It’s nearly sunrise, and Justin Stephenson is about 20 feet above the forest floor on a 32-square-foot tree stand. The November weather in Ontario cottage country is frigid. Stephenson’s bundled up in up in heavyweight camouflage, hunter orange vest, and hunter orange toque. His 870 12-gauge shotgun with a rifled barrel rests, butt on the wooden floor. He has been out here for an hour and 15 minutes, and the sun has started to rise. By now, he’s trying not to fall asleep. He thinks: Maybe it’s useless getting out here this early. He made too much noise climbing up to his perch on the stand. He is never going to get a deer.

He barely finishes this last thought, though, when he hears a noise so loud that he later describes it as “a drunk horse stomping through the woods.” At first, when the deer walks into the clearing, he thinks it’s a fawn. But that’s not it: as the deer gets closer, it gets bigger. And bigger. At 100 yards away and Stephenson can finally see the deer is a massive eight-point buck. One of its antler tines looks broken, possibly from fighting. “It was just,” says Stephenson, “this gnarly beast.”

He gets lined up for the shot, but the buck is at him head on—not a shot he wants to take. The bullet could shoot through the deer’s stomach and intestines. Stephenson’s entire body is ringing with adrenaline, but he waits and thinks: “Am I really going to do this?” By the time he resolves to shoot, two minutes have passed. Forty yards from the stand now, the deer sees Stephenson in the tree, and turns and runs toward the other side of the clearing. Stephenson shoots once, but it’s too late; the buck’s gone. “The next time this goes down,” Stephenson promises himself, “I won’t think twice about it.”

Stephenson has been hunting as an adult for the past eight years. Every fall, the 41-year-old drives out to a hunting camp with a group of his friends from the city to hunt deer. He also hunts ducks and geese north of Toronto, a few times each season. He’s also a self-described city guy. Stephenson lives in Toronto’s Corso Italia neighbourhood and is a fulltime video director/designer, perhaps most well known for designing and animating the title sequences to feature films like David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis and A Dangerous Method. That big buck wasn’t the first animal he’d ever shot, but it was so big and so big and so impressive, it made him think twice before pulling the trigger.

Thanks to the popularity of books such as Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Vancouverites Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon’s The 100-Mile Diet, hyper-local has become cutting-edge eating. Killing for your own meat is as local, and visceral, as it gets. And books about hunting such as Call of the Mild, The Mindful Carnivore and The Beginner’s Guide to Hunting Deer for Food are gaining popularity.

Not to mention, we also live in a throw-back era when everything old is new again; hunting’s increase in popularity among the “cool” crowd really isn’t that surprising. It’s cool to have a garden, wear your grandfather’s clothes, and grow your beard out. This atavistic aesthetic is visible in art, music, fashion, and even dining culture: put on some plaid and grab a drink at the Farmhouse Tavern (an actual restaurant in Toronto), or pick up a maple syrup candle at Toronto’s upscale gift shop, the Drake Hotel General Store.

Hunting, however, is a commitment that transcends foodie trends—it’s not like growing a garden or eating seasonally. A would-be hunter must learn how to use a gun, and actually go out into the wild to kill animals. So why do it? For self-described unlikely hunters such as Stephenson, hunting is about exploring something that was lost—a human instinct and method of survival many urbanites have long forgotten. It’s also about knowing where the meat on their plates came from, and being comfortable with the way that animal lived and died. When you talk to hunters, even those who might have once balked at the thought of killing an animal, you’ll hear something else as well: hunting is fun.

The number of hunters in North America has dropped significantly since the ’90s. In the U.S., the number of hunters (over the age of 16) fell to 12.5-million in 2006 from 14.1-million in 1991, according to the National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife-Associated Recreation. In the past few years, however, those numbers have started to climb again. The most recent survey shows hunting increased by nine percent, in total, between 2006 to 2011; about 13.7 million Americans now hunt. In Canada, national numbers are difficult to acquire because each provincial hunting and angling association measures data differently. At least one hunting organization, Edmonton-based Hunting for Tomorrow, claims they’ve seen an increase here too.

Hunting for Tomorrow has even seen vegetarians walk through its doors. One in particular stands out in executive director Kelly Semple’s mind. Shortly after The 100-Mile Diet was published in 2007, a vegetarian turned aspiring-hunter registered for a women’s outdoors weekend. The woman was a university student who liked to eat meat, but didn’t like the commercial processing aspect, Semple says. If she was going to eat meat, the student told Semple, she wanted to learn how to properly harvest it and prepare it, and be responsible for taking the animal’s life. That fall, following the outdoors weekend, the woman took a hunting mentorship program through the foundation and shot her first deer, Semple says. “She’s never looked back.”

Vegetarians aside, there’s enough newbie, urbanite interest in hunting for people like Virginia-based Jackson Landers, who grew up in a vegetarian home, to write The Beginner’s Guide to Hunting Deer for Food. And the Bull Moose Hunting Society (BMHS), founded by 20-something urbanite hunters Nick Zigelbaum and Nick Chaset in San Francisco, recruits and mentors city-dwelling novice adult hunters.

The influx of hunting and fishing stores in urban areas is another indicator that hunting is on the rise with city dwellers, says Patrick Walsh, editor of hunting and fishing magazine Outdoor Canada. “You have these big box fishing and hunting stores, and you think, ‘Who the hell is buying all this stuff?’” he says. “It can’t be some dying demographic.”

Stephenson started hunting as an adult to reconnect with the past. Growing up in Whitehorse, YK, he rode dirt bikes and hunted with his dad. But he was eager to shed the rural trappings of his childhood when he moved to Toronto in 1990 for university. “I went to film school, and had it that I wanted out of the Yukon and wanted out of rural Canada,” he says. “In many ways, I thought that as part of the transition to living in the city, I had to ditch a lot of these things that I did as a kid.”

Then, eight years ago, Stephenson helped a stranger he met at a garage sale jumpstart his Honda motorbike. The stranger had no idea what he was doing, but Stephenson did. That was when he understood how unique the skills were that he’d left behind. And it’s how he found himself in that tree stand, deciding he did, in fact, want to shoot the massive buck deer loping toward him.

Stephenson says he experiences a “strong vividness” after taking down an animal. That feeling—the awareness of that animals mortality, and of your own—takes a bit of getting used to. It’s also exciting. “I really do think it taps into a part of our psyche we’ve been well adapted for,” he says, “but we aren’t using.” As BMHS puts it: “Bull Moose is an organization dedicated to providing a means for those of us who have lost our instincts, our predatory skills and our connection to the wild world to get those parts of ourselves back.”

Besides offering people the chance to really provide for themselves, hunting also offers this incredibly visceral experience. Hunters take a life, and like it or not, that taking creates an adrenaline rush and a flood of mixed emotions: Pride, excitement, and more often than not a tinge of guilt or sadness. Hunters are thrust back into the food chain, from which most urbanites are increasingly disconnected. There’s an animal you shot. You feel its lingering warmth under your fingers. You break its skin with your knife. You know exactly what your dinner cost because its blood is—quite literally—on your hands.

Reconnecting with this lost part of the human experience is something that appealed to Lily Raff McCaulou, the author of the hunting memoir, Call of the Mild. She grew up in a suburb of Washington, D.C., and had only held a gun once—when she was a teenager—before she started hunting at 26 years old. That was two years after moving to Bend, Oregon from Manhattan for a reporting job. “You’d be hard-pressed to find an unlikelier hunter that me,” she writes in her book. “I’m a woman, and married to a man who does not hunt. I grew up in a city, terrified of guns.”

Raff McCaulou first started fly-fishing with her now-husband and worked her way up to hunting. The day after she shot her first animal, a pheasant, she brought the bird home and dressed it herself over a garbage can in her backyard. Describing the adrenaline rush that came with that first kill she says: “But my own feeling, as the pheasant falls from the sky in a surprisingly slow, graceful flutter, is singular and pure: euphoria.”

Raff McCaulou adds that experiencing this mix of excitement and guilt helps hunters better respect and appreciate the animals feeding them. Something we don’t always do with shrink-wrapped meat pulled out of the cooler section at the grocery store. “That’s not to say all of the meat I eat is meat I’ve hunted, but it has changed my relationship with food,” she says on the phone from her home in Bend. “It’s reconnecting me to the past. It’s really made me think about what humans, until relatively recently, had to do to eat meat. And it’s given me a new awe over survival.”

Toronto food blogger and hunter Joel MacCharles didn’t talk about hunting in public five years ago. In 2009, when he and his partner Dana Harisson decided to write about hunting on their blog, Well Preserved, they were hesitant about how some of their 25,000 monthly readers would react. And with reason: the authors of one of their favourite blogs, New Zealand-based Kiwiswiss, received a death threat in 2010 over hunting related posts. When MacCharles wrote his first hunting diary for the blog, they lost 50 percent of their followers. The following year, in a post that outlined the details of MacCharles’s hunting trips each fall, they lost 25 percent.  “And,” says MacCharles, “We don’t have any gory pictures.”

Jump ahead four years. On a Monday night last December, MacCharles walked into The Avro, a tiny bar in Toronto’s Riverside neighbourhood, wearing a vest covered in homemade buttons— souvenirs from each of the couple’s previous swaps. Tonight is the Christmas edition of the monthly Home Ec swap night he and Harrisson organize through Well Preserved. The space, filled with reclaimed furniture and knick-knacks, was packed full of swappers ranging in age from 20-somethings to early 40s. That night, the theme was holiday cookies, and The Avro’s bar counter was stacked with plates of baked treats.

There are other hunters and hunters-in-training at the swap too. Kelly Moore and Jessie Sweeney hang out near the bar talking to Harisson. Moore has been hunting with her husband Aaron since 2005, but Sweeney is just starting, and plans to get her firearms license this winter year and to practice shooting over the holidays (both of wwhich she does).

MacCharles, sporting glasses and shaggy-curly hair, is eager to talk about how this year’s moose hunt went. One of his hunting buddies shot a cow (female moose) on the first day. MacCharles came pretty close to a bull (male), but it was too big to shoot. But since the camp shares, his friend’s kill means he got meat too. MacCharles and Harrisson try to buy as little food from the grocery store as possible, and they hardly buy any farmed meat at all, unless it’s from small, local farms. Not getting a moose, which is what happened last year, would have been a big deal. When at home, they ate mostly vegetarian for the entire winter.

Like Stephenson, MacCharles hunted when he was young. He was in university when he turned vegetarian on a whim that lasted six years. “And then one day after dinner I decided I wanted a hamburger,” he says. After that, he started eating processed food and fast food. “I loved food, but I loved it in a very different way.” But over the last five years, MacCharles and Harisson really started to commit themselves to local and seasonal eating.

It’s hard to say exactly why opinions on hunting have changed so much within the locavore community. It does, though, seem to have a lot to do with ethics. While MacCharles is not be new to hunting, his values for doing so align with those of the urban, locavore community. When someone kills an animal, he says, it becomes something—food—that a person self-provides for their family, and in a way they ethically believe in. Even if farmed meat is easier to buy, he adds, hunting doesn’t feel like an option. “The concept of The 100-Mile Diet is it has smart urban people thinking about where their food comes from,” says Walsh. “An intellectual person can make the leap and ask: If there’s still an animal dying for me to have protein, why don’t I take the responsibility and do it myself?

Of course, for many people, hunting isn’t a food trend, and it’s never been a controversial activity. It’s taken for granted, and definitely nothing they’ve had to explain to themselves, to their families, or even to their communities. In fact, MacCharles has had confused readers from rural communities ask why he writes about hunting so sensitively on his blog. “There are a lot of people I talk to about hunting who see it as organic and seasonal and free-range and ethical, and boy if I had these conversations with my GTA hunting buddies they’d look at me like I had three heads,” he says. “It’s just what they do.

