AlliterAsian (4 page)

1923:
Harry Houdini asks Sam to join his prestigious magic club and eventually takes a patent on Sam's ancient Chinese needle-swallowing trick.

1927:
Talkies take centre stage; however, Sam still manages to garner large audiences.

1930:
Sam's daughters successfully perform on their own.

1932:
Sam and his crew perform at the Orpheum Theatre in Vancouver.

1933:
Daughter Mina leaves the troupe to help the Red Cross with its efforts in the Japanese war.

1934:
Daughter Neesa becomes the troupe's manager.

1936:
Neesa marries and leaves the troupe; Sam retires.

1938:
Germany and Austria invade Poland, forcing Sam and Poldi's son, Frank, to flee to the US.

1940:
Sam is interviewed by the
World
newspaper.

1943:
The Communist Revolution results in the takeover of Sam's property and theatres. Sam and Poldi leave Shanghai in 1948, ahead of the Communist revolution, but Poldi does not gain US citizenship.

1950s:
Sam and Poldi spend the 1950s in the Ruxton Hotel on W. 72nd street in New York City.

1961:
Long Tack Sam passes away, the cause of his death rumoured to be from gangrene developed after improper treatment for a broken femur.

       
A
UTHOR
C
OMMENTARY

I had recently finished my feature-animated doc,
The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam
, about the search for my great-grandfather, who was a world-famous globe-hopping Chinese vaudevillian acrobat
and magician, when
Ricepaper
asked me to write a piece about him. I saw this as an opportunity to try and encapsulate the essential trajectory of his life with no embellishments (not that his life needed much) and to open his story up to a new audience who may not have the opportunity to see the film. Later, I was asked to adapt the film into a graphic novel with the same title, which won the Doug Wright Award for Best Book in 2008. —
Ann Marie Fleming, 2015

       
A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

Ann Marie Fleming is an award-winning Canadian independent filmmaker, writer, and artist, born in Okinawa, of Chinese and Australian parentage. Her film work incorporates various techniques: animation, documentary, experimental, dramatic, and often deals with themes of family, history, and memory.

Runaway Writer

Ricepaper
10, no. 3 (2006)

Alexis Kienlen

There is a mystique that surrounds Evelyn Lau. It may be because Evelyn's work is so personal, and as a result people have a hard time separating her from her work. Or it may be because she's had such an extraordinary life.

At the age of fourteen, in 1986, Evelyn left her parents and ran away from home. In 1989, she burst on to the literary scene with
Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid
. The sordid tale of a teenage prostitute was groundbreaking subject matter in the early nineties and drew a lot of attention from the unsuspecting media. The diary is a gutsy and disturbing first-person recollection of life as a prostitute and drug addict in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

Evelyn began writing as a child, and it's possible that the writing kept her sane and alive while growing up under the watchful eye of strict parents who detested her creativity. With the success of
Runaway
at the age of eighteen, Evelyn went on to publish poetry, prose, and personal essays. In 1990, at the age of twenty, she won the Milton Acorn Memorial People's Poetry Award for
You Are Not Who You Claim
, her first book of poetry. She has also been nominated for a Governor General's Award for Poetry for
Oedipal Dreams
, and she received a Canadian Authors Association award for “Most Promising Writer.” Her prose books, mostly concerned with the rigours and sadomasochistic dramas of sex, have been translated into more than a dozen languages.

Everything I've heard about Evelyn swims around inside my head. I've heard that she's a quiet and private person, despite her public past, and doesn't want to be associated with the Chinese-Canadian community. Who is the real Evelyn Lau?

As I prepare for our interview, I contemplate how her writing has evolved.
Inside Out
, a collection of personal essays, touched on tough subjects like the effects of a lawsuit on her writing, as well as her struggle with depression and bulimia. Published twelve years after
Runaway
, the book reflects her recent years and proves she's become more comfortable in her skin. Recently, a collection of poetry,
Treble
, hit the shelves. The flower that graces the cover of
Treble
contrasts with the darker images that marked her earlier works. It is a peaceful emblem, homely even, something that you might see on the cover of a Martha Stewart magazine. Compared to the dark, deeply sexy imagery of Evelyn on her previous covers, this new design is a breath of fresh air. It also catches me off guard. Does the mysticism that surrounded Evelyn Lau even still exist?

