Edited by R. David Stephens,
Henry Chow and Other Stories
Tradewind Books, 2010.

Ages: 13 +

Henry Chow and Other Stories is a collection of writing for young adults by Asian Canadian writers.  The work of thirteen writers (some new and emerging, others veteran), appear here for the first time.  Among the veterans is Paul Yee with his ghost story “The Dark Room” about a photographer working in a Chinatown studio in the 1920s.  A young wife and her son come in to have their photographs taken to send back to the wife’s father-in-law.  She makes a rather strange request, one that is truly haunting to the photographer, who apparently doesn’t or didn’t believe in ghosts.  Another tale of ghostly dimensions is Marty Chan’s “Driven” about a driving lesson gone awry. 

Alongside these tales, are some great stories about adolescent women, such as Fiona Tinwei Lam’s “Air”, about a young woman whose sexual awareness and coming-of-age is shaped by her mother’s fear from past experiences in China with Japanese soldiers.  In Evelyn Lau’s “Working the Corner,” a teenage runaway makes a decision to become a prostitute with a growing awareness of its dangerous consequences.  “Beached” by Hanako Masutani describes a young Asian woman’s frustration with her white girlfriend as they compete for a boy’s affections. 

Overall, the stories in Henry Chow have been well chosen, reflecting a diversity of experiences.  The stories are set in different time periods and such far-off geographical locations from Canada as Jamaica (Tony Wong’s “Mr. Chin”) and Calcutta (Kwai Yun-Li’s “The Handwriting Expert”), giving the reader a taste of the wider context from which this cultural group – Asian Canadians – is drawn. Publisher Michael Katz at Tradewind consulted with writers from the Asian Canadian Writers Workshop in Vancouver (they produce the literary journal ricepaper) to create this anthology.  It offers but a small taste of what is out there in terms of writing by contemporary Asian Canadian writers and hopefully such a taste will whet readers’ appetites for more. 

Sally Ito
June 2010