All Our Ordinary Stories: A Multigenerational Family Odyssey
On page 173 of Teresa Wong’s excellent new graphic memoir All Our Ordinary Stories, we learn that monarch butterflies take multiple generations to complete their migration. It takes three generations to go from Mexico to Canada and then the fourth completes the return journey. This means that second- and third-generation monarch butterflies never alight in Mexico, where the family journey begins and ends. As metaphors go, this works perfectly for a book about an immigrant in search of her roots. Just replace Mexico with China.
Teresa Wong is a Chinese Canadian author/illustrator. In this, her second memoir, short episodic chapters describe Wong’s present and past, including her parents and other forebears from China who settled in Canada. The tone is one of struggle, but not for material things.
Right from the beginning, we see a communication gap between the generations. Wong, the narrator, doesn’t speak Mandarin and her Cantonese is poor, but in myriad other ways she just cannot connect with her parents. She invites her mother to watch the movie The Joy Luck Club on the sofa, believing they might bond over it (the movie depicts Chinese American mothers and daughters). But mom gets bored and wanders off to bed.
That’s not the worst of it. Starting when Wong is seven, her parents make her take piano lessons for a decade. Attendance involves a three-hour round trip by bus. Just as she begins to excel, they tell her, “We don’t really like classical music, so we won’t be going to your recitals anymore.” When she wins second place in a city-wide piano competition, she is alone.
Years later, her father abandons his wife and daughter to enjoy his retirement in China. (He returns to Canada but seems unrepentant.) No wonder relations are strained.
With her parents unforthcoming about the past or indeed about anything, Wong embarks on a personal search for her family history. What she discovers, almost by chance, is that at the heart of her family history are two life-changing ordeals: her parents’ escapes from China. When Wong asks for more details, her mother says, “But my story is so ordinary.” It’s anything but.
In a well-handled flashback, we learn that mother and father, separately, had to take interminable bus rides across vast distances, cycle for miles, hike through dense mountain forests, and then swim for five hours across shark-infested waters from mainland China to Hong Kong, moving almost entirely at night to avoid detection. Throughout this, the father carries false travel papers that have an official-looking stamp made with an instrument carved from a sweet potato.
Exhausted after his swim to freedom, the father is taken in by a friendly farmer and allowed to sleep in a shed. He wakes up the following morning to find he’s locked in, and the farmer has turned him over to the police. Only a ransom paid by an aunt in Canada saves him.
Notwithstanding the fact that both parents eventually make it to Canada, this book is full of failure. Almost every episode ends with a dying fall. The wintry black and white illustrations match the bleak tone. Wong’s artwork is spare and simple—orderly ink lines and washes that eschew expressionism and never bleed over the margins. A face is three dots (eyes, nose) and three lines (eyebrows, mouth) whose slants and twists convey the emotions. A child could parse these images, and, indeed, a childlike atmosphere is established with the book’s opening line, lifted from The Sound of Music: “Let’s start at the very beginning.”
Beginnings—or the finding of one’s roots—are a major theme in All Our Ordinary Stories. It’s a theme almost as old as migration itself; a cultural gap opens up between first-generation parents who remember their roots and their children who don’t. And they all live between two worlds: the old and the new.
Does All Our Ordinary Stories add anything to the immigrant narrative genre? Yes. Learning about the extent of Canadian racism was an eye-opener. In the face of such cruelty, it’s heartwarming to see how the immigrants stay true to their cultures, particularly regarding food and family gatherings. And the escapes from mainland China belong in a thriller.
The book ends with a rumination on the lives of monarch butterflies. It’s a pleasing denouement. If some of the content of All Our Ordinary Stories —family dysfunction, communication failure—might be described as “heavy,” what could be lighter or more beautiful than a butterfly?