Family Resemblances

The conflicting pulls of private dreams and family expectations lie at the heart of these two debut novels by young Canadian women.

Beth Levy, the young adult narrator of Sidura Ludwig’s Holding My Breath, begins her story with her own parents’ wedding in Winnipeg in 1947. In the moments after the ceremony, as the couple, Goldie and Saul, enjoy a few moments of privacy, Saul expresses the dream that will henceforth be the guiding vision for this couple’s shared life: a three-storey house that Goldie has already had her eye on, with a covered porch and an eat-in kitchen, and lilac bushes and tomatoes growing in the back yard. As Goldie hears her new husband talk about this house that he promises they will live in one day she feels herself falling in love with him all over again. At that moment, Beth tells us, “My father smelled like everything she thought she wanted in her life—the McAdam Avenue house, four children, a membership to Hadassah.”

It is an uncomplicated dream of material comfort and security, and in the case of Beth’s mother it really does appear to be all she wants from this life. The couple does not immediately attain the McAdam Avenue House—that takes them about a decade of hard work—and the four children never materialize—Goldie cannot have any more children after Beth—but the form and shape of the dream never change, and Goldie’s bitterness and despair about those aspects of it that are delayed or denied to her altogether are matched by the complete, uncomplicated and unambivalent satisfaction she experiences when she does finally attain the house and the Hadassah membership that mark her entry into the middle class of Winnipeg’s post-war Jewish community. So complete is Goldie’s satisfaction, in fact, that she cannot imagine any other sort of dream taking hold in those she loves and she demands from them absolute conformity to the system and culture that made the fulfillment of her own aspirations possible.

It is a particularly arid culture that Ludwig portrays, one that is materially comfortable but bereft of spirit, imagination and life. Conformity is the value held most dearly by Beth’s mother, and there is little that nourishes Beth in the culture to which she is meant to conform. The tamest of her personal dreams are ignored, struck down and belittled. The only future for her that is deemed possible by her mother is marriage to another Jewish man from this same community, the purchase of a house and the production of children of the same mould. Even work possibilities are limited. Beth dreams of the galaxies, of becoming an astronomer; her mother ignores her or tells her she can be a teacher. Alternative models for the life of a Jewish woman do not exist in Beth’s world. Her one aunt who pursues a life on stage comes to a bad end at the hands of untrustworthy men. Another aunt who remains unmarried personifies the life of the traditional, pitiable old maid: mousy, quiet, endlessly grieving past deaths. It is a world so lacking in imagination and so stifling to the individuals within it who dare to vary slightly that it would seem like a caricature of 1950s and early 1960s conventionality if not for Ludwig’s honest, clear writing and patient, compassionate observations that render the characters and their insular world entirely believable.

In her impressive and moving first novel, The End of East, Jen Sookfong Lee also portrays conflict between individual aspirations and family obligations, conflict so extreme in some of its manifestations as to seem at times like sacrifice of the individual on the altar of family and tradition. The narrator of this novel is Sammy Chan, a woman in her twenties who fled her family in Vancouver for what seemed like freedom in Montreal. After six years in Montreal, though, she has found that she cannot keep a relationship, finish school or find a job. She returns to Vancouver for a sister’s wedding, stays on to care for a mother who seems at first either mad or mean or a nasty combination of the two, and begins the difficult but necessary process of integrating the weight and complexity of her family’s past with her current life and hopes for her own future.

Sammy’s grandfather, Seid Quan, immigrated to Vancouver from China in 1913 and, like the thousands of other Chinese men who came to this country in the early years of the century, he passed almost his entire adult life living alone in Vancouver’s Chinatown, working all the while to send money back to the village to repay his debt to them, to support a wife he would get to see only a handful of times at intervals of many years, to support the children born from his infrequent visits home whom he would not get to see or know until they were grown, or nearly grown.

In spare, unsentimental language Lee creates a vivid picture of Chinatown in the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, of the poisonous racism of the larger white culture of Vancouver, of the loneliness—but also the camaraderie and support—in the lives of these men who subjugate any hopes and dreams they may have once held for the sake of families that in many cases will never yield to them the supposed benefits of family such as love and a bulwark against the loneliness of life.

Sammy’s grandfather is not the only member of the Quan clan whose life has been determined and shaped primarily by the demands of family and community. Her mother, Siu Sang, is a beautiful young woman with a head full of romance fantasies when she arrives in Canada from Hong Kong in the 1950s to marry Sammy’s father, Pon Man. While the marriage is loving, the demands on Siu Sang from her mother-in-law and her rapidly growing family overwhelm her, crowd out any sense of who she might have been, and might ever wanted to have been, and ultimately destroy her sanity, if not her very soul. Pon Man has also lived a life determined by others. He came to Canada against his will at the age of 15 to live with a father he didn’t know and would never be able to love. Each character in this novel is fully drawn, the dimensions of their conflicts, hopes and losses revealed in a way that is searing and memorable.

While it is very much in vogue these days to bemoan the breakdown of traditional values, both these novels portray the often harrowing price that was exacted on individuals in the service of those values. Both books end with their narrators on the cusp of their adult lives. Whether they will ultimately be more successful than their foremothers at integrating the conflicting demands of individual aspiration and traditional obligations is something the authors leave their readers to ponder.