Evelyn and I meet in a coffee shop in downtown Vancouver. When I first see her, I'm struck by how pretty she is. She has a smouldering presence attached to her plump lips, high cheekbones, and smoky eyes. She greets me with a warm smile and a firm handshake and apologizes for blowing her nose due to environmental allergies. She's drinking an apple juice because she doesn't like coffee. I notice a small scar near her neck and wonder what it's from. I never bring myself to ask.

I anticipated meeting a sombre and serious woman, but Evelyn puts me at ease. She's chatty, funny, and engaging. We immediately commiserate over our love of literature. It's obvious that Evelyn is both passionate and knowledgeable about writing. She's managed to harness and direct her talent and creativity, though she's entirely
self-taught and never received a formal education. She tells me that one of her favourite writers is John Updike, and she considers Alice Munro to be our greatest Canadian writer. Both authors are experts at writing stories that focus on the nuances of human interactions and relationships—also passions of Evelyn's.

When I tell Evelyn she's rumoured to be a private and serious person, her laugh proves otherwise.

“People think I'm serious because of my subject matter. But I'm not. I love to make people laugh, I always wish I had more humour in my work because it's the best way to engage readers.”

You could assume that because Evelyn is a Chinese-Canadian, her family's experience of immigration would be one of her main influences. “I don't see myself as being a Chinese-Canadian writer, because I don't write about it.” She says part of writing is about tapping into your sense of being an outsider and of otherness from the community, society, and family. Evelyn's own focus on the nuances of human interactions and relationships is shaped by her time on the streets; she thinks of that time in her life as her sense of otherness rather than her Chinese-Canadian heritage.

Evelyn was born in Vancouver and still resides there. It's interesting that she still feels comfortable in the city, as it was there that she fell into prostitution and drug addiction. Evelyn admits that she wrestled with her feelings about Vancouver while she was in her twenties, but now “Vancouver is home. It's changed a lot in the past few years. I tend to think of it as a collection of distinctive neighbourhoods.” You might think the distinctive neighbourhood of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, infamous for street life, drug addiction, and prostitution, would stigmatize Vancouver for an ex-street kid. But Evelyn realizes that the life she lived in this space is one of many lives the city has to offer. Vancouver is a multilayered
city, with different aspects of personality, much like Evelyn herself. In her collection of short stories,
Choose Me
, written from the perspective of seven different young women, Evelyn explores the relationships between home, space, and self.

Besides, living on the street didn't cripple Evelyn's writing career; it brought into existence her first commercial success,
Runaway
. But how did Evelyn manage to publish her first book while living such a transient and unstable life? She explains that while living on the streets she won a number of literary contests. She applied for and received financial funding from the Canada Council through the Explorations Program for new writers, which in recent years has ended due to government cutbacks, though today, alternative programs like Outreach offer grants for emerging and established creative writers.

Despite her obvious potential, publishers were leery about the book, unsure about the public's response to the gritty subject matter. They thought the book might tank, and it was difficult to plan a book with a writer who might not have a fixed address. Luckily, HarperCollins took the chance and picked up
Runaway
. The book proved to be a critical and commercial success. It was a bestseller for thirty weeks and has been translated into multiple languages.

In 1993,
Runaway
was optioned to become a movie and aired on CBC as
The Diary of Evelyn Lau
. The intense subject matter demanded skilful acting and as a result launched the successful acting career of Sandra Oh, a Canadian actress most recently seen in
Sideways
. Evelyn, who worked as a consultant on the CBC project, never actually saw the entire film. The visual rendition of the reality Evelyn lived hit too close to home. Unsurprisingly, Evelyn stills finds the book to be rather painful.

“I can't read it,” she confesses. “If I'm asked to read it at a reading, there's only one passage that I'll read.”

“What is important, I think, about Evelyn Lau,” wrote critic Patricia Pearson in 1993, “is that she blends startling prose talent with a fierce determination to be true.” This combination unfortunately led to a nonfiction exposé of her ruined love affair with writer W. P. Kinsella, a relationship that began when he was sixty and she was twenty-four. The media cast an eye toward Evelyn again, in 1997, when the older Vancouver-based author of
Shoeless Joe
sued Evelyn over the article, titled “Me and WP,” in
Vancouver Magazine
. The lawsuit diminished respect for both literary talents. The two writers had signed a pact giving one another permission to write about their relationship, but Kinsella alleged that Lau's portrait of him was malicious and erroneous. A lengthy court proceeding eventually settled in a fairly innocuous way with a letter of retraction in the magazine.