It’s becoming that way for people like MacCharles, Raff McCaulou and Stephenson, too. They’ve invested time in learning how to properly handle firearms. They’ve considered the consequences, felt conflicted about the lives they’re taking, and have come out the other side deciding it’s still something they want to do. And something they enjoy doing. Hunting isn’t just a fad to them and the many others that have joined and continue to join them—it’s become something they just do too. It’s probably something they’ll just do for the rest of their lives. Even so, don’t count on spotting hoards of hipsters lining up at the local shooting range anytime soon. For now, the barriers and the stakes are too high. As MacCharles says, “At the end of the day, there are very few people who take a life or death activity as just fun.”

Illustration by Freyda Goodman

The rules would save them, of that he was certain. Sixty percent certain, anyway. Parthi dipped a wooden spoon in the pot simmering on the stove. Nadia had asked for Indian, and though it wasn’t his favourite food—the smells reminded him of glittery childhood festivals—he wanted to please her. As he stood stirring the masoor daal, passing the time until she arrived, he wondered if there might be a way to calculate the odds of the rules protecting them. He smiled to himself at the ridiculousness of the thought. As Nadia liked to remind him, there were areas of life where math didn’t apply. She once sent him a snippet of something she found online: “The commutative property of math, A+B=B+A, does not apply to life. Lost and found is not the same as found and lost.”

Yes, well, he’d lost his wife to Facebook. But he’d found Nadia on Twitter, a mere five months after Tara left him for her long-lost, middle-school crush. Parthi wasn’t certain what he felt for Nadia, but it was relief to feel something. After Tara moved out, two months into his sabbatical, he’d drawn the curtains and taken to the marital bed, contemplating non-mathematical concepts he’d neglected for years: concepts like duty, commitment, betrayal. And love. He knew the odds of finding love again were low, and yet one night in late March, out of the blue glow of the laptop propped beside him on the bed, Nadia had appeared: @suburbanSpy is now following you on Twitter. Today, four weeks and three days after he received that message, she was following him all the way to his home in Kingston. And though he knew this didn’t mean she was his—there was her husband to think of, but Parthi preferred not to think of him—he didn’t want to lose her. Not now, not tonight. For four hours, from the time she arrived on the train from Toronto, till the moment he dropped her off at her friend Joyce’s, he was free to believe in the proposition that love could outbalance loss.

His cellphone beeped. As he walked into the family room to pick it up, he willed himself not to be aroused. It was a conditioned response: Nadia was the only one who texted him these days, and some of her texts—maybe one in seven—were erotically tinged. So when he heard the beep, he’d feel himself becoming hard, and have to think about something unpleasant. Like grading his Intro to Mathematical Logic exams. How pathetic to have to worry about such a thing at forty-nine.

Train is running 10 minutes late. Looking forward to tasting my “dal.” [insert annoying smiley]

Nadia loved to poke fun at his disdain for emoticons, which she considered symptomatic of his general snobbery. Early on, she’d sent him a list of all the spheres in which he was a snob: wine, food, literature, programming languages, movies, grammar, visual art, and music, especially music, though to some extent Nadia shared that snobbery. It was music that had brought them together, after all.

Parthi opened the fridge and took out an English cucumber. Nadia had requested raita too. As he began to grate the cucumber, noting the random pattern which the slimy strips formed on the cutting board, he considered the unlikely sequence of communications that had   resulted in the coming-together of two such different people: Sandra Brown, his some time student, tweeting that it was “cool when your favourite professor follows you back on Twitter”; Nadia, who followed Sandra, happening to see the tweet in her stream and deciding out of curiosity to click on Parthi’s profile; Nadia’s subsequent decision to follow Parthi and to reply to some of his trivial tweets about food and books.  And his decision to follow her back, a crucial move as it enabled private messaging between the two of them. Before Tara left him, Parthi had used Twitter mostly to connect with other mathematicians and students. Nadia was neither. Her avatar was a cartoon image of a fifties housewife, and her profile page linked to a blog about elementary education. But loss had clearly affected his frontal lobe. He clicked the follow button more readily than before.

On her end, he later found out, Nadia had been exploring his decades-old weblog and following the circuitous links to his memoir. She’d zeroed in on the parts about music, especially his reviews of concerts he’d been to in the early 80s, many of which she’d attended as well. Parthi had committed to memory the first direct message she sent him:

@suburbanSpy: Just spent longer than I’d care to admit reading bits & pieces on your site–so addictive. Was at Heatwave concert, too. Had forgotten lineup

She’d used up all 140 characters, no room for a period. He’d clumsily responded:

@pureMathprof: Funny, I’d pegged you as much younger.

Just what every woman wants to hear, that she’s old! It turned out she was forty-five, with two young boys and a husband. But she told Parthi later,“You had me at Heatwave.”

In the flurry of private messaging that followed, Nadia told him all about the summer of Heatwave, when she was sixteen. She’d gone on an exchange to France and lost her virginity with a purposefulness that Parthi found surprising. “I wanted to lose it with a Frenchman,” she wrote, “but I settled for a Québécois I met on my second night there.” (For the first time in his life Parthi had been tempted to type back “LOL!”) She recounted how she’d returned from Paris in time for Heatwave, an outdoor concert held outside the city, headlined by Elvis Costello and Talking Heads. Nadia had just discovered Punk and New Wave—late to the party, of course—and she said hearing those bands live had transformed her life. By sheer dumb luck, almost thirty years later she stumbled on Parthi’s online recollections of the concert. “It was like a hand reached through my computer screen, pushed through my skin and grabbed hold of the small, molten core of me,” she wrote. “The part that’s still alive.”

Parthi put the grater down and felt in his pocket for the iPod shuffle he’d bought earlier in the day. He’d filled it with the songs he’d been sending Nadia every morning since that first direct message. “Catching you up” was how he explained it to her. He understood her Achilles’ heel. It was his, too: music, which was a proxy for . . . what? Youth, passion, love?

The cellphone beeped again. Parthi glanced at the text: Hi sweetbf. Train’s arriving in your city (!) in 20 minutes. Can’t wait to…abide by the rules! He smiled and turned off the stove. In the entrance way, on the small Ikea table, he found the car keys. The rules were a joke they shared, a reference to regulations governing what could be shown between a man and a woman in Bollywood movies: chaste kisses were okay, but no French kissing; hugs and caresses were permitted if and only if clothes remained on. But Indian movie rules were constantly being contested and negotiated, and so were his and Nadia’s.

It was after their first “real life” meeting two weeks ago that Nadia had decided rules were required. They’d met in a Korean restaurant in a Toronto neighbourhood a safe distance from her home in Lytton Park. Brashly and without having planned it, Parthi had leaned in to kiss her lips, which were soft and tasted of the fruity Gewürztraminer they’d been drinking. Afterwards, on a  park bench, she’d let him kiss her again but when it was over, he noticed tears in her eyes. “Are you crying for M?” he asked, using her husband’s initial because she’d never revealed his full name.

“For M, and for the boys,” she said. “And for us.”

Us. As Parthi eased himself into his old Honda Civic—Tara had taken the Volvo—and pulled the seat belt strap across his shoulder, he realized that he did not understand the nature of this “us.” And he still didn’t know what rules governed it. He picked up his cellphone and tapped the Twitter icon. The DM exchange from last night lit up the small screen:

@pureMathprof: Is cuddling okay? How about kissing?
@suburbanSpy: Cuddling, kissing maybe, but no tongue. And no sex!
@pureMathprof: But, Nadia, the time I took the laptop upstairs . . .
@suburbanSpy: That wasn’t sex. I didn’t touch you.
@pureMathprof: Your words touched me.
@suburbanSpy: From my words to your hand…

Parthi pulled into the driveway and turned off the motor, but left the key engaged so he could listen to the end of the song that was playing. A cheating heart is still a beating heart . . .

“Jesus, turn that off!” Nadia said.

“The shuffle gods,” Parthi mumbled. He withdrew the key from the ignition and stole a glance at the woman in the seat beside him. Nadia looked tired, her green-gray eyes were blood-shot. Her dirty-blond hair, slightly mussed from the train ride, glinted coppery in the early evening sunlight.

“So this is where you live,” she said, gesturing towards the bland brick facade in front of them and the weed-infested lawn to the side.

“Yep.” For the first time since Tara left, he felt embarrassed by the degree to which he’d let the property go. He felt Nadia’s eyes on the side of his face and he turned to meet her gaze. She had once mentioned that M was conventionally attractive and knew how to dress. (“He has a guy at Harry Rosen,” she’d told him.) Parthi had a receding hairline and zero fashion sense. What did Nadia see in him? He could understand how a woman might be charmed by his online persona. Despite his mathiness, he was good with words. In pixels he shone. But in person, for an entire evening?

Nadia placed her hand on his leg, just above his knee. Parthi stared at her fingers, struck by their delicate paleness. He put his own hand on hers, and had a momentary vision of what the hand of a child of theirs might look like. “Quite the contrast,” he murmured.

“Yes,” Nadia said. Smiling now, she pulled her hand away from his thigh, grabbed a small bag from the back seat, and opened the car door. As Parthi followed her to the front entrance, he felt the flutter of an extra heartbeat in his chest. It was a benign arrhythmia that afflicted him when he was nervous. As if reading his mind, she said, “I’m nervous, are you?”

“Hmm” he said, “a little. There’s a decent bottle of Torrontés waiting for us inside.” As he put the key in the lock, she leaned into his body, and when he turned to look at her she kissed him, first on the corner of the mouth and then straight on. He felt her tongue slide against his. He pulled away slightly. “The rules . . .” he began.

“Yes.”

Katie Lynes is a cat person living a dog person’s life in North Toronto. (Her soul, however, is thoroughly French.) She has published non-fiction essays in newspapers and (defunct) magazines, and has recently turned her hand to fiction. “Shuffle Gods” is part of a longer work in progress.

Susan Crean’s decision to write about her family servant and dear friend Mr. Wong takes her on a journey that reveals just as much about the ever-shifting nature of multiculturalism and identity in Canada as it does about Wong’s life

It’s a brilliant Friday morning in August, 2011 just past nine o’clock, and the sidewalk along Spadina Avenue in downtown Toronto is already thick with people. A yellow school bus pulls up to the curb letting off a stream of passengers who make for the Wongs’ Association building nearby. Like me, they are headed for the Ancestors’ Hall on the top floor where the official opening of the national convention of Wongs is taking place — if convention is the right word for something that’s more family reunion than business meeting.  The gathering is a tri-annual event bringing together reps from Wongs’ associations across the country and the agenda includes things like a trip to Niagara Falls, a photo-op in front of Queen’s Park, and a banquet for 1,200 on Saturday. Unquestionably this is the highlight of the weekend, a gigantic and very public event featuring video presentations, live performance (music and dance), and live politicians—Premier McGuinty, MP John McCallum and Toronto City Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam, for starters.

If the main function of the convention is social, clearly there’s a political edge to it and that goes for the ceremony in the Ancestors’ Hall which, unlike the banquet, unfolds entirely in Cantonese and seems geared to Old Times and an old guard rather than the present. Founded in Toronto in 1912, Wong Kung Har Wun Sun is one of dozens of benevolent societies set up to help early Chinese immigrants survive the hardships of living on the margins of an intensely racist society. They provided community, support (job information, shelter), protection and even credit when none was available from the banks.  Much has changed in Canadian Chinatowns in a century, and younger Canadians often know little about them, tending to regard them as ‘old men’s clubs’. In a moving memoir both about his father and his recent apprenticeship at Modernize Tailors in Vancouver, writer J.J. Lee describes in The Measure of A Man  going to a banquet at the Lee’s Benevolent Association of Montreal. “Its members comprised Lees from the same village as my father. Everyone acted as if they were my uncles, but I didn’t know how I was related to them, if at all, and I still don’t. Nor do I have any clue to whom they were benevolent.”

