Paper Shadows

Eighteen years after he sat by his mother's hospital bed watching her die, novelist Choy (The Jade Peony) received a disturbing phone call from a woman who claimed to have recently seen his ""real mother"" on a streetcar. In this memoir, after briefly contemplating the shattering possibility that he had lived his 57 years without any suspicion that he might be adopted, Choy quickly moves on to relate the story of his boyhood--at times, it appears, to reassure himself that it actually took place as he'd believed (""These are the documented facts that I have known all my life: I was born Choy Way Sun, on April 20, 1939....""). A well-rendered picture of a closely knit enclave at a dramatic time--in Vancouver's Chinatown during the WWII era--Choy's narrative has been shortlisted for Canada's Governor General's Award. Depicting memories of his childhood from as early as age three, he tells of his first run-ins with kwei, the ghosts that drift through homes; of his mother's habit of playing mah-jongg until morning and his attraction to the flash and clamor of the Cantonese opera. He also dwells on more familiar coming-of-age terrain, describing his aspirations to become a cowboy and the ups and downs of caring for a puppy. Though drawn in finely wrought prose, the memoir's 26 chapters and four parts are fragmented further into vignettes, some as short as a page, which works against cohesion. And, disappointingly, Choy does not return to the mysterious call that began these reminiscences until near the book's end, at which point he quickly explains how he finally uncovered the secret surrounding his birth. (Oct.)