Review: All Our Ordinary Stories

Wong examines her relationships with her parents

Many second-generation Chinese-Canadians or Americans feel a cultural and generational gap between themselves and their parents. Some children are the family translator for documents to doctor appointments, have difficulty communicating because they don't have a strong grasp of their parents' native tongue or culture.

These observations are captured in Teresa Wong's All Our Ordinary Stories, where she attempts to be closer to her parents by trying to understand their hardships and values. However she feels hampered by her elementary Cantonese skills, only knowing words for physical objects and not feelings or thoughts.

The graphic novel is relatable

The graphic novel opens with Wong coming to terms with her mother's stroke, and her father expecting his daughter to take on the caregiver role. Despite Wong's simplistic drawings, they clearly convey emotions and the reader immediately becomes vested in the story she is telling.

Wong delves into her childhood, having to translate everything for her parents, whose education level was stunted by the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution, some of the most fraught passages in the book.

As youths, her parents separately swam from China to Hong Kong, a perilous journey attempted by an estimated tens of thousands of people, but only a fraction made it alive. 

When Wong asks her mother to tell her more about her escape, her mother tells her it was "ordinary", that everyone she knew swam too.

It is this pragmatic attitude of wanting to move on with their lives that is a cultural and age gap that Wong encounters with her parents, or is it not wanting to be re-traumatised? Wong can't tell which it is.

She finally gets some insight into her parents' previous lives when visiting China with them, watching how they interact with relatives and friends, though she still feels held back by her inability to fully comprehend their conversations.

Her stories resonate with immigrants

Not only did her parents make the leap of faith to come to Canada, it turns out her great grandfather did as well back in 1912, who went back to China three times, making the long journey by boat to get married and have children. Not only did he have to work hard to pay off the C$500 headtax, but also was separated from his family for decades because of the 1923 Exclusion Act.

In All Our Ordinary Stories, the reader can see how much thought Wong has put into crafting her graphic novel, in how she tells it through the drawings and words. And in some ways her stories are relatable to many immigrant families, with the parents -- and in the case of Wong's great grandfather -- trying to carve out a better life for themselves and their progeny.

While Wong may not be able to get the full story of her parents' lives and get to know them the way she hoped she would, this book is proof that she has tried very hard to appreciate what they have done.

All Our Ordinary Stories may seem like a graphic novel about identifying as Chinese, it is a Canadian story about taking the risk of establishing roots in a new country.