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Words
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Knopf Canada's New Face of Fiction, 2007 Vintage Canada paperback now available at your favourite online or neighbourhood bookstore Spanning eighty-five years and exploring themes of isolation, immigration, romance and sanity, The End of East is an incredibly moving portrait of one emblematic family and Vancouver’s Chinatown. “I walk this city every day, sidestep the garbage, hold my breath through the alleys. But even in the dirtiest of places, where the sidewalk is covered with gum and the hum of traffic and city-noise is so loud that you can’t even hear your own footsteps, you can always look north and see the mountains. And there’s always a breeze, faintly salt-scented, that touches your face as you turn to look west.” |
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Samantha Chan returns home to Vancouver to care for her aging mother, abruptly leaving an unfinished life in Montreal. Feeling abandoned by her four sisters and resentful at the city she thought she had escaped forever, she finds herself cobbling together a makeshift family history and delving into stories that began in 1913, when her grandfather, Seid Quan, then eighteen years old, first stepped on to North American soil. The End of East weaves in and out of past and present, picking up the threads of Sam’s grandparents and parents: Seid Quan, whose loneliness in this foreign country is profound even as he joins the Chinatown community; Shew Lin, whose hopes for her family are threatened by her own actions; Pon Man’s tension between obligation and desire; and Siu Sang, who tries to be the caregiver everyone expects, even as she feels herself unravelling. Through it all, Samantha, who carries within her all the conflicts of the past, is embroiled in her own struggle, a volatile mixture of dangerous love affairs, a difficult and duty-filled relationship with her mother, and the still-fresh memories of her father’s long illness. An exquisite and evocative debut, The End of East sets family conflicts against the backdrop of Vancouver’s Chinatown—a city within a city where dreams are shattered as quickly as they’re built, and where history repeats itself through the generations. ------ Reviews "Lee is a courageous young writer." "Beautifully crafted, The End of East moves seamlessly from era to era, country to country. Lee tells a provocative and deeply moving tale about how ethnic identity creates an emotional battlefield for those trying to traverse two cultures in one country. "A poignant debut saga.... An enlightening look at Vancouver's slice of the Chinese diaspora." "An impressive debut novel....
An enrapturing exploration of identity." "The truth that imbues every line of Jen Sookfong Lee's The End of East is so coruscating that we must look away. And yet she will not let us, and so we cannot."
--Jacquelyn Mitchard, New York Times bestselling author of The Deep End of the Ocean "A powerful contribution to the chronicles of Vancouver's Chinese immigration...impressive exploration of overwhelming forces that break successive generations of an ordinary, yet also remarkable, family." "Only 30, Lee has crafted one of the most sophisticated and structurally complex novels published in Canada in years. Perhaps, more importantly, she has created an emotional powerhouse of a novel about a family unable to express their love for one another." "Vancouver native Jen Sookfong Lee's first novel is impressive, both in terms of its accomplished prose and its ambitious three-generational scope...Lee's talent is undeniable." "Jen Sookfong Lee is aware, it would seem, of the dark side of
mythmaking, its distorting and even parasitic price. It's one of many things that make her a novelist to watch." "With The End of East, Lee has constructed an accomplished and complex
story about the intricate set of issues that surround Chinese-Canadian identity, a story that will ring true for Canadians of other backgrounds." "Jen Lee shows off a confident style, investing The End of East with rich imagery and well-wrought characters and deftly handling the complexities of the various storylines." "In this powerful first novel Jen Sookfong Lee moves fluently through the life of an immigrant family, speaking what remains unspoken between the generations. Observant and humane, The End of East shows us that within a family nothing ever really ends." “From China to Vancouver, past to present, The End of East beautifully guides us through the heart of the Chan family and the Chinese immigrant experience--charting dreams, regrets, hopes and triumphs along the way. Jen Sookfong Lee’s storytelling instincts are honest, unflinching and fearless.” “I am awestruck by Jen Sookfong Lee’s ambition in this, her first novel, an ambition that is fulfilled with power and grace. Whatever assumptions I had about Vancouver’s Chinatown have been supplanted by Lee’s vision of a world where family obligation is passed on through the generations, where personal dreams are sacrificed for family goals as a matter of course. It’s a world that is different, and yet so terribly similar to my own. The End of East is a wise, challenging and heartbreaking novel. And Jen Sookfong Lee is a novelist with the eye and ear and soul of a poet.” |
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