Across Continental Divides, Teresa Wong’s Extraordinary Story

• All Our Ordinary Stories: A Multigenerational Family Odyssey
• Teresa Wong
• Arsenal Pulp Press (2024)

Some of our most important relationships exist beyond words, living instead in holding someone’s hand or preparing them a plate of sliced fruit.

For many immigrant families divided by language and generational differences, silences and strained exchanges punctuated by fleeting moments of tenderness can characterize parent-child relationships.

Calgary graphic novelist Teresa Wong explores the spaces between herself, her parents and the invisible ties that bind in All Our Ordinary Stories, her second book. It’s a compelling, quietly devastating work of generosity, empathy and humour.

Wong’s vividly rendered scenes span generations and geography. We visit her childhood in suburban Calgary and her parents’ youth in China. We see her grandfather, seasick on an ocean liner, making his way to Canada in 1912 and living through lonely years of legislated Chinese exclusion. The book assembles the cumulative efforts of generations striving, however imperfectly, for a better life.

As a child in 1980s Calgary, Wong is tasked with translating for her Cantonese-speaking parents, though she doesn’t know the language well. Realizing a dream held by many generations of Chinese kids in Canada, she quietly quits Chinese school so she and her brother can watch Saturday morning cartoons in peace.

In scenes that will be familiar to many children of immigrant families, Wong’s often funny memoir explores important questions: Where did we come from? Who are we to each other? Are we defined by our suffering?

And how do we show each other love, particularly when the world has shown us so little of it?

Wong’s parents came of age during the Cultural Revolution in China. Her mother was exiled from Guangzhou to a rural commune in the countryside, where she and her peers were sent for Communist “re-education.”

Wong’s parents were among the thousands of young people in their teens and early 20s who, raised in famine and poverty and determined to find a better life, hatched secret plans for escape. Known as “freedom swimmers,” they risked their lives by fleeing China in the water, swimming for hours in the dark to make the five-mile journey to freedom in Hong Kong.

Wong’s parents made separate journeys in the early 1970s, both with friends.

Her father tried and failed to cross once, when he was found in the water, arrested and imprisoned for nearly a year; he succeeded the second time while crossing with two young champion swimmers with whom he struggled to keep up.

Her mother, not a strong swimmer, tied herself by rope to a friend and inflated the inside of a basketball to keep herself afloat. The third person in their group swam ahead, came across a patrol boat and told its officers to go back for the young women. As dawn broke on the water, the officers on the boat found them and brought them to shore.

One day in the kitchen in their Calgary home, Wong tries to ask her mother about her experiences escaping China.

“Ma, why don’t you ever talk about escaping to China?” Wong asks.

“What’s there to say?” her mother replies.

“Well, you swam to Hong Kong.”

“It’s such an ordinary story.”

That’s the end of the conversation. Wong remembers her mother telling her about her escape very few times in her life. But on a 2003 trip to Hong Kong, her mother reunites with the friend who swam with her to freedom. They hold hands the whole time.

“There was so much more I wanted to know about their escape, but my mom and Ying were focused on the present,” Wong writes of that visit.

In a scene in which she’s riding Hong Kong’s mass-transit railway system with her mother and her friend, Wong offers an important if overlooked truth of extraordinary stories like her mother’s.

“A person is more than their hardships,” she writes. “And knowing the details is not the same as knowing her.”

She contrasts her parents’ early experiences in China and Hong Kong with the halting communication and long silences that permeate her daily life with them.

She brings readers to long days at Deerfoot mall in Calgary, where Wong’s mother worked in the food court at Manchu Wok, a Chinese fast-food joint.

During their mother’s weekend shifts, Wong and her brother would wander the halls for hours. The quiet of those scenes stands in contrast to the dramatic depictions of migration and exile elsewhere in the book.

All Our Ordinary Stories does the important, often under-sung work of shedding light on the silences that live across generations.

The book begins and ends in the final years of Wong’s mother’s life. As she writes at several junctures throughout the book, “This is not the beginning. But it is a beginning. Which is as good a place to start as any.”

As with every relationship, there remains so much to tell each other, and there is always so much more to be done. Particularly in making change across generations, and learning to forgive yourself.

In an affecting scene towards the end of the book, Wong searches for her own face in those of her children, reflecting on the dismay her mother often expressed for failing to see herself in her daughter.

“Motherhood can be so isolating, especially for new immigrants. You spend months assembling a human inside you. Then you disassemble yourself to bring them into the world. Is it too much to ask for a bit of resemblance after all that?” she writes.

“How lonely it must’ve been for her to find nothing.”

After having children of her own, Wong started to see herself and her mother differently.

“I kept searching for signs of myself in their faces. They all have flat noses and my eyes,” she writes.

“But it no longer felt like a problem.”

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Teresa Wong will join graphic novelist Tessa Hulls in an event called ‘My Pictures, My Words,’ moderated by Vancouver journalist and author Petti Fong, on Sunday afternoon, Oct. 27, at the Chinatown Storytelling Centre in Vancouver. The talk will be followed by a book signing. Presented in partnership with the Vancouver Writers Fest.