With their aging memberships and declining purpose, it’s no secret the associations need reinvention. Not everyone would see opportunity in the situation, but Greg K.W. Wong does and Greg’s been a key convention organizer. His tactic has been to recruit youth and let them loose. “Allow people to run with their ideas and the result is spectacular, so long as they work together,” he asserts. The premise of the old associations holds true: there is strength in numbers. And, he quickly adds, ingenuity. Crazy ideas sometimes get traction.

Although I am not young, not a Wong and not even Chinese, I’m one of Greg’s recruits, somehow ending up working on the committee editing the convention’s glossy, bilingual magazine. Somehow implies random happenstance, though, which was not how it was. I was there on purpose because I have a close connection to someone who was a Wong. Wong Dong Wong came to Canada in 1911 when he was sixteen, lived his entire life here, and never returned to his homeland in China. He was one of the ill-fated generation of Chinese men stranded by the exclusion laws that Canada enforced between 1923 and 1947, which condemned them to lives without family and children. Mr. Wong met my Irish grandfather in Toronto in the mid 1920s, and in 1928 went to work for him as cook-housekeeper when the family moved into a new house in Forest Hill. My father and uncle were still teenagers then; Mr. Wong was thirty-three. He remained in the job until he retired to live in Chinatown in 1965 by which time he was seventy, I was twenty and had known and loved him all my life. My earliest memories involve him, and a major part of my childhood was spent in his kitchen and garden, or on outings like the Saturday afternoon he took me to see a movie for the first time. I was seven and the movie was Bonnie Prince Charlie starring David Niven.  I remember the amazement and horror—first at immense size of the screen images, and then the sight of horses being killed in battle along with people. Wong leans over to whisper, “No worry, Sunsii, the horses are acting too.”

I started pestering Wong about going to China when I was about three or four, spurred on by stories of being able to dig your way there. In the sixties as he neared retirement, he still talked of his returning to Canton (Guangdong), but his health was poor by then and the Cultural Revolution had begun.  When he died in 1970 I’d begun writing, yet the idea of writing about him sat unformed for decades in the back of my mind. Right next to the assumption that someday I’d find his village and make the journey back to find his roots in China.  I knew both propositions would come up implausible in the light of day. I also knew it would not be OK for the Boss’s granddaughter to try writing a memoir of the loyal family servant—which is how it would be seen and how I’d have viewed it myself from the outside. On the one hand, to confine myself to writing only what I knew of Wong from my life with him would be to write my own story and utterly sentimentalize his. For his included his Chinese heritage and perspective, as well as his experience of Canada—Canada the state, and Canada the place—and the world hidden behind the phrase “going down to Chinatown” which happened every Sunday. How would I know enough to write about Mr. Wong and who he was with any confidence? How different would my effort be from Duncan Campbell Scott using the stories of Indigenous peoples in his poetry while he governed their lives as the Deputy Superintendent General of Indian Affairs?  After all, I benefited from the racial injustice that landed Mr. Wong in the heart of my family.

Without knowing the answer to this, I set out on my search three years ago, figuring that I’d know how to write Mr. Wong—and if I could—after the research was done. The dilemma, I thought, would be finding people who would speak to me.

Very probably Mr. Wong was a member of the Wong Kung Har Wun Sun Association. Over the five decades he lived in Toronto he’d have socialized there, heard the latest talk of Dr. Sun Yat-Sen, the Guomindang and the Communists, read the magazines with news of his home Taishan (Toisan), played mah-jong, and raised money for the Cantonese Opera. As I made my rounds speaking to people, I was repeatedly told I’d never get near the old associations; if I wanted to find anyone in Chinatown with memories of Mr. Wong I should get something in Sing Tao, the Chinese daily which publishes editions in Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, and Hong Kong. Enter Joanna Qiao, a Chinese-speaking journalist with special knowledge of Chinese-Canadian history who became my research assistant and translator, who orchestrated a front page weekend feature published a few days before I set out for Mr. Wong’s village in Taishan (Toishan). This was the breakthrough that elicited messages, offers of help and tips from Taishanese in Canada, Australia and Hong Kong. Even the Bureau of Overseas Chinese Affairs in Taishan City emailed to ask when I’d be arriving.

Around that time I also met Chuck C.C. Wong, a retired university librarian at a panel on Chinese-Canadian history. Before long I was collaborating with him on his bibliographic projects while he was giving me tips on primary source material.  One day in the winter of 2011, Chuck announced he’d taken on the task of pulling together the magazine for the up-coming Wongs’ national convention and could use some help. Not long afterwards he invited me to meet another Chuck Wong, this being Chuck K. Wong, a long-time and very committed Association director who, after dim sum, took us back to the offices on Spadina.  Chuck K. showed me around and talked with enthusiasm about the Association’s history, pointing out the photo of his great uncle, Wong Nun Yao, third chairman of the Association. “He worked every Sunday managing its social and financial affairs,” he writes in the Convention magazine. “I never heard him complain about the burden, and in that he was a role model to all of us.”  A few days later, as Chuck C.C. and I were going over material at the library, he turned to me. “You know, you should write something about your first visit to the Wongs’ Association. For the Convention magazine.”

This chain of events could be described as a nifty way in the Association’s back door— except it was actually through the front door and by invitation. But it typifies the openness I encountered in the Chinese community, and the willingness of many (writers, academics, and old-timers) to help me negotiate the barriers of language and culture.  Mr. Wong’s story is familiar in this milieu, of course, but the fact that I come with it scarcely raised an eyebrow. People simply embraced it. Some even searched me out after reading about my search—as did Howe Chan who called me up from B.C. when he read the Sing Tao piece to tell me he’d grown up in a village very close Mr. Wong’s. Howe has become a friend and adviser, and, as we poured over the Wong family tree, it almost seemed logical that he’d find a connection. And he did, discovering his mother was a cousin of Mr. Wong’s five times removed.

Over many conversations Howe told me his own family story, beginning with his arrival in Moncton in 1949 to meet a father he didn’t know. From him I learned how Canadian laws had had the capacity to turn family into strangers. Occasionally, the reverse happened when affection created family among strangers.

If I feel I can now write about Mr. Wong it has to do with the fact that Canada has changed. Since Mr. Wong’s time the idea of pluralism has become an ideal in the minds of many Canadians, perhaps a side-effect of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism, the policy, may have begun as a clever way of subsuming Quebec’s distinct status in Pierre Trudeau’s mantra of “one country, two languages and many cultures” but over 40 years later diversity has become part of our national identity, and exists on visceral as well as official levels.  Moreover, scores of people have become engaged in serious cross-cultural inter-connection, something implied by intermarriage and achieved in many places by simply going to school.

I figure this is what poet-activist Robert Priest is talking about when he mentions our “melding around the edges”. Diversity, he claims, has seeped into the culture and is changing our understanding of ourselves.  In “Meeting Place”, a poem about Toronto, he writes:

i come home to find i’ve gone a bit buddhist

another day i’m slightly marxist

i dare say there are even days when i may get a little gay

we’re all so close

we can’t help tripping over one another

Over coffee at our local cafe, the Tango Palace, we agree that this melding business could be one of multiculturalism’s major achievements. Priest sees a perspective emerging that does not present Canada “as this offshoot of a civilization that happened in Europe centuries ago.” Speaking of the Scots/Irish and English immigrants to Canada like the two of us, he notes, “We came over as transplanted Europeans. We we coming from a place with a rich history and were going to a place with very little history.”  In that situation the Indigenous inhabitants were the people with the knowledge and skills, and inevitably some Native ways were adopted by mainstream Canadian culture. This is the point John Ralston Saul makes in his groundbreaking book, A Fair Country. Canadian civilization, Saul argues, was largely built on Aboriginal concepts of fairness, egalitarianism and negotiation and is not the creature of Western tradition with its hierarchical culture, and monolithic concepts of nationhood. Moreover, newcomers to Canada were often minorities in the countries they left behind, so they brought an experience that predisposed them to try accommodation with their neighbours rather than attempted domination.

In imperial terms, Canada was downwardly mobile from the outset. It was established as a triangulated entity not a monolith, the result of the continuous interaction between French, English and Indigenous peoples—and is a work-in-progress to this day.   Multiculturalism no doubt tapped into this sensibility. But it left us with the image of the Canadian mosaic which has never really fit reality. Ever since it was invented, Canadians have been building bridges between those islands of colour set in concrete which cannot deal with the fluidity, the hybridity and kinetic energy of the culture we have been evolving. Perhaps the metaphor we need is river.

In the end, it was this basic commitment of Canadians to make pluralism work that made it easy for many communities—especially the Chinese Canadian community which is one of the oldest—to take multiculturalism at its word, and embrace the notion of participating in the defining of Canada and Canadianess. An illustration, should you want one, was right there, front and centre, at the Wongs’ Banquet. This was the grand moment when the new and official family coat-of-arms was proclaimed by Forrest Pass of the Canadian Heraldic Authority (the office in Rideau Hall which grants such honours on behalf of the Queen).  Being official means conforming to the ancient rules of British heraldry, not easy an easy task according to Chuck C.C. Wong, who was on the design team along with Greg Wong and the Authority’s expert Forrest Pass.  First, to be Chinese it had to have a phoenix and a dragon. “Once that was accepted,” Chuck explains, “the big question was what would we have for the two flanking animals This kept me awake nights until I came up with the obvious: a polar bear and a panda.”

The media loved the two bears, and so did many Wongs.  Toronto City Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam, who spoke at the banquet, gave the medal emblazoned with it to her father. “He took some pride in it, and liked the choice of animals,” she says. For Wong-Tam the evening was transformative. “I’d had absolutely no contact with the Wongs’ Association until the night of the banquet. I’d never understood before the gut connection people experience at family gatherings, where everyone is welcome simply because of a shared namesake.”

But it was Susan Eng, the vice-president of advocacy at CARP who made the quip about reverse appropriation. She was having fun, she says later, “as it is usually those in an established community appropriating from newcomers.” She was also making a distinction. In her view, the use of other people’s culture as decoration usually trivializes that culture and dismisses that peoples’ equality. But, Eng maintains,  the appropriation going on at the Wongs’ Banquet was a statement of belonging:  “There is a bit of reverse cultural appropriation going on. But it allows the Wongs to have a bit of fun while creating a symbol that incorporates both heritages; something they can call their own but also something that roots their identity in Canada.” Greg Wong echoes the point. “The crest was putting us on equal footing. It was not opening doors. It was re-inventing something.” And it was also one crazy idea that caught on.

In the beginning I had no expectation I’d ever find Mr. Wong’s village. In China, I not only found it, I found descendants of the uncle who originally brought Wong to Vancouver to work in the restaurant business. The uncle, Wong Wanshen returned to China in the 1930s after the death of his only son, and so it was his adopted grandson, Wong Wenxi, whom I met in Wing Ning in 2010.  I am still mulling over the improbability of turning up in a corner of the People’s Republic looking for the story of a orphan boy who left ninety-nine years ago and never returned—and finding it.  And the luck of then finding a relative to coach me on Taishanese pronunciation and tell me about New Year’s at Shui Doi (Wing Ning) when the Opera would come and perform.

