What Happened this Summer

This collection of short stories by Governor General's Award winning author Paul Yee takes readers into the lives of Chinese teens in Canada, who must deal with their cultural backgrounds as well as battle parents over schooling, careers and peer relationships. Like all teens, they grapple daily with issues around sexuality, religion and fitting in.

This book speaks to many young adolescents who struggle to balance family traditions with the lure of urban culture. Whether they are immigrants or not, teenagers can draw text to self-connections through this powerful story of one Chinese adolescent boy — a complementary class activity would be to encourage students to tell their own stories in healthy class discussions or through writing their own personal narratives.

This novel is a collection of stories of Chinese-Canadian teenagers dealing with the conflict arising from being a teen in modern Canada and trying to live within their families’ traditional Chinese culture. The stories involve a group of teens loosely connected by being part of Toronto’s Chinese-Canadian community. Each chapter can be read as a stand-alone story. Most of the teens in the stories are immigrants; some were born in Canada to immigrant parents. The stories deal realistically with the issues these teens face, and do not flinch from dealing with harsh problems.

Paul Yee’s other books include Ghost Train and The Bone Collector’s Son. He has won the Governor General’s Award, the City of Vancouver Book Award and a BC. Book Prize.

Caution: Coarse language, descriptions of drug use and sexual content.

Like Tales from Gold Mountain and Dead Man’s Gold, Paul Yee’s latest collection of interrelated short stories captures the struggles of the Chinese in the New World. But this collection marks a shift in more ways than one. The time is not the nineteenth, but the twentyfirst century; the locale is no longer the West Coast, but Toronto and its suburbs; and the immigrants are teens. Although some of these young people are attracted to Chinatown and Kensington markets, more often their world consists of high school halls with rows of lockers and an “outdoor market of sour lunch smells” and “too many posters of Hello Kitty.”

Adolescent questioning, cynicism and angst are compounded by issues of racism, family obligation, the tensions of two cultures, and struggles with language. These teens are still electronically connected to their friends back home, a home where they knew the language, where teachers praised them, where they knew the song lyrics! Da-ren, studying for the dreaded TOEFL exam, finds that the small words are the most difficult aspect of learning English. And it is the small words that layer the complexities of these stories. Words like fate and gay and family and love.

In the final (and title) story, the supernatural creeps coldly in to a summer on the beach. But there are quiet ghosts in the other stories too: an 18-year-old becomes a father when he marries to pay a family debt of honour; Simon discovers that his birth-Mum killed herself so that he would have a better life in North America with his father’s family.

Yee – a keen listener and observer of life in the high schools and the malls – provides a sometimes humorous but ultimately haunting glimpse into the fraught world of Chinese-Canadian teens.

The award-winning author takes us into the lives of Chinese-Canadian teenagers and their struggles to balance traditional parent expectations against the pull of today’s culture.