In 1995 Wayson Choy received a mysterious telephone call from a woman named Hazel, telling him that she had seen his real mother. As it turned out, the woman on the streetcar was not Wayson's mother. But Hazel was right about one thing: he had, in fact, been adopted. Inspired by this startling revelation, Paper Shadows is a vivid and moving memoir of Wayson's Choy's childhood in Vancouver's old Chinatown. From his early experiences with ghosts, to his discovery later in life of deeply held family secrets that crossed the ocean from mainland China to the Gold Mountain of Vancouver in the form of paper shadows, this is a beautifully wrought portrait of a child's world.
'The man writes like an angel, as he proves in Paper Shadows, a spiritual follow-up to his award-winning novel The Jade Peony.'
Now
'In the era of the talk-show memoir, in which telling it all passes for telling it well, Paper Shadows stands out as a thoughtful, luminous and very finely crafted work.'
The Globe and Mail