Ultimately the search for Mr. Wong has become part of his story. Partly, it inspired attention because the work of Chinese domestic servants is an all-but-lost history. But it was also because Mr. Wong is an example of those special individuals who are able to cross cultures and make alliances across the power lines of race and class, supposedly rigid boundaries that are never completely impermeable. The Canada he helped create ended up helping me find him.

Illustration by Freyda Goodman

“Strip mine your memories,” said Jake, my writing teacher. So I did. And found that, even after forty-two years, the last sight of my mother’s face still haunts me.

She lay, cocooned in pillows, dressed in a silk blouse and dark wool suit. Her cheeks glowed like marble, bloodless and cool. Her hair, combed and pinned back, made her look as if she had just visited the hairdresser. Caked with makeup, her features had been rendered smooth and ageless, a wax caricature of my real mother. The casket and its brass fittings gleamed under stained-glass fixtures set in the vaulted ceiling. Although it was a drab winter afternoon, muted yellow hues filled the corners of the room, as if it were lit by a waning fire.

I stared at her forehead, cheekbones, hair for a full minute. But could not detect evidence of the final indignities. Seeing her there, surrounded by plush fabrics, made up like a movie star, dressed in the clothes she wore to play the church organ, caused a slow bile to burn up my throat. I held her hand for a few seconds and then lifted my fingers to my nose. The embalming fluid had overwhelmed her all-too-familiar scent of bleach and Tide. I touched her cheek once and turned away.

A case of deja vu, I thought. But that made no sense. In all the fourteen years of my life, I had never been to a funeral.

I wanted to run from that muffled room, escape those oak-paneled walls. However, the brick funeral home sat in the middle of downtown Winnipeg. I had lived in the bush all my life and had no idea where to go. So I stumbled away from the casket, over to the family pew. Sat next to my youngest sister. And my eight other siblings. Through a glass block barrier which separated us from the larger sanctuary, I watched dark silhouettes file into the chapel. And remembered the last day I saw her alive.

It was the second Saturday in December, 1968. The temperature hovered near minus twenty and the dry snow squeaked underfoot. But the wind had died down during the night. I had made porridge for breakfast and fed the younger kids. After I cleaned up the breakfast dishes, I decided it had warmed up enough for a ride. Every morning, it was my job to turn out our three horses, clean stalls, and throw a timothy bale in the outdoor manger. My young mare hadn’t been ridden all week, except for short daily trips for a drink. Because our stable had no running water, we rode them after supper, down the hill to the nearby lake. I always carried an ax to chop a hole in the ice. Sometimes it took over an hour, depending on the thickness.

In the dim hallway, where I scrounged up some long underwear, I tripped over a laundry basket. Jeans, shirts, towels, and sheets splayed onto the floor. I plucked up bundles of sweat-stinky clothes and stuffed them back into the basket. Several other baskets, filled to the brim, lined the narrow entrance to our three adjoining bedrooms.

My mother called out from her bedroom at the end of the hall. “The kids don’t have anything clean for school. And it takes two days to dry everything.”

Despite my eagerness to get outside, I could not ignore the laundry, or her voice. When I entered her bedroom, I stared at the crumpled bed. She had been curled up in it for the past three days – like a fox in its den, in a fetal half-circle, hidden in a nest of sheets. The room stunk like dirty socks, sawdust, sweat, perfume.

As she spoke, she pushed strands of hair away from her red-rimmed eyes and struggled to raise herself. But she couldn’t get much higher than the pillows. Her skin resembled fireplace ashes, grey and smudged.

I said, “Right. I’ll do a few loads. Hang them outside, so they’ll freeze solid. Then I’ll crack them in half and haul them inside to dry in the back porch. Should take me all day.”

She sighed, wiped her eyes, ran her palms down her cheeks. “Where’s Val? Can’t she help?”

I wanted to spit but swallowed the phlegm. “She’s gone to Marc’s. You know, that half-wit RCMP she likes to mate.”

She sighed again and asked for a glass of water.

As I turned to fetch it, my cheeks burned with a furious pity. My mother hadn’t eaten any breakfast and probably no one had asked if she needed to go to the bathroom. My father had headed for the bush hours ago. My two older brothers, who cut and hauled logs with him, never asked if she needed anything. Several times, I had seen them giggling into their fists when our father called her a “lazy bitch.”

The previous October, he had taken our mother to a Kenora doctor. She saw this physician often, but he never questioned the recurring fractures and black eyes. The doctor resembled a car salesman, chubby and pale from too much sitting. After the examination, he declared her to be trapped in a bad menopause, caused by ten pregnancies, three miscarriages, and twenty years of overwork. He prescribed tranquilizers and told her to take it easy. Get the kids to do more.

By November, she started to fall down. Almost every day. When she collapsed, we dragged her to bed. Sometimes she stayed there. Sometimes she got up and made supper. My father took her back to the pudgy doctor and asked him to fix her so she could make meals and do laundry. Instead, the doctor committed my mother to a psych ward.

She stayed for a couple of weeks, at the same time as my best friend’s mother, Maude, who was also menopausal. After Maude’s husband had died of a heart attack, she had been diagnosed with a “nervous breakdown” and endured a series of shock treatments. She told me, years later, how the nurses forced my mother to get up out of bed and walk. Even when my mother fell down, they kept prodding her. Maude wasn’t too clear on the ugly details but I decided that my mother must have been given shock treatments, too. No adult ever told us kids the exact diagnosis.

I brought my mother a glass of water and four slices of toast covered with peanut butter and raspberry jam. While she drank and ate, I sat on the end of the bed and watched.

“Can you do the clothes?” she asked.

I glanced at the baskets in the hallway and grimaced at the injustice of it all.

“I want to ride my horse.”

“I don’t get to do what I want.”

I rolled my eyes. “I’m not the mother. You are.”

She started to answer but stopped. Then she buried her face in the sheets. I could tell by the heaving motions she was crying. Her head bobbed into the thin material – silent, but violent movements. Like a swimmer breast-stroking into the waves. I felt like a shit for reminding she couldn’t do her job.

I grabbed her plate and stomped out of the room. As I headed for the dingy kitchen, I booted the row of laundry baskets. They spilled. A sour part inside me felt good about kicking dirty clothes all over the hallway.

Two hours later, I had washed and pegged four loads of laundry onto the sagging line behind the house. As I finished up the last basket, a five-point buck approached our compost pile. He dipped his head and nuzzled deep into the pile, rooting for potato and carrot peels. I stopped and walked closer. Then I picked up a browned apple slice and offered it to him. He sniffed and chomped hard. So hard the apple chunk slid from my numb fingers. I leaned over to retrieve it. The buck, irritated by my interference, reared up and stomped both of his sharp front hooves into the back of my head. The impact knocked me face first into the compost. Despite the rotten vegetables and the egg shells jammed into my mouth, and the shooting pains in my head, I yelped.

The buck spun away, back into the pine forest.

Inside the house, I washed my scraped cheeks and stared at the grainy bathroom mirror. Tears stung my eyes as I thought about the unfairness of washing other people’s dirty laundry and the unfairness of being booted face-down into half-frozen compost. By a stupid deer.

While I dried my hands, I heard muffled crying and moans. The bathroom, about the size of two kitchen tables, was attached to the left side of the entrance porch. In this twelve-by-twelve room, washing machine, tubs, closets, shelves, barrel stove, and cement cistern were crowded together. Both bathroom and porch had been added after the main house was built. To allow heat from the barrel stove to flow into the bedrooms, a rectangular hole had been cut into my parents’ room and fitted with an iron grate. The sounds emanated from this grate, near the ceiling. I wanted to stuff a blanket into it, but couldn’t figure out how to do this without setting fire to the house. The nearby stovepipe glowed from the four-foot logs I had rammed into the stove, to heat the water for the laundry.

I had heard her sobs many times before. So I hardened my heart and grabbed my barn-smelling coveralls. Shadows from the pails and tubs stacked on top of the cistern reminded me that the laundry chores had chewed up the warmest hours. If I wanted to ride in daylight, I needed to hurry. I flung open the back door and raced across the snow-packed yard. As I ran, I remembered that I had forgotten to let out the horses. My mare liked her morning feed so she might try to dump me and run back to the barn. I hardened my heart again and decided to risk it. After I bridled her, I led her outside. Then I chased the two other horses outside and pitched them a fork full of hay. As we rode through the pine forest behind our house, she tried to dump me. Twice. Because of the cold, I rode bareback so it took some fancy clinging to stay on her back. After an hour, she had tired enough to give up trying to pitch me.

By the time I entered the back porch and peeled off my coveralls, the metal stove had stopped pinging and the stovepipe had stopped glowing. The floors in the house felt stiff and cold. I could hear CBC on the television set in the living room but it appeared that no one was old enough or strong enough to throw some logs into the stove. After I loaded it, I went to check on my mother. She hadn’t moved. But she was no longer crying.

I started peeling potatoes.

After about half an hour, my two older brothers and my father returned. Tired and chilled from their day in the bush, they wanted food, and lots of it. They devoured moose stew and mashed potatoes, and left the kitchen. My father went into the far bedroom to nap and my brothers went into the living room to watch CBC with the younger kids. Everyone assumed that I would clean up the kitchen, even though I still had to water the horses and bed them down for the night. No one else wanted to go outside. The temperature had dropped, below minus twenty-five.

When I got back from the lake, I brushed the rim of frost from my scarf and hood, and removed stiff layers of barn clothes. Through the grate above the stove, I could hear my father and two older brothers laughing.

“She hasn’t got out of bed all day,” my father said.

“It’s Saturday. She wants a day off.” My brother, Ernest, a year and half older than me, said this quietly, as if unsure of he should agree with my father.

A chair slammed against the wall. “Nope, she’s faking. AND she’s a lazy bitch!”

My oldest brother, John, taller and broader than my father, could drive a pulp truck and work as hard as a grown man. He said, “Maybe it’s time to go back to the doctor. I could take her into town tomorrow morning.”

“And get her to buy Christmas presents. I don’t know who the hell is going to look after all that crap.”

I heard the sound of sheets being yanked.

“Look at that! She’s pissed herself. Ernie, get your sister.”

As I hung up the last of my outdoor clothes, Ernest came into the porch and gestured for me to follow him.

“I heard what you said. More laundry for me.”

When we went into my parents’ room, my father had already cleared the blankets off the bed. My mother sat on the edge of the bare mattress, shivering and mumbling.

“That’s it. Get her ready. We’re going to the hospital. Let that idiot doctor worry about piss-stained sheets.”

He grabbed the bundle of bedding. Then he looked at us, swore, and stomped out of the room. John followed.

After I pulled clothes out of drawers and closets, my brother and I started dressing her. Though we didn’t know it, it was to be our last physical contact with her. Ernest complained about this unmanly chore, but, to me, it seemed beyond funny.

As we stripped off her damp nightgown, I laughed. As I cupped her breasts into a bra and he fastened it at the back, I laughed. As we hoisted up her underpants, zipped up wool slacks and pulled on a thick sweater she had knitted, I laughed. As I knelt at her feet and rolled up her socks, I laughed.

When I sent Ernest to fetch her winter coat and boots, I cried.

She looked at me for half a minute but her eyes could not focus. Outside the window, I heard the old station wagon rumbling, so I sent Ernest to tell our father she was ready. When he came back into the bedroom, huffing from the cold, we wrapped her arms over our shoulders and lifted her up. With one kid jammed under each armpit, we walked her out to the Chevy.

Then we sat at home and waited.

A week before Christmas, she died. They had found the brain tumour. But it was too late. As I said, I saw her face one last time, at her funeral, the day before Boxing Day. She did not resemble the woman we had carried out to the car.

So what do I do with these memories now, Jake? Oh yeah, I forgot.

