EXPLORING THE AMBIGUITIES OF RACE AND CLASS WITH TACT AND GRACE
Award-winning Canadian author Susan Crean grew up in an upwardly mobile Irish family in Toronto. One of the markers of her grandfather’s social climb was the fact that he could employ a Chinese servant, Mr. Wong, who worked for the Creans from 1928 until 1965.
“I grew up in Mr. Wong ’s kitchen,” Susan Crean says early on in this elegantly written and fiercely felt account of a love that crossed the boundaries of race and class, but could not make them disappear.
In lyrical prose, Crean remembers learning to cook from Mr. Wong, learning important moral lessons and enjoying the many delights he brought into her life, from an annual fireworks show to long, affectionate conversations in the kitchen. One strand in this well-woven book is made up of Crean’s memories of childhood in Mr. Wong ’s kitchen and of the faithful cook’s complex and affectionate relationships with her grandfather and grandmother.
Another strand records the author’s attempts to “find” Mr. Wong in her own and her family’s memories, and her research into oral history and primary sources to understand the lives of Chinese workers who came to Canada despite the many racist barriers erected against them in the land they called Gold Mountain.
Yet another strand in the account records her travels to China and Ireland to visit the home villages of Mr. Wong and her grandfather, Gordon Crean, in search of further insights into these two men and the puzzle of their relationship.
The memory portrait of a beloved servant is always a project fraught with dangers of sentimentality and mystification. Too often, the white author turns the tale of the racialized servants into hagiography or Hallmark sentiment, blurring entirely the brutal realities of race and class that undergird and hedge in such relationships. (The recent bestseller The Help is a painful example of this essentially meretricious phenomenon.)
Crean is exquisitely aware of these narrative dangers, and she is remarkably successful both in delineating them and avoiding them in this exemplary memoir.
Workers like Mr. Wong helped build Canada and they are far too often lost to history. Crean’s eloquent and thoughtful memoir rescues some of that lost history, and is a must read for anyone who cares about Canada’s history and its still-problematic racial present. Mr. Wong taught her the importance of truth-telling, and this book is a lovely homage to that teaching.