What We All Long For - FIRST IMPRESSIONS

What We All Long For - FIRST IMPRESSIONS

I finished Dionne Brand's What We All Long For because it is an AI book club selection. I would not call it easy reading. It took a while to hook my interest in these second-generation immigrant young people trying to make lives for themselves in Toronto in 2002. Carla, the daughter holding the baby witnessing her mother's suicide; Tuyen The artist and Binh the MBA, the two BIC children raised by parents haunted by a lost child; Jackie, the daughter of hippy parents mourning the loss of dancehalls and the good old days; Oku, the poet drop-out obsessing about the same girl since high school; and Quy, the lost boy, remembering how he survived. I think my “suspension of disbelief” is hindered by the unconvincing characterization. With the possible exception of philosophy majors, I don't think people think in such abstractions. Nor are most 20-somethings thatself-aware. I can accept that the omniscient narrator, the poet/writer Bran, understands the emotional underpinnings of these characters. But I have trouble believing the characters. 

Is the plot thick enough to support the growth, the transformation of each character, as believable? They do grow, and that's a good thing. 

I don't have a problem with the coincidences or with the ending. One of the themes is the role of chance in our lives. A novel is by definition a contrivance. The structure of this novel is varied points of view leading to a final crash which brings all the plot threads together, like the movie.

The reviews of this novel sound very snarky. Beautifully disappointing. Political. Well-intentioned. Predictable sex scene. Soap-opera-ish. Race-based alienation. These all sound reductive to me.

What We All Long For - CANLIT THEMES:- The Same But Different

What We All Long For - CANLIT THEMES:

1) The-Same-But-Different traumas of all the migrants. Whether they came by train from

Halifax, or flew in from Jamaica, or arrived as refugees from camps in Thailand, these

people have baggage. All people have baggage. But, as I said, I am not convinced that twenty-somethings would

understand either themselves or their parents in this way. 

What We All Long For – CanLit THEMES - Coming-Of-Age

What We All Long For – CanLit THEMES

2) Coming-of-Age. Personally, I am old, and I have promised myself that I've read enough

coming-of-age novels of teens discovering sex and rejecting their parents. I no longer identify

with them. They are going through a stage. Been there. Did that. Learned something. Need to

learn more about older adults. Thus, where I am in my life impacts my response to the characters and the plot.  

What We All Long For – CanLit THEMES - The Immigrant Experience

What We All Long For – CanLit THEMES

3) The Immigrant Experience. I am pretty familiar with the first generation immigrant stories of

new Canadians as presented in CanLit. It is interesting to peek into the lives of the next generation, but I cannot say that anything surprised me or seemed to be a revelation. We are all individuals, from often confused families, and from other places before we got here. We all struggle to figure out what's going on and how we can best fit in. For some, those families or places of origin were more of a hardship than for others. Some had a choice and others had immigration thrust upon them. No one ever asks Where else would I rather be?

What We All Long For – CanLit THEMES - Becoming the Ideal Canadian

What We All Long For – CanLit THEMES

4) The Ideal Canadian: I kept thinking, these new people could benefit from more of a helping

hand, more of a feeling of being welcomed here. It might be useful for them to learn about

those who are already here, how they did it, how they broke out of the silos and interacted,

participated. Those already here could extend a hand of welcome with language, and social interactions, and schools, and employment, and patronage of businesses. We are all immigrants. Most of us whose families chose to come here arrived as "economic immigrants/migrants," poor people without hope of owning land in the old country, of breaking through the old class structures, seeking the freedom to be the best they can possibly be. Just like today's immigrants. For some, war and dislocation were the impetus for migrating. For others, not as much. All came with the knowledge that they have to work hard, and hoped to vaccinate their children with that knowledge too. Only Jackie seems to have picked up that lesson, of what she has to do to survive in a capitalist system. And Binh.

What We All Long For – CanLit THEMES - The City

What We All Long For – CanLit THEMES

5) Toronto as a character in the novel: Everyone hates Toronto. Its size implies dominance. Its lack of interest in anywhere else, smugness, can seem off-putting. I'm not that familiar with Toronto, having visited only twice, and not knowing the geography. The last time I was there, I never got over the feeling that the lake was on the wrong side of the street. Perhaps because of this, I envy Carla's familiarity, her fearless flying through the streets on her courier bicycle. 