I write a story.

Donna Besel lives in a rural community and writes fiction and nonfiction for various publications. Her writing has accumulated numerous honours, including nominations for CBC’s Literary Awards and “Canada Writes” competitions. She teaches creative writing workshops to all ages and has instructed groups on art, music, outdoor activities, and trauma.  

Gillian Wallace has had poems published in various journals including The Antigonish Review, Room, and forthcoming in Descant. Previously, she won Arc’s Diana Brebner Prize and in 2010, she was named a Hot Ottawa Voice by Ottawa’s Tree Reading Series. She has occasionally edited her poems online at http://gillianwallace.ca.

Behind them sits Sudhir, whose restless eyes appraise the scene, darting into the
thick forest all around us, then back to the roadblock. In each man’s mind a
common fear unfolds: at any moment cadres of armed Maoist rebels—Naxals—
will emerge to rob them or worse, alleging them to be spies or profiteers or
corrupt bureaucrats, kidnap or even kill them.

The Kandhamal forests—lush with teak, cashew, mango, bamboo, neem, jackfruit
and the wizened banyan—emit a foreboding coolness, shrouding sunlight and
vision. They hide well those who would gladly withdraw from the world.

We’ve spent a long day visiting experimental preschools in remote Adivasi
(aboriginal) villages in this southern part of the Indian state of Odisha. The
rapidly approaching jungle dusk reminds Sudhir that this is no time to be
indecisive. Yet the roadblock, a telltale sign of impending Naxal ambush,
ultimately causes Sudhir no great distress. The Maoists are known to fire upon
vehicles fleeing their checkpoints, yet flee our vehicle did, once Sudhir so
commanded the driver.

The fear I’d instinctively drawn from the pale faces of the driver and cameraman
made me inquisitive. What did Sudhir see? What does he know about Naxals,
besides the fact that he’s devoted his life’s work to eliminating them? Much of the
evening passed in silence before I asked him.

2.
Sudhir is a Kond—a Kandhamal tribal, a speaker of Kui—from a village three
kilometres from our roadblock, as the birds fly. These forests sustained his
childhood; he knows them better than the road, which is not two decades old. The
forests remind him of many things, like turmeric, which grows wild for gathering
by Kond children, or is cultivated and sold in village cooperatives, and which
these days Sudhir buys in large plastic bags every time, like this time, he returns
to Kandhamal.

As a boy, when his parents arranged for him to attend an English-medium school
in town, Sudhir developed a hunger he’s never fully satisfied. Today he leads a
small team of social workers on a six-year project, backed by a Dutch foundation,
to develop trilingual—English, Odia, Kui—preschool curricula and train local
teachers for new village schools. Even when the government builds schools close
to their villages, Kond children rarely attend. Teachers bus in from towns, or
bribe a supervisor to skip the journey. Absenteeism abounds. Regardless, the
teachers speak only Odia, the state language. Tribal younglings speak nothing but
Kui.

There is an urge inside all of us to make right what is wrong. There is also the
willingness to define what is wrong in our own terms. For Sudhir, it is not poverty
that has broken his society but rather the absence of its expression.

3.
Two years before the roadblock, on August 23, 2008, during the Hindu festival of
Janmashtami, thirty men armed with AK-47s broke into the ashram of Swami
Lakshmanananda Saraswati and massacred him and four followers. The Swami
was a controversial figure in Kandhamal, preaching a gospel to convert (or
reconvert) tribals from Christianity to Hinduism. Between these communities,
tensions roiled.

Local police and state security officials quickly blamed the attack on Naxals,
recently entrenched in the area and the only group likely to be so well armed. But
some Hindu nationalist politicians in Odisha moved swiftly to place the blame on
Christian Konds, and soon there erupted a four-day conflagration of
communalistic violence across more than three hundred jungle villages. Dozens
died. Twelve thousand were displaced. A nun was raped.

The Naxal leadership issued a release taking credit for the assassination of Swami
Lakshmanananda, claiming his ministry persecuted Adivasis. No one was
listening. And in an area about the size of Prince Edward Island, where more
than ninety percent of the 650,000 people live in one of 2500 forest villages,
Kandhamal became a locus of fear, distrust and misinformation. Among Konds,
sympathy for Naxals grew.

4.
The road to Kandhamal leads northwest out of the town of Berhampur,
encountering rain-swelled paddies almost as soon as the last tea stalls and
mobile-phone shacks are behind us. The first villages we approach rise over the
road in clouds of dust from the morning motorbike and bullock-cart traffic. A
small green sign announces each hamlet in Odia and English.

My companions recite the latest gossip associated with each place we pass: here is
the birth village of our Chief Minister, see how nicely paved the roads are here;
there is the hometown of a legislator currently in jail for murdering, allegedly, a
member of the mafia.

Further along we pass the massive Bhanjanagar Dam, an artificial reservoir in the
Rushikulya River that regulates the flow of water downstream to the towns and
heavy industries of Odisha’s coastal belt. Here in this bucolic dominion peasants
and paddies cut a slight pose against the machinery of industry. Timelessness is a
vulgar word in Odisha.

The rural road begins to rise; we are gaining elevation onto the foothills of
Kandhamal. Where earlier we had followed a purposefully paved route with a
dotted white line dividing its two lanes, we now follow a single, cracked,
unmarked lane through unsigned villages. Soon even the hamlets fade into the
forest. Then, our frail road climbs almost fifteen hundred feet in less than three
kilometres of switchbacks. The forest is dense. Nothing stirs. Even the
imagination has gone still.

5.
To the Government of India, Naxals prey upon the wretched like a parasite. The
powers in Delhi developed Operation Green Hunt to fight them with a
combination of army, police and local militias force-raised from among both
tribal and non-tribal communities. They patrolled towns and roads, established
crude bases at the edges of the forests, and waited for ambush.

That summer in southwestern Odisha, Naxal platoons blew up a school that was
employed as police barracks, torched buildings in villages under government
control, assassinated several suspected police informers, kidnapped construction
workers, looted an armored bank truck, infiltrated a tiger sanctuary, felled
cellular towers and other communications infrastructure, staged a three-day
siege of a police station, and set up people’s courts to humiliate alleged
conspirators against Naxalism. Across the state line, they ambushed a police bus,
killing seventy-six Green Hunters.

The government deployed various surrender policies and amnesty initiatives
while arraying troops in targeted sweeps of easily accessible jungle coordinates.
They snatched suspected Naxals at roving checkpoints. They allegedly faked
encounters: extra-judicially killing Naxal leaders in custody and then staging a
firefight. Once they ambushed seventeen Konds at a committee meeting and flew
them by helicopter to neighbouring Andhra Pradesh for interrogation. In Andhra
they’ve been fighting Naxals for forty years.

6.
I had only recently recovered from amoebic dysentery, which from a serving of a
contaminated water-rich vegetable, perhaps cucumber, bore into the liquid
reserves of my body and nearly drained me in a matter of days. An intrepid
protozoon, probably E. histolytica, rendered me fetal, and for nearly a week I got
no further than the bathroom, except to keep my appointment with the Police
Inspector in Odisha’s capital city, Bhubaneswar, to apply for a visa extension.
This proved in excess both futile and medically ill advised.

A sufferer of dysentery is generally disinclined to eat, while at the same time
characteristically prone to a regular evacuation of precious fluids and energy
stores. Every half hour I visited the toilet to discharge a volley of my insides,
while microscopic trophozoites—active ingredients, spawn of the ameboid—clung
tenaciously to my intestinal tissue. I replenished with bottled water and, when I
could, salted crackers. On the fourth day after becoming symptomatic, I tried to
eat rice. On the fifth day, Sudhir rode up on his motorbike with a bag of apples
and bananas.

Then suddenly, in one final—and, I feel compelled to admit in this context,
supremely satisfying—movement of my bowels, E. histolyca was expelled from
my digestive tract in an alien pod of mucus. The trophozoites gradually died off
from the medication. On the sixth day I was back at work, slimmer than I’d been
in years. A decidedly unbecoming shape, according to Sudhir.

7.
The work that Sudhir and his team do in the forested villages of Kandhamal falls
under the general rubric of development, which might be distilled into an axiom
like “Building the capacity of the poor to rise up out of poverty.” It follows from
primeval societal notions that villagers can’t build a school until they first come to
a collective understanding of the purpose of education; that you can’t plant a tree
without comprehending how you may be exploited for your fruit.

Development also exists on a higher plane. It is the process, Sudhir and his
colleagues show me, of empowering people to express what they already feel. The
Adivasis have no use for what is under the earth, the minerals that outsiders
greedily crave. They feel a unity with their nature that is based on mutual respect
and love, which is not the same thing as ownership and control. How can they
express this to the person who would exploit the same land in the name of profit,
of development of a different kind? The role of development is to make this
expression communicable; to give agency, rather than enduring submissiveness,
to poverty.

That is also, basically, the role of Naxalism.

8.
Several months after the roadblock in the forest, a band of Naxals kidnapped a
Block Development Officer in Malkangiri, a district to the west. They plucked
him, his assistant, his driver and another man from a jeep in the forest near a
tribal village. It was a brash show of strength: Naxals control eighty per cent of
Malkangiri; all but the few towns along the main roads.

But the Naxals botched the PR part of the operation. The snatched bureaucrat—a
Mr. Vineel Krishna—was immensely popular among Adivasis in Odisha. Civil
servants of his rank have a foul reputation in rural India for running their own
kleptocracies, but Mr. Krishna had been using his seat to help Adivasis form local
committees to receive government entitlements—clinics, poverty cards, public-
works programs, preschools—and understand their rights against the
encroachment of mining companies.

The Naxals made demands: the release of seven hundred of their jailed comrades,
including several top leaders; the cessation of the Polavaram Dam project, which
will flood a valley along the Andhra Pradesh border and displace thousands of
Adivasis; the cancellation of the destructive Deomali bauxite mine; and the
retirement of Operation Green Hunt.

In the end, some of the jailed were freed to return to the forests, and the cadres
deposited Krishna and his colleagues in town. Sudhir says the Naxals have been
dented by the ordeal: slashing and burning, they failed to distinguish between
good crops and weeds.

9.
Sudhir and I share a tendency, conversationally, for boyish banalities, which
Sudhir undertakes bilingually for the benefit of our Odia-speaking driver and
cameraman. It melts away time in the intense humidity of the jungle road trip.
Once we carved several hours from the monotony of the pre-monsoon swelter on
the topic of animals, which ones we’d eaten, and how they tasted.

I grew up in Texas, and my family is Newfoundlander. Thus I enjoyed a
comparably adventurous childhood, gustatorily speaking. Most of my trump
cards—seal, moose, peccary—required prolonged narrative contexts in order to
equip Sudhir with the vocabulary for translation. His winning hand—peacock,
elephant, water buffalo—was capped with an ace of spades: the Bengal tiger.

Konds do not hunt tiger, except when the tiger has invaded the village. They
accept the certainty that by their lives they risk transgressing the tiger’s frontier,
just as tigers accept the innate risk of being hunted for encroaching upon Konds.

Once, when Sudhir was about five years old, a tiger killed several goats in the
village one spring, and his grandfather and father led the hunt to destroy it. They
succeeded in killing the tiger, after which according to custom the animal should
be eaten by every family in the village, so that the tiger’s spirit will live in each
house and future tigers will stay away. He pressed me to understand this story as
an emblem of tribal folklore. As if all of us aren’t the heirs of myth. Still, he ate
the tiger.

