What We All Long For

Jackie is on the streetcar, thinking of the train ride she and her parents had taken when moving from Halifax to Toronto so many years ago: “She could feel her parents’ anticipation. She was a little sick from the rocking of the train, or was it from their talk about how different, how exciting life was going to be from then on?” (91). She alternates between these thoughts and Oku’s awkward parting sentence, thinking of his appearances and innocence: “She despised people who didn’t know what was going to happen to them. Those kinds of people, she thought, lied to themselves […] She had no pity for that kind of person, and what Oku had been asking for was pity” (91-92).

After moving to Toronto, Jackie and her parents had lived in Alexandra Park, an “urban warren of buildings and paths” (92). They originally intended to make some money and head back to Halifax, and they still talk as if they will one day. For Jackie, however, Halifax is only a distant memory. They’d arrived at the tail end of the popularity of the Paramount, “the best dance club in the country” (94), a club well known only by the very hip—“[b]lack people and a few, very few, hip whites” (95). Clubs like the Paramount “were the places people went to feel in their own skin, in their own life. Because when a city gets finished with you in the daytime, you don’t know if you’re coming or going” (95).

Jackie has a story “selling post-bourgeois clothing” (99) called Ab and Zu; she had secured the location when the neighborhood was still seedy and benefited from the creeping gentrification. Reiner opens the store in the mornings, and as Jackie arrives back at the store, Reiner is waiting for her so he can leave for his gig in the evening. He seems to be hurt, but she promises to spend the night on Sunday, which eases him. 

Carla finds herself thinking about a news story she had seen once, about a man who jumped in front of a subway train with his 3-year-old son. She remembers wondering why he had taken the boy with him, and thinks about how, if she were to have tried to take her own life, she would have done it alone and set it up to appear as if she had just disappeared.

She remembers being at her home in St. James Town as a small girl and feeling the “odd stirring of the air on the balcony” (103), recognizing that something had happened, even if she didn’t fully understand. Her mother had asked her to hold Jamal, then stepped off the balcony to her death. Carla was only 5 years old at the time: “Over the years, despite her efforts to hold on to the memory, her mother faded and added until all Carla had left was the certainty that Angie had existed and the violent loyalty she owed her” (104). Jamal had been too young to remember their mother, so Carla took it upon herself to tell him about her.

After she died, no one claimed Carla and Jamal “except her father. And that reluctantly. Angie had been dead to her family since the day she started up with” Derek (106). Despite being able to pass for Spanish or Middle Eastern, Carla took her mother’s decision, along with everything it cost her, as a deliberate choice: “good or bad she had crossed a border” (106). As a result, she considered passing to “have been a betrayal of her mother’s choices” (106).

As Carla works through these memories, she watches her old apartment building, watching people walk in and out of the doorway, looking for familiarity in their figures: “Doesn’t a life leave traces, traces that can attach themselves to others who pass through the aura of that life? Doesn’t a place absorb the events it witnesses; shouldn’t there be […] some symbol embedded in this building always for Angie’s life here?” (111-112). As she turns away from the building, she tries to summon the energy to go see her father but is unable to do so.

Tuyen’s parents both suffer from insomnia but deal with it differently. Tuyen’s father, a former engineer, would have so much residual energy from working at the restaurant that he would stay up late “drawing all the buildings in the city as if he had built them” (113). Cam, on the other hand, “played the vision over in her head, trying to regain the moment when she did not see” (113) Quy’s disappearance. They both suffered from the guilt of losing Quy, and neither could find a cure for it.

Tuyen shared similarities with her father Tuan: “Tuyen learned to draw from her father […] imitat[ing] his posture and the movement of his drawing hand […] unaware of what he was actually doing” (115). Whereas Tuan focused on the real—the buildings of the city—Tuyen purposefully drew the impossible and the fantastic, much to Tuan’s frustration. Tuyen’s mother had a different outlet. Cam spent long evenings writing letter after letter to “a network of officials, charlatans, magicians, crooks, and other distraught parents like herself in her search” (116) for Quy.

Following her visit, Tuan drives Tuyen back to her apartment; Tuyen is surprised to discover “her father slightly elated” (118), claiming that they will have some news soon without explaining what he means by it. His change in demeanor startles Tuyen: “He was usually so purposefully serious that the hint of any lightness, and it was only the merest hint, seemed extravagant” (120). Tuyen makes a mental note to get in touch with Binh.

She and Binh were close in age but far apart in sensibility; they were never particularly close. Growing up, they were responsible for “translating the city’s culture to their parents and even to their older sisters, […] responsible for transmitting the essence of life in Toronto to the household” (121). They both used that to their own advantages—Binh to skim a bit off the top of bills; Tuyen to find ways to get out of school: “The uneasy collaboration made them wary of each other and therefore mistrustful” (121), and that mistrust remains with her. 

As Tuyen and Carla ascend the staircase, they smell food coming from Carla’s apartment and realize that Oku is cooking. Neither of the women cooks, but Oku, on the other hand, often comes to cook for them, making “elaborate meals from their scanty cupboards” (129). Food is a sore spot for Tuyen because of her parents’ restaurant. As a child, she used to ask why they couldn’t “eat like normal people” (129) and developed a dislike for traditional Vietnamese food. As an adult, her diet consists mostly of potatoes due to their simplicity and versatility. She also buys milk despite being lactose intolerant, and she mostly lets that go sour.

For Carla, food reminds her of her trips to Kensington Market with Nadine—who her father had a family with before meeting Angie—in order to shop for Jamaican food, which Nadine had learned to cook just for Carla’s father. Unlike the two women, Oku has “no culinary antipathy registered in childhood discomfort” (132). He loves his parents’ cooking and learned both from them and from others’ cultures, picking up more along the way.

Following the meal, the three discuss Jamal’s predicament. Oku and Tuyen express confusion as to why it is Carla’s responsibility to save her brother again. Carla tries to explain that her father isn’t willing to help, and this is “inconceivable to Oku. His own father would never let him out of his sight. He thought of this with fear and relief” (135). They eventually let it go and get drunk on a bottle of rum Oku stole from his father.

“Quy” Summary

After some time at Pulau Bidong, Quy learned some English, his “first step to humanity” (137). Quy meditates on different lives and gratitude, his experiences on the Dong Khoi—the refugee boat he accidentally boarded—and considers how his brother got his parents at the height of their guilt. Despite this, he doesn’t feel bad because he sees all the years Binh was fattened instead of him:. “Self-interest is what moves the world. People bunch together because they’re scared. I’m a loner. Don’t expect me to tell you about the innocence of youth, that would be another story, not mine” (139).