Books at Bedtime: The Mysteries of Marty Chan
Saturday, February 28th, 2009
My son’s introduction to mysteries was by way of Canadian writer Marty Chan. Beginning with The Mystery of the Frozen Brains followed by The Mystery of the Graffiti Ghoul and then finally with The Mystery of the Mad Science Teacher, my son has followed the erstwhile adventures of ten year old Marty in his French Canadian town in Alberta with great interest. Marty is the only Chinese kid in his prairie town. This makes him very self-aware. In Graffiti Ghoul, he says:
Being the only Chinese kid at school already made me stand out like a beach ball on a snow bank. My black hair and darker skin made me different from the rest of the kids, and my classmates teased me almost every day. They called me a math geek. They claimed I ate cats. They said Jackie Chan was my uncle. None of it was true, but that didn’t stop them from making nasty rumours about me.
One might chuckle now reading this, feeling Marty’s comments to be dated, but in fact, this kind of racial teasing was pretty common-place for many of my generation of Asians growing up in the predominantly white prairie provinces of Canada. One couldn’t help then but feel like an alien — an idea which Chan makes much of in the first of his series: The Mystery of the Frozen Brains. Marty feels so conspicuous in his town that he actually begins to believe that he might be a space alien. He and his new-found friend Remi even go out in search of a space ship.
For my son, Marty Chan’s books are entertaining stories of a boy trying to solve mysteries in his town, but for me as a parent, reading Chan’s books reminded me of what growing up Asian in North America was like. Thanks, Marty Chan, for rendering an ‘alien’ existence in such a pleasurable way for both parent and child!