10.
Naxalism refuses to enjoin systems of oppression and poverty that can’t be
reformed from within. The premise of development is the correlative idea that
progress is a form of defiance. Naxals, Sudhir believes, offer an alternative from
oppression in the form of withdrawal and self-governance. They are guerrillas,
sure. There are also Naxal teachers, poets, logistical supporters, propagandists
and social workers.

If someone were to peer into his life from high above and conclude, easily
enough, that it is revolution Sudhir is fomenting with his development, what
would be the error in labeling him a Naxal?

A few minutes after we sped away from the roadblock, Sudhir instructed the
driver to pull over next to a goatherd, with whom he conversed in Odia. Then we
continued our way home to Berhampur.

That was not a Naxal roadblock, Sudhir told me later. Instead, the cunning of
bandits had arrested our exit from Kandhamal: copycats had dragged fallen logs
across the road to mimic the cadres and freeze their victims in fear. The
goatherd—newsman of the forest—confirmed that no Naxals had been reported
in the area that day.

It was the trees in the road: they were already dead. Naxals cut down living trees,
if for no other reason than because they can. Once, when Sudhir was visiting his
preschools, he came to a roadblock of felled trees. As soon as the driver killed the
engine, a squad of armed Naxals (including two with axes) emerged from the
woods to interrogate him. After some discussion of the work he was doing and
where he was from, Sudhir and his driver were freed to pass.

There is no confusion out here. Naxals have simplified things: you are friend or
enemy. Being that certain about the world allows the Naxals to slip in and out of
the shadows quickly, and has kept their movement alive in India for over four
decades. Sudhir angers at news of Naxal violence, and so his calmness in these
encounters demonstrates his mastery of their ways. Yet they both share a certain
understanding of development, and of the forest.

The Naxals cut down a tree because they can, because it proves their will; cutting
down a tree to block a path is an act of defiance, whereas moving a dead tree onto
a road is a cry of hopelessness.

Darby met this guy Turner at the swimming pool in Squamish and shes brought him around the house a few times. She keeps saying were just friends Dad nothings going on. I dont know who she thinks shes fooling because its pretty clear this Turner guy is biding his time. Trust me I can tell when a boy is love struck and I could tell right away he was on his best behaviour. He even calls me sir. At first glance he seems like the kind of kid who could use a good beating because it might do him some good. But the older I get the more I think people are the way they are no matter what you want to believe. They dont change. And if Turner wants to wear scarves and girly jeans then its no business of mine.

I grew up on this little farm an hour or two outside of Halifax. My old man worked three weeks at sea and three weeks at home on a scallop fishing boat. Those were hard men. He came home reeking like the ocean in a foul mood drenched head to foot and ready to sleep. Hed sit in the living room with rubbing alcohol and hed work it into his joints his elbows and his knees and the base of his back to relieve the pain. And he drank. He drank beer and Johnny Walker and whatever he could get his hands on. If he wasnt doing that then he was in the yard fixing the lawn mower or underneath the car and his fingers were black from grease and his jeans all had holes in them but he refused to buy a new pair. He made Ma patch them. Everyone in his generation was like that theyd work themselves to the bone all summer and hibernate in the winter and live off the dole. One day he said to me Rick do yourself a favor and steer clear of women. We were painting a fence in our backyard and I remember he was drinking a beer and he said if I never met your mother Id be a bloody millionaire. I shouldve cut off my balls and been done with it. Who needs em? All women do is shit out kids and cost you money. I was maybe eight years old when he told me that but I never forgot it.

I showed Darby some old black and white photos. She asked a lot of questions and it was the first time in a long time Id thought about my family. We were dirt poor and theres no way Darby can imagine what that was like. Im glad. Darby never met my brothers. My older brother was Josiah and my younger brother was Albee and both of them passed away before she was born. Josiah was a few years older than me and I followed him around everywhere. One time we climbed up twenty feet into this tree and he showed me a birds nest he found. There were tiny blue eggs in it and he stole one. I dont know what he thought he was going to do with it but then the mother bird came and he said run Ricky run away quick. The bird was dive bombing us and I was running around screaming and then it pecked me in the forehead and I was bleeding everywhere. Josiah was laughing and laughing and for years after that whenever he told that story he would say I peed my pants. When he was feeling really mean sometimes he would call me Little Ricky PeePee. Maybe thats a weird memory to have because he was a good brother. He used to sit on the edge of our bunk bed and read out loud to me and Albee. We read the Hobbit and Aesops Fables and Watership Down. My old man would be screaming in the other room and slamming doors and Josiah would sit there sounding out the words and reading them to us one by one.

One day when Darby was in the bathroom I asked Turner if I could bum some smokes and he gave me a whole pack of Benson and Hedges black king size. Darby would kill me if she knew Im still sneaking smokes but really what difference does it make now? Once you have cancer you have cancer and were all going to die anyway. I patted the kid on the shoulder and I said youre a good man Turner. Once they left for the night to go to some party up in Whistler I sat on my back porch and smoked six in a row looking at the sky. It turned orange and then red like the color of blood and then finally it was dark and I listened to the ocean in the distance. I stuck the butts through the slats in the porch so Darby wouldnt find them later.

Albee was a mommas boy and Im not saying theres anything wrong with that. He used to help Ma bake and he would wear aprons and he never wanted to play outside or do anything dangerous. My old man used to beat him and call him a fag and a sissy and one day he caught him wearing one of Mas dresses and he broke his arm. Just like that. He went into the room and snapped Albees arm between his hands like a twig. He took me with him to the hospital and we told the doctor that Albee fell out of a tree and thats what we told Ma too. Thats when I first knew that I had to get Albee out of there and take him far away.

The worst beating I ever took was in Toronto believe it or not. We moved there in 1972 and both me and Albee got jobs working at this nightclub downtown called Crazy Eights. I was a bartender and Albee served tables and it was a pretty good gig at first. But then Albee started catching shit from some regulars. I could see it happen they would grab his ass or try to trip him and one time they knocked a tray of drinks out of his hands and laughed while he apologized and cleaned them up off the floor. There was this one dirtball who didnt know when to give it a rest. It was early maybe ten on a Friday and I came over to tell him he wasnt welcome anymore right in front of his friends and I stood there until he got up from the table and walked out the front door. Because he left with no big fuss I forgot about it but then a week later when I was closing up around two in the morning he jumped me in the alley. There was nobody around and he shoved me against a brick wall with his arm against my neck then he broke my nose with the butt of his hand. I didnt get a single swing in and pretty soon I was on the ground and he was kicking me in the face and then he dumped a garbage can all over me and said fuck you faggot. That was almost forty years ago but when I eat my jaw still clicks from where it was broken.

The doctors told me Im not allowed to drive anymore because of the chemo. But once I got out of my bedroom and pulled on my boots I climbed in my truck and headed down to the police station with my shovels and rakes rattling around in the back. It was dark and there werent any cars on the road and at one point I started coughing and swung into oncoming traffic but I made it there in one piece. When I came into the lobby this young police woman told me Darby was getting processed downstairs. I said I have to see her where is she? I mustve been quite a sight there in my robe but I didnt care and I said I want to see my daughter. I want to see my daughter and I want to see her now.

These days things are different for guys like Albee but back then the world wasnt a very nice place. Heroin was everywhere and once he got started he never stopped. My own brother was a junkie. A few times he came home and his face was mashed to shit. Once I locked him in his bedroom for a weekend and tried to get him to detox and he screamed and clawed at the walls and he told me he hated me and threw himself against the door until it splintered and I was worried he was going to hurt himself. There was nothing that could stop him and then within six months he was dead and there was nothing I could do about that either. The last time I saw him in the hospital he looked like a skeleton and he had all these scabs on his face and he kept saying sorry to me. He said sorry Rick and I told him he had nothing to be sorry about and he held both my hands then he cried for a while and fell asleep. That was the last time I ever talked to him.

All these sad memories I dont know if I really want Darby to know about them. But shes a grown woman now and what can I do? Sooner or later you know youve got to rub your kids faces in shit. Tell them the world is a violent and stupid and terrible place and nothing makes sense to anyone. What a message. Youd think after the universe takes away one of your brothers maybe it would ease up on you for a while. But about a year after Albee died in Toronto I got a letter from Ma. Josiah had been drinking in Halifax and he was always a fighter so one Saturday I guess he talked to the wrong girl and in the scuffle a piece of broken glass lodged in his neck and by the time anyone realized what was going on he bled out right there on the floor of the bar. For a long time I wondered what he thought about while he was lying there and if he knew it was coming. Maybe it came on suddenly and he didnt have time to be afraid. I hope so.

Ive never loved anyone as much as I love my daughter. Im not a touchy feely person but I can say that because its true. And if I thought it wouldve done any good I wouldve gone on a rampage through that fucking police station. I wouldve bellowed at the top of my lungs and overturned desks and smashed windows like some goddamn gorilla. But lets face it the chemo took all my strength along with my hair and Im lucky I could even stand up. Sooner or later you have to stop fighting. The police woman told me I would have to wait a few moments before I could see Darby. They wouldnt tell me what she was charged with. They told me she could be released on bail into my custody but first I would have to take a seat. The police woman said it just like that. She said please sir can you take a seat?

My sister Tanya was born right after the second world war. I didnt hear about her until I was nearly grown up and moved out of the house. Josiah told me Ma used to hold birthday parties for Tanya after she died but when my old man found out he put a stop to that with the back of his hand. Nobody talked about Tanya not in his house. To hear Josiah tell it Tanya was the light of our old mans life and he went around showing her off to everyone in church carrying her and kissing her and nuzzling her like nothing couldve made him happier. I cant picture it. I wonder if my life wouldve been different with a sister and when I try to imagine it I just cant. Tanya wouldve been an old woman by now but she died when she was a little baby just shy of three months. You could live to be a thousand years old and that would never make sense. My parents were dirt poor living in a rented basement newly married in Halifax and the gas fireplace sprung a leak and the next morning my old man found Tanya black in her crib not breathing. Thats pain. Sometimes I think if anything ever happened to Darby knock on wood maybe I wouldve ended up a bitter wreck like my old man. I think it wouldve broken me.

When Darby came around the corner her hair was a mess all blond around her face. I guess they gave her some clothes because she was wearing a grey sweater and some grey sweatpants that said VANCOUVER POLICE on them. She trudged out and she said you have to take me home I need to get out of here. Then she cried into my chest for a while and I held her and when I saw the police woman looking at me I didnt care we were making a scene. Later Darby told me the story how some party got broken up and she was hazy on the details but she was really drunk when she took a swing at a cop. Can you believe it? My feisty little daughter trying to punch a cop. In a weird way I was proud. I guess Turner took a run for it and disappeared into the woods and Darby was alone on the concrete in handcuffs with her face against the ground. She told me what happened sitting in the parking lot and she seemed tired and embarrassed. I told her it didnt matter what happened not really as long as she was okay. You get to be my age and you understand things happen and really they dont matter. She was safe. We drove home down the highway and the headlights stabbed through the fog all the way home.

Will Johnson is a writer from Halifax. His work has appeared in a number of Canadian literary journals, including Little Fiction, The Fiddlehead and Prairie Fire, as well as in the anthology Somebody’s Child. Check out his website at www.goodwilljohnson.com or follow him on Twitter @goodwilljohnson

I’m having a sarcastic moment with a tin, the colour of robin’s egg blue. I’m enamoured with this rectangular container, its edges rounded, its paint worn and its body slightly dented. I clutch the tin and feel something unexplainable. Under its smooth folk art exterior, outside of its practicality, and under its lid, lives a dirty history. “Minöséget a dolgozóknak. Yeah, right,” I’m still talking to myself. “Füszerétékesitő Nemzeti Vállalat.”

“Are you going to share the joke?” my husband asks.

