Lauralyn Chow

Paper Teeth by Lauralyn Chow is a short story collection featuring a Chinese-Canadian family called the Lees and flits back and forth between the past and now. It’s a beautiful collection, with each story titled after a dish in a Chinese restaurant, Egg Drop Soup, Spicy Beef in Lettuce Wraps, One Thousand Year Old Eggs and so on.

Food is an integral part of this novel. For so many of us, I think food conjures up a special part of memory, of nostalgia — food has the ability to make us sentimental in a way that no other thing can, and I think the author does that excellently in this book. There are regular references to dim sum, har gao, steamed whole fish with ginger and scallions and barbecued duck that make me hungry, happy and wistful all that once.

My dad was born in Australia, but his family lived in Shanghai and Hong Kong for a long time before that, so he grew up surrounded by Chinese food, speaking smatterings of Russian, English and Cantonese with his siblings. I never learnt Cantonese or Russian, but one of my earliest memories is eating fistfuls of rice as a baby, little white grains, stuck to my face, surrounded by the smell of green onion and soy sauce.

… so that’s what Lauralyn’s writing does to you. It makes you remember. It makes you wax poetic about tofu puffs and sliced oranges, which for me, is not totally uncommon, but it happens a lot between her pages.

Her writing speaks so much to belonging — the kids of the Lee family don’t know how to speak Chinese, and even though some of them desperately want to learn so they can understand their parents’ conversations, they despise the idea of going to Chinese school after public school. They desperately, desperately want to belong, to be Chinese, to understand the little old ladies at church — something they continue to struggle with throughout the stories.

I think of Chow’s writing and I wonder how many people are saying to themselves, oh, holy shit, that’s me! That’s my family. No way.

I think if you’re new to short stories and don’t really like how quickly they’re resolved, this one’s for you. You really do get an excellent picture of the Lee family, from so many multiple perspectives and it almost feels more like a family drama than a short story collection.

I adored this.

… (mehr)