A short novel following the life of an elderly Chinese woman in Toronto's Chinatown/Kensington Market area, as personal tragedy strikes, and gentrification pushes her community out into Scarborough. The style is impressionistic, changing font sizes—drifting in and out of poetry—and intensely personal, to the point of visceral. I felt this story like a chest wound. Which is not to say its tragedy porn, or just a weepy. Wong wants us to know what living in that place and time was like, to preserve a record of it what it tasted like, smelled like, felt like. I was initially wondering why the Chinese dialogue was written out in the Roman alphabet then translated into English in brackets, but Wong said in an interview that she wanted to preserve the main character's dialect, Toisan/Taishanese, which used to be ubiquitous in North America, but is declining as the elders pass away, and newer immigrants speak Mandarin or Cantonese. It's a portrait, an elegy and a celebration of what was, even when what was could be heartbreakingly difficult.

Beautiful pen and ink drawings take up the last third (or so) of the book, chronicling the neighbourhood as it was, including the main character walking through it. The e-book version compressed these quite a bit, so I'd like to at least lay hands on a physical copy at some point to look at them more closely. The artist has since left Toronto, his heart broken by what the city did to his neighbourhood.