by Wayson Choy
Doubleday Canada ~ Unpublished Review
What is remarkable about this book is how the author, ever a writer, shares his spirit at a time when all is failing and the easiest and most compelling action would be to let go. After finishing All the Matters, the much awaited followup to The Jade Peony, Wayson Choy suffers an asthma attack so severe that he is put into a drug-induced coma to prevent brain damage. “Multiple cardiac events” cause complications that leave him incapacitated for some months, and his slow path back to health means re-learning to walk and even write. He vows to turn a new leaf, but “brisk daily walks - boring! were the first to go!” Four years later, he has another heart attack and a quadruple bi-pass.
What struck down the author was urgent, all consuming and cataclysmic. As future infinity tugs him, it is voices from the present, soft and insistent, that call him back. “Can you hear me, Mr Choy?” And he returns, sometimes unwillingly, often crankily, fogged and exhausted, to feel the touch of his god-daughter’s hand, the prick of a needle, the cool of a damp cloth. These tactile, gentle moments hold him to the present.
Not Yet, A Memoir of Living and Almost Dying is a journal of a battle fought on many fronts, not the least by Choy’s extended family of friends who quickly gather around him, holding him strongly with their caring and love. Even as he lies in bed, unable to move, he examines the meaning of family, and the bonds that bind us to cultures and to those we hold dear. His humour is ever present. “Rule 3 of Dying: Avoid pain at all costs.” He is able to hold his readers’ rapt attention while lying prone in a hospital bed in a coma! The pages flow effortlessly.
Choy’s memoir is an intelligent, humourous and self-deprecating look at a life as he pulls himself back from the edge of collapse. He lauds the human spirit and the unbreakable bonds of family as he responds to the ministrations of professionals, to the thousand small kindnesses of hundreds of staff whose job it is to bring us back, to not let us go before our time. “I had been saved by invisible networks of compassion, by people who had borne untold difficulties and survived famines and wars and revolutions, to salvage the likes of me.”
Wayson Choy is the author of The Jade Peony, which shared The Trillium Prize with Margaret Atwood and All That Matters, which was shortlisted for the Giller Prize in 2004. He lives in Toronto.
