When Denison Avenue, a novel with pen-and-ink illustrations, came into my inbox as a submission, it felt like fate. I know this sounds dramatic, but bear with me—I swear it’s worth it. (You’ll just have to wait until next May to read it!).
I had been working in publishing for over 20 years in various roles, including one memorable year selling ads for a mining newspaper, which meant I learned a lot about rocks. When I started, I had dreams of the books I could acquire and edit if given the chance. These books would give voice to people who had not been given space, and would expand how we think of our communities and intersections. But, in 1998, as I collated media kits and faxed ad specs, that dream seemed very, very distant.
Fast forward 23 years, and my publishing career had taken a beautiful shape. I had just started as an acquisitions editor at ECW Press, the Canadian independent that had published two of my own books and that delights in bringing provocative, weird, and fun titles into the market—books like the award-winning The Annual Migration of Clouds by Premee Mohamed and The Environmentalist’s Dilemma by Arno Kopecky. I had finally been given the freedom to look for and develop titles that play with form—I love books that defy expectations of genre and surprise readers—and bring previously invisible stories into the light.
I come from a Chinese family that first arrived in Canada in the late 19th century, when my great grandfather came for a gold rush, but then returned home with no gold to speak of for his efforts. His son, my grandfather, came to Canada in 1913 and stayed, despite discriminatory immigration policies and years of separation from his wife and children. His life, from his childhood in the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong province to his decades of running the only barbershop in Vancouver’s Chinatown, has been a touchstone for me personally, but also professionally. There is so much about him, my grandmother, and the other early Chinese immigrants to North America that has remained untold.
Denison Avenue, written by Christina Wong and illustrated by Daniel Innes, is the story of an elderly Chinese Canadian woman named Wong Cho Sum, who begins to collect recyclables after the sudden death of her husband, as a way to distract her from her grief but also to find community in Toronto’s quickly gentrifying Chinatown-Kensington Market neighborhood. It’s a place that she has lived in most of her adult life, and yet she finds herself feeling displaced as familiar businesses shut down and condo towers are built in their place. Daniel’s illustrations, finely detailed drawings of the buildings and streets that Cho Sum walks past every day, bring the neighborhood to life. Even as we were editing the book, some of the buildings were demolished, so the poignancy of Denison Avenue is acute and urgent.
For me, the connections are even deeper. Cho Sum speaks mainly in Toisan, the dialect of the early Chinese Canadian and American immigrants. Toisan is also the dialect of my family, what we spoke at home, the words we used when my mother was teaching us how to cook. By the 1980s, when different waves of Chinese immigrants began arriving from different provinces in China and other countries like Taiwan, Toisan took a backseat among the diaspora, and Cantonese and Mandarin became dominant. Today, Toisan is most often spoken by the elderly, the Chinese seniors who are watching their language and their communities simultaneously fade away.
Cho Sum reminds me of my grandfather, my father, and my mother, people whose lives—filled with hard work and resiliency—are rarely seen in popular culture and almost never in books. When I first began reading the manuscript for Denison Avenue, I didn’t know that it was the book I had been waiting for my whole life, but by the time I had finished it, I knew it with more certainty that I had ever felt.
It’s not often that our personal stories and our professional ones dovetail as neatly as my past dovetails with my experience working with Daniel and Christina. But, trust me, it’s magical. Denison Avenue is everything I have ever wanted to acquire: a story that has gone untold up until now and a book that defies what we know about graphica, fiction, language, and even poetry. Perhaps even more importantly, Denison Avenue is, quite simply, everything I have ever loved.
Jen Sookfong Lee is a Chinese Canadian broadcaster, novelist, and acquisitions editor at ECW Press in Toronto.
