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Paper Shadows: Memoir of a Past Lost and Found
Paper Shadows Memoir of a Past Lost and Found Author:Wayson Choy Three weeks before his 57th birthday, novelist Wayson Choy received a mysterious phone message during his publicity tour for The Jade Peony. When he called the number, he was greeted by the sounds of Vancouver's old Chinatown, and an older woman's voice telling him that she had just seen his mother on the streetcar. Wayson politely informed th... more »e caller that she must be mistaken, since his mother had died two decades earlier. No, no, not our mother, the voice insisted; your real mother. As it turned out, the woman on the streetcar was not Wayson Choy's mother. But the woman on the phone was right about one thing: he had, in fact, been adopted. And so, three weeks before his 57th birthday, Wayson Choy became an orphan. This astonishing revelation inspires the beautifully-wrought, sensitively told Paper Shadows, the story of a Chinatown past lost and found. From his early experiences with the ghosts of old Chinatown, to his discovery later in life of deeply held family secrets that crossed the ocean from mainland China to Gold Mountain, this multi-layered portrait of a child's world reveals uncanny similarities between the colorful secrets that enrich Wayson Choy's award-winning The Jade Peony and the subsequently discovered secrets of his own life.« less