The End of East, by Jen Sookfong Lee

This is my first foray into Asian-Canadian literature, and I found it utterly absorbing. The End of East is a quick, though not insubstantial read about 3 generations of Chinese-Canadians in Vancouver, starting with the patriarch, Seid Quan, who emigrated around World War I.

I always appreciate when love stories are tempered by responsibility, though Lee gives us love communicated almost exclusively through responsibility. As Seid Quan labours in his barber shop in Chinatown, thousands of miles away from his wife and children in China (with whom he has only spent weeks in the many years he has been gone), it is above all a labour of love. When his son and wife finally arrive, it is a love that is still long-distance, a love without intimacy, and yet no less valid. One of the most poignant scenes in the story is Seid Quan’s reunion with his son, Pon Man, as Pon Man arrives in Canada at age 15:

“Seid Quan reaches out to him and Pon Man steps back. He is smelling the old-man odour on me, he thinks. Like the odour of this huge and unfathomable country. Seid Quan is desperate to touch him, and Pon Man looks scared, as if his fifteen-year-old self is completely unable to cope with his father’s tangible and enormous emotional need. He sneers instead, turning his head to avoid the smells and sights of despair and pathetic happiness.
Seid Quan’s hands shake as he puts them in his pockets, his son still untouched.” (56)

This longing for touch reappears again and again in the story, a potential panacea for loneliness, but as the youngest daughter, Sammy, discovers with her rough sexual encounters that leave her bleeding internally, touch without intimacy is no remedy. Yet intimacy seems to be the one thing the Chan family cannot achieve except in rare moments. Each feels alone and misunderstood, though it is this commonality that joins them. That, and of course, the tremendous obligation to care for our families, and to love them in any way we know how.