“Look at this!” I shove the tin in his face. “Do you see what this says?”

“No!” he says jerking his head back. “I can’t read it if you hold it an inch from my face.”

“Sorry,” I answer. “I just get so pissed off sometimes.”

“I didn’t notice,” he says. “That’s a nice tin. What does it say?” Ken grabs the tin and tries to pronounce what I had just read. “Foozere-”

“Don’t even try.” I snatch it back. The word has fifteen letters in it and even I can’t say it easily.

“Look at this lovely red paprika. It looks hand-painted.” I turn the tin in my hand. “And there’s one on the other side, too. And look! A pot of chicken paprikás with noodles.

There’s even a drumstick!” I’m beside myself.

The drawings on the tin are simple in their execution and yet charming. Even more charming, is the pretty young woman dressed in traditional Hungarian attire. She wears a full pleated skirt, a hand-embroidered apron, a kerchief on her head and red slippers on her feet. This pretty woman lovingly tends a large caldron of red broth suspended by a stick over an open fire.

Budapest. We’re in a small, crammed antique shop with a spiral staircase leading up to an overflowing second floor, its wares spilling down to ground level.

“Feel free to go up,” says the middle-aged owner. He’s friendly, unlike the sullen, rude shop attendants I’m used to from my visits to Hungary in the seventies as a child.

“I will.” I smile shyly as I search for the price on the tin.

“It’s from the late nineteen forties,” says the owner offhandedly from under his glasses.
4,800 forints. I’m astonished. Almost twenty-five dollars and not a speck of paprika in it. The average Hungarian worker today earns only five dollars an hour. I remember as a child how cheap everything seemed to my mother and I when we converted our Canadian dollars for forints and headed out shopping to stock up on everything from leather gloves to aluminum pressure cookers, our relatives painfully aware of their meager currency and our ability to buy all we needed.

My mother alone packed our suitcases full for the return trip to Canada. Each day, stuffing one more item into suitcases already bursting at the seams. Another bag of Szegedi paprika, another 50 decagrams of ground poppy seeds, five more wooden spoons, the almost forgotten noodle cutters and another length of spicy sausage. Nervously, the entire family–my mother, my aunts, my cousins and I balanced our suitcases on the bathroom scale. And once we took our hands off the handle in order to get an accurate reading, the suitcase would at first quiver, then wobble like a watermelon and then quickly fall off making it nearly impossible to read the needle on the scale in time.

“Did you see what it said?”

“Twenty-six kilos.”

“It looked like twenty-seven.”

“Twenty-six and a half.”

“Take something out.”

“I’m not taking anything out!” my mother insisted, while the rest of us stressed over airline regulations. Everything in the socialist world was stringently controlled and transgressions readily punished. But for my mother everything in the suitcase was precious. These things were bits and pieces of a life she had left behind.

Still clutching the tin, I inspect old Soviet memorabilia and whisper to Ken, “These are western prices. What is he thinking?” I feel ashamed of my remark. As though ‘he’, meaning the shop owner, should be keeping the prices low for my sake. I had hoped to snag some great deals, to fill my suitcase full again but at these prices I have to choose carefully. Why do I think that Hungarians in this new economy are not entitled to eke out a living from my desire to pillage their past?

On the lid is the evidence of the crimes of Communism. A clue to the changes my mother described that took place after the Soviets secured post-war Hungary. There is a drawing of three men, lined up perfectly, their bodies in slight profile. They look in the same direction. Presumably to the future. One is a worker, with the famous Soviet hammer flung over his right shoulder. The middle man, in all probability, is the foreman. And I’m guessing the man on the right, wearing a suit and spectacles with a folder tucked under his arm, handles the accounts. Collectively, they hold the Hungarian coat of arms. In the background are factories with smoldering smoke stacks. Underneath is the caption that halted me when I first picked up the tin.

“Minöséget a dolgozóknak.”

“So … are you going to tell me what it means?” asks Ken.

“Quality for the workers. State inspected paprika. To Make Valuable Spices National Company.” My initial tone of sarcasm is sparked by my mother’s insistence that the quality of everything deteriorated with the installation of a Soviet satellite government. Quality of life eluded all but official party members who drove sleek, black luxury vehicles, the interiors of which where upholstered floor-to-ceiling with crushed red velvet. The state meticulously inspected everything, from a person’s thoughts, to their mail. So why would anyone be relieved to know that even their paprika was state inspected?

Shepherds and horsemen had been using the pungent plant to spice their stews since the invasion of the Turks in the 1600s. By the 19th century paprika was a symbol of national pride. In 1937, Szent-Györgyi Albert won a Nobel Prize for his discovery that paprika was unusually rich in vitamin C. So for what reason, I ask, would the Soviets need to establish a state-run company ‘To Make Valuable Spices National’? Did no one know how to inspect, let alone grow paprika in this country before the arrival of the Soviets?

Whenever I discover examples of Communist domination I become my mother: bitter, belligerent and bound. My mind becomes obsessive and I see an ugly past when I look in the mirror. I wince at my down-turned mouth and re-live the sensations she experienced. I wonder just how much disdain for the Soviets I inherited by consuming vast amounts of state inspected paprika?

I want to put the tin back on the shelf. I feel as though I would betray my mother by buying it. But the paprikas are alluring on the blue background. A simple, simple paprika tin, exploited and manipulated to infiltrate the kitchens of the population. Each day, people were force-fed a new identity. They swallowed the lies by the spoonful, their guts bloated. The paprika that once nourished them, was now poisoned. Poisoned by a regime that intended to destroy their psyches slowly over time. It hails from the time before the red star began appearing on the Hungarian coat of arms, when the Soviets were just learning how to brainwash the population. This tin is a relic, a testament to the moment before everything turned really ugly in Hungary.

This tin was just the beginning.

But worse was still to come.

I want this dented, blue tin because it substantiates my mother’s stories of how wretched life was under Communism. If I can learn, then I can mitigate my guilt for having been blessed with a life of opportunity and abundance. And when she says to me, “They were trying to turn us into them. But we would never be them.” I can answer, “I understand mother. I wish you’d never had to live through that.”

I take the tin to the counter and start to bargain and when I shave off a few hundred forints, I hand over my money.

“How’s business?” I ask in Hungarian.

“You are not from here,” says the owner.

“No, I was born in Canada,” I answer apologetically.

“You have opportunities in Canada,” he says.

“It’s a good country. But Hungary’s great, too.”

“I’ll tell you,” he says. “Before we could eat, but we couldn’t talk. Now we can talk, but we can’t eat.”

My childhood memories are in grey tones, like a black-and-white from the early 1960s. The people, the buildings, the sky, the entire landscape. The only colour I remember is the bright yellow of the number two tram, that still hugs the Danube today. In those days, the tram was appointed with sullen ticket inspectors wearing dull, spiritless uniforms, working dull, spiritless jobs and going home to dull, spiritless concrete apartments.

Now, instead of grey crumbling buildings wounded by bullet holes, I see colour for the first time in Budapest. I hear people talking freely on the streets, in their homes and in the shops. But I realize now that even Hungarians are paying western prices while earning Eastern Bloc wages.

“We still don’t know what we’re doing.” The owner wraps my tin in newspaper.

“This has to be better than what you had before,” I say gently.

“It’ll never be better in my time.” He hands me my parcel. “Thank you for visiting my shop. Please come again.”

I take the parcel and tuck it in my bag. It finds its way into my suitcase. Protectively wrapped in a towel, the tin comes home to Canada. It finds a resting place on the kitchen counter where, like in a museum, it’s admired by visitors.

I call my mother for what must be the tenth time in the past five years to ask for her gulyás recipe. I could have written it down by now, but I want her to tell me again from the beginning. “How many tablespoons of paprika?” I ask.

I want her to know how much it means to me to get it just right. I get it right for her. At eighty-one her fingers are gnarled and her heart squeezes her chest. But she’s still beautiful. And battered. Like the blue tin.

Rita Bozi has publications in WritingRaw.com, Pages of Stories, FFWD Weekly and has contributed to CBC Radio. She is writing Uprising, a memoir and Hungry, High and Hammered, a short story collection. This past summer she attended The Humber School for Writers. Her co-written play 52 Pick Up, was recently translated into Icelandic.

It was all glances and smiles, cocking her head at an almost imperceptible angle through the half-opened door. The man in blue was already blushing and they hadn’t exchanged a word. He stood before her with a brown cardboard box the size of a Kindergarten boy.

“This parcel is for Les Montague.” The letter carrier read from a yellow paper affixed to the metal clipboard in his left hand. He was sweating. From his exertion and the summer heat rather than Kate’s magnetic lure, she surmised. An industrial-grade metal dolly wedged under the box.

“Our downstairs neighbour.” Les was Kate and Sean’s tenant. Sean thought him bizarre but Kate knew Les was just misunderstood. He rarely left his room. Les worked from home like Kate. She was an accountant; she didn’t know exactly what Les did. “I think he’s home right now. If not, can I sign for it?”

He looked down at the mustard form to verify the status of a particular checkbox. “I can actually leave it on the porch. No signature required.” He looked up, adjusted his cap and made eye contact with Kate for the first time. Brown eyes. “It’s pretty heavy.” He handed her a few smaller envelopes from his sack.

“Do you think you could bring it inside? I have no idea what’s in there, and it’s supposed to get pretty muggy today.” The only time Kate had been successful with her mailman machinations, the letter carrier was a woman. Her name was Verlia and they had a three-month affair last summer.

He put down his mailbag, stood behind the brown box, held it in place with his left hand and tilted the dolly back with his right. “Can you hold the door, ma’am?” Behind him, a little boy in green shorts straddled a tricycle, and sped across the sidewalk past the Canada Post truck. Two older girls with meticulous braids loped behind him chatting. Kate stepped past the brown wooden door and onto the grey-painted slats of the empty porch. She held the screen door open and the man pushed the box into her foyer. She liked his smell.

“Take it right to the door halfway down the hall, past the living room.” She followed him inside, dropping the letters on the hall bureau as she passed. They stood together at the top of the stairs. Kate put her hand on his shoulder.

“I know this is asking a lot, but would you mind taking it down the stairs and leaving it in front of that door?” There were only a dozen steps, but he did say it was heavy. And Kate had felt a lot more tired than usual lately.

Without a word, he leaned back and rolled the dolly downward, bending at his knees and moving slow. She could see the package was weighty from the way it rocked a bit on each step. The mail carrier had a patch of wetness on his sweaty lower back. Kate gazed as if it were a Rorschach inkblot, but couldn’t decide what it resembled to her. At the bottom, he yanked the dolly out and pulled it back up the stairs. He stopped at the top.

“What’s your name?”

“Rish, ma’am.”

“Thanks a ton, Rish. I’m Kate.”

The box sat below them at the entrance to Les’s basement apartment.

The intermittent thunks from downstairs were annoying the piss out of Sean. Les must’ve been to IKEA. Sean decided to check the garbage later for boxes. There was no point in asking the weirdo, who kept to himself to the point of hermitage. Sean couldn’t picture Les shopping; he’d rarely even seen him leave the basement. They had inherited Les two years ago when Kate’s dad moved to New Zealand to be a fag, and gave them the house.

“He won’t give you any trouble,” Mr Verdure had said when made the offer to them. Sean doubted his words, though. The gift house felt like a subtle indictment of Sean’s own abilities to provide for Kate, or his failure to sire him a grandchild. As long as Les the basement gnome wasn’t engaged in some kind of major construction, he thought.

