ALL THAT MATTERS
By Wayson Choy
(Doubleday Canada)
432 pp./$35.95

At the heart of Wayson Choy’s Giller-nominated novel All that Matters are the elusive nature of truth, simple acts of decency, and the healing power of forgiveness. Set Vancouver’s Chinatown in the 1930s and ’40s, All that Matters traces the story of Kiam-Kim, First Son, and the Chen Family.

Choy says the novel is a companion book to his 1995s best seller. "The Jade Peony had the story of the First Son in it, but it was 75 pages, and my publisher, my agent, and my editors all agreed this was the paternal side of Chinatown because this is [about] the First Son, and he’d been taken over by the politicians and the men of Chinatown. They felt The Jade Peony was the maternal side, the story of the mothers and the care givers in the home. A publisher came to me six years ago and asked if I would write the story of the First Son. It was interrupted by a near death episode in 2001, when I was writing the book, and I rewrote the book and here it is 2004 and it’s finished".

All that Matters, with its multi-layered plot and peeling back of layers to expose truth, asks some tough questions about family history–how does the past shape an individual, can one know too much. Choy says it wasn’t until his first novel was published that he found out the truth of his existence. "I was on the radio in Vancouver, and I spoke about the book; the secrets of Chinatown. [When I was growing up] I was warned by the people who raised me, ‘Be careful what you do because it comes back to you,’ and sure enough somebody decided to call the radio station and ask if I knew this secret, that I was adopted. And so at the age of 55, I discovered I was adopted... I discovered it on April Fool’s day!"

Rather than allowing the discovery to destroy his sense of self, Choy delved into the mysteries of families, secrets, and truth telling.

"All families are secretive and all lives are. We don’t want everyone to know everything about us, and we hope for that unconditional love where they don’t need that kind of information; they’ll love us as we are. In All That Matters, I really wanted to tell the story of a decent family and a loving family. They’re entrapped by their racism and a racist society, but they meant well, they meant to do well, and I think that’s true of most families who don’t make the newspapers, who don’t make the headlines, who aren’t dysfunctional in a dramatic or melodramatic way, who are simply surviving and struggling to cope with the dark times. There are the same dark times today–war, famine..."

Certainly All that Matters evokes a time where poverty was the rule rather than the exception, and where the helping hand of kindness could mean the difference between life and death. Choy says that bond of decency ties this historical story firmly into the present. "It’s a story that resonates today, and it certainly made me pay attention more after I had survived my near death experience: everything counts, everything matters–especially a decent act. The two symbols in my book are the dragon and the butterfly. The dragon is the power, the forces of life, but I was haunted by the chaos theory that suggested that a butterfly flapping its wings 2000 miles away can change the direction or power of a tornado. Acts of decency are like that. When they’re done at the right time, the right moment, they are ordinary acts but, 2000 days later, that child or that person chooses the light over darkness because of that single act."