What We All Long For – UNIVERSAL THEMES - Parental Responsibility

What We All Long For – UNIVERSAL THEMES

PARENTAL RESPONSIBILITY: We make such assumptions about parenting, about

what children need, about what parents are responsible for doing. We assume people choose to be parents, and in so doing, that they accept certain responsibilities. Yet we know that the generation gap which exists between parents and children works both ways too. The children expect certain things from parents and are resentful when they do not get them. The parents expect certain things from the children and may attempt to use money and/or emotional manipulation to ensure the children live up to the parental expectations. Unquestioned assumptions about marriage, fidelity, parental responsibility, gender, responsibility towards family, cause much of the stress for these characters. 

What We All Long For – UNIVERSAL THEMES - Divides

What We All Long For – UNIVERSAL THEMES

The RURAL/URBAN OUTSIDER/INSIDER Divide: How does the experience of these characters compare with my own at that age? The novel made me more conscious of the difference between growing up in a city and moving to a city when you leave home as I did at age 17. All rural children leave home as soon as they finish school, to find work or go on to post-secondary education. The ties are cut. You choose to go home perhaps two or three times a year. Rural people find a longed-for anonymity in the city where no one knows them, their parents, their families. They long to be as common, as unexceptional as a pebble on a beach, in order to be like the others or to find themselves. Psychologically, this is a very different way of growing up than it is for urban children living at home, guilted into visiting, bumming food and cash, being forced to create a scene, to be angry, to reject, in order to make the break which will allow them to grow up, become independent adults, if ever. Each of the characters in What We All Long For struggles to make this break, to cut the cord to their childhood past. They struggle to break away from their parents. They already have a circle of friends on whom they rely emotionally and financially. Their parents, like everyone coming from elsewhere, struggled without assistance to integrate into the city.

What We All Long For – UNIVERSAL THEMES - Globalization

What We All Long For – UNIVERSAL THEMES

GLOBALIZATION: In the novel, the World Cup works as a unifying interest for the characters from disparate parts of the globe. Games provide an opportunity for getting together, and for unexpected revelations of who knows what about "the others." When a television announcer says “I didn't know we had a Korea Town in the city,” the artist Tuyen is enraged. "You fuckers live as if we don't live here. " [p. 204] This exchange made me think about racism. How it works both ways. How sometimes it is accidental rather than deliberate. That the colour of my skin and my family background doesn't mean that I am anti-immigration. On the contrary, personally I am honoured. I love Canada and I feel honoured when others choose to come and make their home here and participate in, contribute to this country. New Canadians are helping the rest of us learn to love soccer at the same time as they are becoming hockey fans. New Canadians and their children bring languages with them. Language is part of who we are, of our individual identities. Our attitudes towards languages is indicative of our willingness or ability to mix. Our identities, those we bring and those we develop, determine the kind of Canada we envision. Shared space with common ground.

What We All Long For – UNIVERSAL THEMES - Human Rights Abuses

What We All Long For – UNIVERSAL THEMES

HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES: Tuyen and Binh's family fled Vietnam at the fall of Saigon and after years in camps, arrived in Canada as refugees. They arrived with nothing. War would seem to be the greatest human rights abuse, creating refugees with nowhere to go. But it seems like a very difficult issue, focusing on the basic levels of human needs, food, shelter, security. Placing thousands of displaced people into strange often unwelcoming situations seems fraught with danger for all involved. Without adequate support, tragedy seems inevitable. It would seem to require much international cooperation. Neither individuals nor nations can be “the catcher in the rye.” To believe otherwise courts doom and/or madness.

What We All Long For - UNIVERSAL THEMES - COPING WITH GRIEF

What We All Long For - Universal Themes - Coping With Grief

Coping With Grief: It seems to me that another global concern, another experience which unites humanity, is the experience of grief and how we cope with the grief in our lives. Everyone who moves leaves or loses something, and hopes that the destination will prove to be "a better place." If we could see and honour that common experience in each other, we might be more tolerant, more understanding. Maybe that's what prompted Dionne Brand to write What We All Long For.