Evelyn tells me that getting sued by her former lover caused her to react in two ways. “I wanted to write more, and I also wanted to retreat. It was so hard for me to imagine not writing about my life or the lives I intersected with,” she says. “If you're writing about your life, you might have people who take offence, even if you're a genre writer. And then some people get offended if you don't include them, so you can't win at all,” she says with a smile. In the essay about the lawsuit that appeared in her collection of personal essays,
Inside Out
, she confesses that the lawsuit had a negative impact on her writing, and her output has slowed in recent years. This is one of the reasons she turned to poetry. “Whoever heard about being sued for a book of poetry?” she says with a laugh. Her endless fascination with relationships compelled her to keep writing. She says that as she gets older she probably won't be as fascinated with
romantic relationships, but “in your twenties it's at the forefront of your thoughts.”

In many of her stories, couples play out romances and power struggles. People struggle to communicate with each other and try to find ways to relate to one another. Evelyn admits to a fascination and idealization of older men—“father figures.” She cherished the relationship she had with her father, and in the prologue to
Runaway
laments the distance that grew between them as she became a teenager. Evelyn's work doesn't shy away from the unconventional side—the otherness in each of us. Her empathy drives her to tell the untold stories of the human soul. Despite genre, time, or space, it is this side of Evelyn that remains timeless.

Evelyn confides that writing is hard, and a finished product takes effort. After the success of
Runaway
, she was intent on proving to the literary world that she wasn't a one-hit wonder and tried to publish one book a year for several years. In
Inside Out
, she writes about her youthful fascination with writing and how she was unable to stop writing. She followed her debut with three collections of poetry and then set her sights on fiction with the publication of
Fresh Girls and Other Stories, Choose Me
, and one novel,
Other Women
.

Her latest book,
Treble
, was released in Spring 2005 by Polestar Press and is her first collection of poetry in ten years.
Treble
signifies the evolution of her writing process and her determination to tackle diverse characters and themes.

“I could have written five books in the time it took me to write
Treble
because I kept re-writing and tossing out material.” She believes this book represents a move from the outskirts to the centre of society, since it deals more with conventional romantic relationships rather than prostitution.

Evelyn and I talk about writers we know and how they seem so
different from their work. Evelyn casually makes two comments that apply to how she's evolved as a writer and a person. A lifetime away from being on the streets, she's become a lot more relaxed, reflective, and comfortable in her skin. “The part of themselves that writers bring to their work is different from their normal personalities,” she says. “Often when you meet them they aren't who you think they are.” As a writer and reader myself, I understand that audiences can trap authors in their work, though the writer as a person is constantly growing and changing.

The Evelyn Lau I'm talking to is human, a multilayered individual: chatty and funny but with a conscience that doesn't deny darkness. The myth crumbles and fades before me as the real Evelyn Lau gestures and talks on, serene and alive as the flower on the cover of her new book.

       
A
UTHOR
C
OMMENTARY

When I was a teenager, Evelyn's success made me believe that I could write too. When I went to interview her for this piece, I was nervous, but I shouldn't have been. She was warm, funny, and open with me. After the interview, we walked around the marina and chatted like friends. I'd only been living in Vancouver for about a year, and she shared with me some of her thoughts and feelings about the city. At the time, I was an unpublished author who dreamed of getting published. But Evelyn didn't treat me as someone who was inferior to her; she treated me like just another writer. When the piece came out, she and I shared a laugh because an editor had added a line about “her smoldering presence,” which I hadn't written in my original draft. —
Alexis Kienlen, 2015

       
A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

Alexis Kienlen was the literary editor of
Ricepaper
magazine from
2001 to 2006. Born in Saskatoon, Alexis has lived in Edmonton since 2008, where she currently works as a reporter for
Alberta Farmer Express
. She holds an honours degree in international studies from the University of Saskatchewan, a graduate diploma in journalism from Concordia University, and a Certificate in Food Security from Ryerson University. Alexis is the author of two books of poetry,
She Dreams in Red
and
13
. In 2014, she published a biography about a civil rights activist,
Truth, Love, Non-violence: The Story of Gurcharan Singh Bhatia
. She is currently at work on her first novel.