Dreams are made and shattered for young lovers in Scarborough
Leung’s second novel focuses on immigrants with searing portraits
Novelist Carrianne Leung’s debut, The Wondrous Woo, sketched a grieving Scarborough family touched by magic and Kung Fu movies. Returning to the suburbs with her second book, Leung’s title could refer to the “you” of first love or, just as easily, to the landscape where dreams are both made and shattered. It’s ambiguous.
Eleven-year-old June, the only child in a family from Hong Kong, begins her tale in 1979, the “year the parents in my neighbourhood began killing themselves.” Her world, a geometric assortment of streets populated with a variety of races as well as what June calls “whites,” is rocked by death: a “mean” softball coach blows his brains out; a woman from Portugal drinks bleach in her garage; a young wife hangs herself. These events are not only regarded as sad, but also as betrayals of the suburban dream: the promise of “brand new” houses and brand-new lives, far from cramped cities.
June’s working mother, a fan of English idioms, answers her daughter’s questions about what’s happened with, “There’s more than meets the eye.” (She’s also fond of “Que sera, sera,” from the Doris Day movie The Man Who Knew Too Much.) Leung then switches to things June couldn’t know, the thoughts of the soon-to-be dead and those teetering between destruction and survival.
Among the wrenching scenes that follow, like linked stories, we meet Mrs. da Silva, helplessly listening as her Portu- guese-speaking garden plants urge her toward death. Afterward, her son George takes her place, sitting in the garage in all seasons, as if waiting for his mother to return.
Leung’s portraits of isolation speak so poignantly of the lives hidden behind freshly laundered clothes and Lemon Pledge-scented rooms that it’s jarring when the pubescent June retakes the narrative reins. Still, it’s more than worth it to meet Poh Poh, June’s sharp-eyed, sympathetic grandmother.
Moreover, this observant child remains our guide, both to her neighbourhood’s sometimes treacherous streets and to the evanescent beauty of a world she loves and knows she will leave: “the lights flickering on as night fell slowly to the street … all of them waving back at me like shadows, as I turned away.” Nancy Wigston is a freelance writer and critic in Toronto.