Sean stripped down in the bathroom upstairs and turned on the hot and cold taps. He pulled the shower curtain across and soaped himself up, paying attention to his thick blond hair and his rank underarms and dirty ass. Fencing practice made him sweat and stink, but he preferred to shower at home, even though the clawfoot tub was small and he always got water on the floor. Sean was built tall and wide like a refrigerator. Negotiating the bathroom of this place made him feel like a gorilla accessing the driver’s seat of a Cooper Mini. But something about the shower room at the Salle D’Armes unnerved him too. The men’s changing facilities were so spare, the tiled floors so cold and ancient and cracked. Each shower head a mere nozzle jutting from a connected section of metal piping, as a dozen guys scrubbed down a few feet apart, fully exposed. The water was always too hot. Something of the room made Sean think of a gas chamber, though he had never seen one.

The woman at the front desk knew not to give him a towel when he came. He thought he noticed her staring on a few occasions.

“She wants your piggy in her blanket,” said his brother Daniel, who was also Sean’s fencing buddy. Danny sometimes talked bitchy like one of those drag queens. RuPaul—only short, freckled, skinny and white. Daniel and Sean looked nothing alike.

“Bro, didn’t she see my ring?” Sean thought chicks who went after married men were scummy. He wasn’t interested.

He poured a capful of Head and Shoulders and massaged his scalp. The banging started up again. It persisted for a minute, then stopped, then picked back up again. Jackass. Sean felt the urge to go downstairs and build the Bennø CD rack or Bërgsbo bookcase for Les himself. Then instruct him to load it up quietly. Sean got a feeling Les was intimidated by his build and demeanor, or at least he hoped so. Clearly not enough to fear his wrath for making a racket so late though. This guy’s got no respect.

“God damn fuck. Jesus fuck. What the fuck. Fuck.”

Sean muttered as he rinsed his hair then turned off the water. He grabbed a towel and pawed at himself with it. He pulled on a pair of grey gym shorts and a red tanktop, stepped on a pile of Kate’s bras and panties on the floor, left the room, grabbed the wooden banister and pulled himself downward two steps at a time. The phone rang and he ignored it, reaching the bottom of the stairs and rapping three times on Les’s basement door.

I’ve got my adult Nuk from Pacifiers Я Us in my mouth, but I’d so much rather be suckling a woman’s breast. Especially if she’s lactating.

My former therapist, Dr Zirknitz, says I like to dress like a baby at 33 because I abandoned my girlfriend and newborn son when I was 18. I think that’s simplistic and predictable. I believe you can like something for no reason, or at least no significant reason. Milly and the boy still live in Hull. I send cheques every month.

I’ve got my favourite xl onesie on. It’s black with yellow rings around the collar and arm- and legholes. It has a picture of a giraffe on it and I bought it on eBay for twenty-five dollars. The reason I picked it is that it reminds me of the home uniform of the Pittsburgh Penguins. I like dark colours. Nothing too flashy.

There are forty-six baby outfits in my closet. You can afford to indulge a little bit when you’re a highly paid human-rights consultant. I help people challenge mistreatment at the hands of the municipal, provincial and federal governments. Right now I’m working on the case of a refugee who’s a part-time postal worker. She was sexually harassed—a pair of managers ganged up on her in the postal-sortation plant at the end of the night shift. I hate this kind of unspeakable bullshit and I am very good at avenging it. We are going to win this case.

I’m moving out of this dungeon in a month; I just gave Kate my notice this morning. But some things can’t wait. My adult-sized crib was delivered this morning. I didn’t see it till after dinner time because I was meeting the lawyers in Avizeh’s case. It took me two hours to put the gorgeous contraption together, including an interruption from that meathead Sean. But I followed the instructions, and it holds my weight. I’m laying in it right now. I’ve got two rooms down here, in addition to my own bathroom. The living room looks like any seventies rec room, but the bedroom is my baby haven. I’ve managed to keep that obnoxious goon from stepping too far onto my turf. Kate’s father used to leave me alone. He was a very polite man.

I used to think I took a basement apartment because of shame or guilt about my adult-baby lifestyle. I started to see Zirknitz in an effort to sort through those feelings. What a waste of time. The old fool thinks everything in my life—my relationship to my mother, my choice of employment, my thoughts on my own penis size—ties into my life as an ab. I think it’s all bullshit. I’m moving into an expensive condo; I can afford it. So what if the movers balk at moving a crib that holds a man who’s five-nine and weighs 205? I don’t need to hide. I do, however, need my diaper changed.

A trio of firm knocks on the door. Perfect timing.

Kate had missed her period for the first time in a long, long time. Nineteen days late. She was usually like clockwork.

“How was the flight, Dad?” Auckland to Sydney. For a funeral.

“Long, Kat. The movie made me cry. I’m not up for this.” Over Skype from his hotel room, Kate’s father’s voice had a computerized texture to it, like the chorus of Styx’s “Mr Roboto.” He had dated a man from Sydney for a year but it didn’t work out. David was a very large man and one day he just didn’t wake up. This would be the first time her father had seen him since the breakup. She didn’t know whether to pray for a closed casket or an open one. At very least, a sturdy one.

“I’m sorry.” Kate was organizing a pile of financial ledgers while she talked. As she put the top half of the stack down, the phone cord strummed against her left nipple. It felt sore.

“I could use some good news for a change, that’s for sure.”

She took this as her prompt. “I think I might be pregnant.”

His voice sped up, rattling off questions without waiting for reply. “Are you sure? How do you feel? Do you want to keep it? I didn’t think Sean had it in him. Always figured that dick was shooting blanks.”

“I’m not sure.” Kate fanned herself with a balance sheet off her desk. The central air was on the fritz again. She had asked Sean to take a look, but she would just call the repair guys herself later today.

Her father’s voice cracked. “I love you, Katty. Whatever you want to do, I support you. I love you so much…” The impending funeral, she thought. That’s why he’s over-emotional. She decided to pick up a pregnancy test. And make a doctor’s appointment.

“Feel better, Dad. Call me again after the service, okay?”

Kate traced in her mind the times she’d messed around recently. Sean’s brother Danny had put it in for a few strokes before she’d got a condom on him. Kate put the phone down and sat her client’s financial papers back on the desk. She needed to get outside. A walk to the bank. Get the rent cheque and deposit it. She walked down stairs and knocked three times on Les Montague’s door.

Sean’s last client was a plump lady named Mitsuyo who worked for the government. She came to Modern Fitness on her flex hours and Sean put Mitsuyo through her paces. The elliptical machine, an increasing number of push-ups. She would never be a supermodel, but he watched as a seed of new confidence germinated within her. That’s what made Sean feel good.

He wore his gym shorts and tank home. Christ was it humid. The front door was cracked when he got there. Got to deal with that busted central air, Sean thought. He wondered if Kate could take a break. For the first time in ages, he felt horny. Maybe it was the heat. He was developing a visible, potent chub.

Sean picked up the handful of letters on the hallway table. Three for them and two for Les. He went downstairs to slide them under the door, but found it ajar. Sean poked his head inside, and was startled to hear the sound of a crying infant. “What the…”

The noise came from the corner bedroom. Not bothering to knock, Sean shoved the door and strode through the basement ducking his head for the low ceiling. Something was wrong. If Les is hurting a kid, I’ll strangle him. Sean’s rod stopped its earlier throb and his balls moved protectively upward. He knew something was sick about that guy. He pushed the bedroom door wide open.

The room smelled vaguely of fresh piss. Pastel blue walls festooned with a cartoon border: A recurring image of Spongebob Squarepants chased by an electric eel wearing a lime-coloured baseball cap. The balding freak knelt inside a gargantuan wooden bedstead, balancing himself on the frame atop the vertical slats, wearing an enormous black terrycloth jumper. Kate stood shirtless next to the Brobdingnagian crib with one breast cupped in her hand. Les Montague slowly lapped at her tender aureole with a long flat tongue. He paused mid-lick, and offered Sean an infantile simper.

Sean’s remnant semi-erection turned to sand in his shorts. Kate stood still, swiveling her neck at an acute angle to face him.

“I’m having a baby,” she said. “I don’t think it’s yours.”

Shawn Syms has completed a short-fiction collection and is currently at work on a novel. His fiction has been shortlisted for the Journey Prize, and his writing has appeared in nearly fifty publications including the Globe and Mail, National Post, Joyland, The Rumpus, PRISM international and the Winnipeg Review.

Illustration by Dave Donald

Why we should never feel bad about what we read

“I keep telling myself that this winter I’m going to re-read In Search of Lost Time. I can’t believe how long it’s been.”

“Oh. Yeah. Um. Me too, it’s been … way too long since … that.”

“But you have read Proust, right?”

“Proust? Have I read him? What a silly … I mean, obviously—hey, I’m going to grab a drink, do you want one?”

You can insert anything into the place of Proust in this hypothetical conversation, be it another classic, the latest CanLit triumph, the steamiest or most thrilling commercial hit or perhaps the newest smartypants trade non-fiction in the vein of Malcolm Gladwell et al. The point is, even— or maybe especially—those who most love reading and books seem to be plagued by the sneaking suspicion that we should be reading something other than what we are; that whatever we’re reading is wrong.

The wrong choice, the wrong genre, the wrong level (high-brown vs. low-brow, commercial vs. literary) or the wrong period (we’re behind on what’s new, we haven’t read enough of the classics—the list goes on), the wrong demographic. Do I read enough books by women? By queer writers? By aboriginal writers? Is my bookcase politically, socially or intellectually compromising? Am I geographically lopsided? Does it matter if I missed the Russian novelists all together? In a completely non-scientific sampling, I surveyed a few bibliophiles on their guiltiest “missed book”. Responses ranged from In the Skin of a Lion to “anything by Gabriel Garcia Marquez” and from Trainspotting to Ulysses. Expressions of genuine pain clouded my friends’ faces as they ‘fessed up. People who love to read and to talk about reading were wincing over the fact that they hadn’t read, well, everything.

And then there is the temptation to define ourselves not by what we read, but by what we refuse to read, a sort of negative and combative impulse that makes us focus not on what we love about books but what takes away from our enjoyment.

Reading is, at its core, a leisure activity. We gain knowledge, joy, catharsis and empathy from reading. And yet when reading, a solitary pursuit, becomes interactive—when we talk about it with one another—it is suddenly fraught with anxiety and guilt. Everyone is in the same boat, minus the perhaps imaginary spectre of a few maddeningly well-read people. But if we’re all together in our anxiety, why do we torment ourselves and one another? Guilt is rarely a productive emotion; it is more immobilizing than motivating.

That being said, positive peer pressure can sometimes have happy consequences when it comes to reading. Book clubs democratically give each member a chance to select a title, meaning readers who might never have picked up Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town or The Sisters Brothers may find themselves pleasantly surprised. I remember reading 1984 overnight in high school—I literally stayed up all night on a school night—after fibbing to a (totally dreamy) boy that I had already read it. By dawn the boy was forgotten and all I could think of was Winston and, of course, the cage of rats.

Perhaps the important thing isn’t why or when you read a book, but how. As long as you are willing to engage with a book on its own merits and read generously, it doesn’t matter whether you’re reading it because it won the Giller Prize and you don’t want to be left out at the water cooler or because the picture of Fabio on the jacket made you feel tingly.

Besides, no one can read it all—not even if you choose a narrow focus by country, period or demographic. Choice should be delightful, not debilitating. The secret of it is that there is no wrong book to read. Even if you’re re-reading Harry Potter on the subway. So maybe we should take the opportunity to cast aside the textbooks inside of which we’re hiding our comics books, and embrace the fact that we can strive to expand our reading habits without beating ourselves up—and that most importantly, guilt adds nothing to the reading experience.

Grace O’Connell is the author of the novel Magnified World. She lives in Toronto, where she works as a writer and editor.