All That Matters
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4.5 • 6 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Set in Vancouver's Chinatown in the 1930s and 1940s, Choy continues the story of the Chen family household, this time narrated by First Son, Kiam-Kim. We first meet Kiam-Kim at the age of eight, staring at the yellowed photograph of his mother, who died in China when he was just a baby. Kiam-Kim, Poh-Poh (his larger-than-life grandmother) and Mr. Chen, his demure and honest father, journey to a new life in Vancouver's Old Chinatown. Following the dream of finding gold and then one day returning to China -- wealthy -- they, like many Chinese families around them, find themselves in a country on the brink of the Second World War, struggling to survive in a foreign land and keep alive the traditions of an older world.
Finely crafted, and rich in historical detail, All That Matters depicts 1930s Vancouver in the haunting hues of memory, and sees in the Chen family a fragile miniature of a larger world. Dwelling on Kiam-Kim's sense of responsibility to his community, Choy unfolds the Chen family's secrets in thoughtful and luminous prose, leading the reader to a breathtaking conclusion that far transcends the limits of its time and place, and gestures towards all humanity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Choy's lovingly detailed novel (following The Jade Peony and the memoir Paper Shadows), three-year-old Kiam-Kim Chen journeys from China to Vancouver in 1925 with his father and his grandmother, Poh-Poh (a former Chinese slave girl). As he matures, he gains a stepmother, an adopted brother and two stepsiblings. Poh-Poh's unsettling stories of kitchen gods and ghosts provide vivid reminders of the Old China the family left behind. Set pieces form the novel's core, like Poh-Poh's elaborate preparations for her mah-jongg party when Kiam is eight. That's when he first encounters Jenny Chong, a "tiger" girl with a fierce temper (and, eventually, the good looks to match it). When Poh-Poh dies, Old China's ghosts really do come back at least the ghost of Poh-Poh (who haunts Kiam's stepbrother, Sekky, so intensely that Kiam's embarrassed father hires an exorcist). As Kiam grows up, the relationship among Kiam, Jenny and Jack O'Connor, the Irish-Catholic boy next door (whom Poh-Poh had barred from their house) gets tangled in the complexities of WWII and the ethnic politics of the neighborhood. Choy's novel captures the spirit in which exile turns into assimilation.
