67. China Dog and Other Stories by Judy Fong Bates (Fiction, Short Story Collection) 173 p.

World Lit Challenge: Canada

I read a recommendation for her novel, Midnight at the Dragon Café, but the hardcover copy I found at the used bookstore was a little pricey. Since I love short story collections, I decided to try this and see if I liked her writing before reading her novel. As it turns out, I like her writing very much. The collection as a whole is excellent. Judy Fong Bates uses very simple, direct prose, which I enjoyed very much. The stories are all narrated in the first person or from an intimate third person limited point of view, and the protagonists and narrators are almost all women.

All the stories are focused on the experiences of Chinese immigrants to Ontario in the mid- to late-twentieth century. The author herself came to Canada when she was a young girl, and grew up in various small towns in Ontario, which I suspect are the ones featured in the story. She is clearly writing what she knows, and doing it with immense skill. As Bates has pointed out, there was a time when every small town in Ontario had two things: a Chinese laundry and a Chinese restaurant.

The book opens with “My Sister’s Love”, which is one of the two weak stories in the collection. It started off well, but felt too short, incomplete, with a message that was too obvious and predictable. Following it is “The Gold Mountain Coat”, a funny and charming picture of two brothers through the eyes of a young girl.

The third story in the collection is “Eat Bitter”, a sad story about a young man longing to leave Canada and return to China. Although grateful to his uncle for giving him the chance to come to Gam Sun, the Gold Mountain, he is unhappy with the laundry business and the racism of small-town Ontario. And with the Canadian climate:

Back in China, he had listened in disbelief to stories about the frigid temperatures in Canada. He laughed when he heard about men losing their ears and fingers after they were frozen. He had pictured them falling cleanly off, making a clink as they hit the ground! Every time he stepped out of the laundry he was shocked by the biting winter air. Even though he felt it every day, this Canadian winter would always be a mystery to him. They would never be on familiar terms.

In “Cold Food”, my favourite of the bunch, a old woman longs for independence after many years of forced reliance on her husband, her stepson, and finally her daughter. It’s an exceptionally vivid depiction of the cultural as well as generational differences which can arise between immigrant parents and the children they raise in a new country, and gives insight into the isolation of women living in communities with only one or two other Chinese families.

“The Lucky Wedding” is the story of a young woman who elopes with her white boyfriend, and of the differences between those Chinese-Canadians born in Canada and those who immigrated from China. “The Good Luck Cafe” is the second weak story in the collection. Like the first story, it starts out strong but finishes with a rushed and slightly pointless ending. In it, the arrival of a young mail-order bride leads to strife between two brothers.

“The Ghost Wife” relates some of the fears felt by mothers, particularly that a daughter might marry a white man, and bring up her children without knowledge of Chinese language and culture, and without being able to communicate with their grandparents. The collection ends on strong note with “China Dog”, the sad story of a young wife and mother who becomes convinced that a curse of her husband’s family will have disastrous consequences for her husband.

Aside from some smooth, solidly good storytelling, I particularly enjoyed recognizing many of the details of life in Ontario scattered throughout the collection. The Canadian weather, the bus stop outside a store rather than a station in small towns, Toronto’s Chinatown, Timothy Eaton United Church, the five Christian denominations in every small town…they make up a picture I recognize, and make the things I don’t know about seem that much more real.

I can’t wait to read her novel.

Books read: 67/100 (67%)
Pages read: 19,825/25,000 (79%)
Days passed: 203/365 (56%)

Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2007, Judy Fong Bates, World Lit Challenge