it had to be from Gwei Chang’s perspective of life-long yearning and guilt, echoed in train by Ting An’s heart-rending intensity around his abandonment and rejection. I remember how Ting An dearly held it together, held it together in the most tenuous of ways, until the torrential flood of it exploded over his long-lost father. In this way, Ting An broke Gwei Chang. Could it have been out of spite on Ting An’s part? (There is indication of this in the book.) Or was Gwei Chang was already emotionally exhausted and inaccessible to his son? Regardless, this volatile subject matter continued onto the next generation, Morgan and so on, down the family tree to the destruction of the ultimate Wong heir. The death of Suzie’s unprotected baby still brings tears to my eyes because I used to be an obstetric Registered Nurse and as such I saw a lot.

  SK: Volatile for sure, but also highly ambivalent, as you suggest. There is no single way of fully understanding what motivates some of the characters, and this is one of the things that I love about the novel. There is always some new interpretation that suggests itself every time I teach it. Mui Lan may be the most transparent of the characters, as far as her motivations are concerned, but she too is marked by a complexity that resists facile interpretation; after all, she lives in the shadow of Kelora’s presence and spirit, unbeknownst to her. Ting An is certainly the character around whom the most complex narrative thread of the story pivots—a figure both loved and rejected.

  SL: Wong Ting An tackled a whole different world from the one of his mother. And I don’t think that it was his mixed race that marginalized him. Although a lot was left unsaid, Gwei Chang and Chinatown as a whole embraced him in their own way, rough and gruff and without women as it was. Moreover, Ting An made a passionate choice to broaden his horizons and straddle the many cultural worlds that he encountered. So what happened? I think that his story—and let’s go out on a limb by calling it a love story even if it was somewhat spectacularly vampirized by Fong Mei —would be an interesting one to pursue. We know he becomes a successful businessman, which is a long way from his grandfather’s rustic cabin and his First Nations roots with the mother he barely knew.

  SK: Ting An moves within the bachelor society of men without women, in and out of what is his father’s household, yet a household to which he doesn’t belong, and he, like his father before him, reaches out, beyond his Chinese community, and marries a French Canadian woman. She—sorry but can’t remember her name now—is someone who stands for, at least in the larger historical context of the novel, the other settler society in Canada, the one that has long felt losing out, under threat of extinction.

  SL: I did not give Morgan’s mother a name. I suppose the reason might have been because it did not directly pertain to the novel that I wanted to write or, more to the point, finish writing. Another reason was that at the time there seemed to be a lot of radical ideas, i.e., feminist and French Canadian, about separatism as a more direct way for a group to develop. I wanted to singularly focus on Chinese Canadians, perhaps because there were hardly any books on the subject matter at the time. I think it was Lorraine Hansberry who said something like “the only stories we have are about how rich white folk are.”

  SK: This is so true, and certainly Hansberry knew this firsthand. Until books like DMC started appearing in Canada, the only stories around, or those stories that mattered, were those told by settler society. That Morgan’s mother is both white and Quebecoise, not to mention that she remains nameless, contributes to his character’s role. I tend to think of Morgan as a character who embodies what cannot be contained or accepted by either the Chinese community, his relatives in particular, or the Canadian mainstream society. He is rendered marginal by both sides. Precisely because he is a direct descendent of Kelora, I think he disturbs both sides’ notions of what constitutes their respective imagined communities.

  SL: I don’t agree with this assessment. I feel that it is his untamable spirit that makes him all the more attractive and dangerous to both Suzie and Kae. After what happens to Suzie, Beatrice and Keeman are especially terrified of him. And for sure there is a way that Beatrice and Keeman represent that staid generation of Chinatown’s home guard. It is likely that Morgan may have been rejected out of hand for his un-Chinese-like features and behaviour, not the least of which is the way he rejects himself as Chinese. Morgan’s story is just one more generation removed but already it seems like the conditions of his survival have accelerated. Morgan is young and rebellious, and easily fragmented in the hostile face of an increasingly complex and strange world. Being mixed-heritage with a white mother, he has even more collisions in his struggle for social justice than his father. The reader easily overlooks Morgan as the academic that searches back to the historical ramifications of the Janet Smith murder. (He may be a fictional character, but he could have been a Chinatown activist peer of mine.) And so he proves himself a ferocious, if somewhat awkward, fighter for his political integrity and personal naiveté. At different stages in his life, he introduces both Suzie and Kae to his ongoing struggles.

  SK: This is exactly what makes him such a fascinating character; he’s a threshold figure, which increases his appeal, the desire he inspires to cross boundaries, as both Suzie and later on Kae do. There’s still so much to talk about, but we’ve reached the end of our interview space. I want to thank you for your time. Above all, I want to thank you for agreeing to have DMC reprinted. So let’s end our dialogue with one final question, this time not about the novel. I would like to hear you talk about where you’re at as a writer now, what you’re reading these days, what kinds of issues excite your writer’s imagination.

  SL: Yay, love that finish line, eh! This Q&A has been my pleasure and I really appreciate your devoti
on and insights into our project. I am such an amateur writer, eclectic reader, and eccentric recluse. The three go hand in hand for me. Unlike professional writers, I seem to have an allergy to making money with my art. As a consequence, for better or worse, I have had to accommodate other ways to keep body and soul together. On the other hand, my art may have been freed to a certain extent. And I was perhaps able to take the time to distill a lot of what I saw in life into some pretty quintessential ideas that, in turn, have always guided me through many fickle fluctuations in my life’s journey. In other words, I took aim to lose the bullshit and get to as much of the human truth (such as it is, it is all that we have) as I could muster, in the hopes that I might not, in the words of the late great Audre Lorde, “die stupid.” I guess with my start as a visual artist, I basically continue to search in my writing for what I dub my dream-girl or woman with a vision. I’m hoping she has a healthy smattering of curiosity as opposed to a focus on her own vanities. Today as a post-feminist—

  SK: Wait a moment! It’s the second time you refer to yourself as a post-feminist. What does post-feminist mean for you?

  SL: Ha, as a “teach,” you’re not going to let me get away with anything! I guess I mean that my path remains the same, except what used to be the ceiling to my position somehow blew away and let in all sorts of weather—or possibilities—for multipositions. Put another way, whatever feminism means, for sure it is at heart something that I’d love to keep investigating as it continues to develop for, and deviate from, me.