Two Books about Scarborough

I came to Canada in 1989 and lived in Scarborough until 2002. No matter what people say about this place, it is still where I spent my formative years and it will always feel like home. But Scarborough is itself not a small place, and I lived mostly north of Finch, while everything to the South remained faceless and featureless to me.

I returned to HK to live in 2005, and returned this July. In anticipation of returning, I ordered a few Canadian novels to help my psychological transition, including That Time I Loved You by Carrianne Leung, and The Break by Katherena Vermette. I stopped ordering eventually because it was running up quite a bill.

That Time I Loved You is set in a Scarborough suburb in the 1970s, a time when young couples and immigrant families moved into new houses in new neighbourhoods. The interconnected chapters brought to live characters who are treading suburban lives. That suburban neighbourhood is at times the ideal community, at times a gapping hole sucking up dreams and hope, and sometimes simply a canvas in the background waiting for inhabitants to determine what life could be.

A week after arriving in Toronto, I got a library card, and borrowed two books:

Brother — By David Chariandy

The Woo-Woo: How I Survived Ice Hockey, Drug Raids, Demons, and My Crazy Chinese Family — By Lindsay Wong

I read Brother first since it is about Scarborough as well. The story is moves and slows well, and the language is enjoyable to read. The book is eye opening to me not only because it tells the story of a Jamaican family (and how they see other immigrants), but also because it showed me life in other parts of Scarborough.

The book is set in a neighbourhood on Lawrence between Markham and Morningside roads, the area which I knew nothing about. There is something about suburban houses and housing complex that looks overly uniform, and makes me forget that people and neighbourhood there have a story too (as I have realized while reading That Time I Loved You).

Another thing I felt while reading was a vague sense of pass and present. Brother gives little hint of the year of the story, but I think it is set in the late 90s, judging from one of the protagonists’ profession. Now, late 90s and early 00s is hardly ‘historical’, but it does remind me that people in their 40s now did have a childhood, and their parents struggled through harsher times.

Finding my place in relation to these two books:

1) If my family came earlier, we would be that same age as the HK immigrant family in That Time I Loved You

2) The brothers that came from Jamaica, young adults in Brother, could have been the lives of classmates I had while in high school

A thought sometimes comes to mind while reading: I wish I had gotten to know who and who better back then.

P.S.

Looking up from the novel as I strolled through various neighbourhoods over the past weeks, I realized that behind the unchanging suburban landscape, there are countless resilient and fragile stories that marks the passing of years in our city.