Diaspora Dialogues

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Excerpts

First Dance

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When I found out that Julia Orpana was organizing our school dance, I knew I had to be there. I asked my friend John Kelly if he’d go with me. I was standing in the noisy kitchen of his place on Spadina Avenue near Bloor Street, waiting for him to walk me the rest of the way to school. A large iron stewing pot filled with coffee sat in the middle of the table. His parents and six brothers and sisters huddled around the pot, each breaking off hunks of crusty bread and dunking them in the coffee. The coffee was beige with milk, and Mrs. Kelly had used honey to sweeten it. John’s youngest brother, Attila, was on his knees in his chair, the coffee dribbling down his chin as he slurped it from the bread.

John’s family spoke only Hungarian to one another, as did mine. In fact, they weren’t Kelly at all but Kulcsar. An officer at Pier 21 in Halifax had decided that Kulcsar wouldn’t fly in Canada, so he renamed the family Kelly. We were Beck, and our officer was all right with that, so we got to keep our name.

Published in TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Book 1. Purchase the book to read the full piece.

When We First Arrived in Toronto

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parts of Italy were intact,
like ways of looking at the snow.
it was in the eyes, the Tuscan light,
the way it made the snow explode,

and wood, and iron railings and soot;

it was in the eyes, and through the spirit,
and spirit loved the world and was not
alien to it

and so the festive was a box of chocolates
or any homely thing
in the
world, for nothing could resist
the song of a boy’s heart . . . 
Published in TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Book 1. Purchase the book to read the full piece.

Nylon-Encased Flesh

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I wake up, body splayed across the mattress in a starburst. Sunlight. Then rain. Then resurrected sunlight. The men on a neighbouring roof are hammering sadistically out of time. Bang. Pause. Bang bang. Pause. Pause. Bang bang pause. I decide I can’t stand my apartment walls and bound out. Walk through the heavy, congested streets, now weightless.

Countless people in Toronto are thinking about the one that got away. How many times have they fantasized about you? All the times you starred in a daydream. In someone else’s romantic comedy. I wonder whose movie I’m in.

A morning of furious feet. Victorian houses, oak balconies, stray tabbies, turquoise lawn ornaments, patio chaises. The shadows of leaves spin across the cement. Kensington Market bustles and hums with soft peaches, skinned trouts and pink crinolines with black lace. The dogs on Augusta Avenue yip like the out-of-work actors I hang out with. Several European seniors out for a stroll, a Japanese Laundromat that also sells rice paper, two blond kids playing with Hula-Hoops on Markham street, ten friendly cats looking for a few good scratches.

Published in TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Book 1. Purchase the book to read the full piece.

Toronto locations referenced in this piece

“The Trinity-Bellwoods drumming circle drips a collective energy. The dreadlocked kids paint their skin with sandalwood, gold dust and red hibiscus . . . then sweat out the colours into porous swirls as they dance . . . ” —Trinity Bellwoods

“Embedded in Connections: I-Spy. new years eve. corner of queen and bathurst. you boy. me girl. loved each other’s makeup. you went fetish. i went savage. still wanna kiss? . . . ” —Queen & Bathurts

“Beverley Street balconies are decayed hickory wood and twisted iron. The ambitious ivory festoons the dilapidated Victorian houses. Affluent front-porch-hounds sop up the hide-and-seek sun . . . ” —Beverley Street

“From their view, Arshia cannot see the homeless, the CN Tower, the convenience stores, the Spadina streetcars that fill the centre of the avenue like bone marrow. Only an affluent maple-lined street, with four-door Infinitis on carefully paved driveways . . . ” —Spadina Ave.

“She wants to skip over to Hazelton Lanes and watch the ladies with big lips try to eat soup. When they catch their own reflections in their spoons, they always ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh.’ . . . ” —Hazelton Lane

“Kensington Market bustles and hums with soft peaches, skinned trouts and pink crinolines with black lace. The dogs on Augusta Avenue yip like the out-of-work actors I hang out with . . . ” —Augusta Avenue

“Several European seniors out for a stroll, a Japanese Laundromat that also sells rice paper, two blond kids playing with Hula-Hoops on Markham street, ten friendly cats looking for a few good scratches . . . ” —Markham Street

“Yonge Street is nothing but an outdoor mall, loved by millions not for the architecture or the sunlight or the beauty in humans, but for the ability to acquire things that do not change your life . . . ” —Yonge Street

“Outside, rain taps Morse code on Christopher’s stained glass windows. From their view, Arshia cannot see the homeless, the CN Tower, the convenience stores, the
Spadina streetcars that fill the centre of the avenue like bone marrow . . . ” —CN Tower

“Through Chinatown, after picking up a university-stamped envelope from the post office. Asia slices through the city. An assembly line of golden Buddhas, Ming vases and brass gongs stretch up Spadina Avenue . . . ” —China Town

Vanishing Father

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When Bing Hum got home late that evening from Harris, Smythe & Hum LLP, he found his fifteen-year-old daughter watching a movie-of-the-week that starred Lucy Liu in yet another of her “Asian slut” roles. Frozen in the doorway of Jade’s bedroom, he stared at the flat-screen TV screen where Lucy Liu, worse than nude in a half-bra, garter belt and stockings, lap-danced for a hairy-chested maintenance worker, her pinecone breasts thrust forward, her long waist undulating like the belly of a serpent.

Bing stood there, a bag of takeout Thai from Golden Mango dangling from his fingertips. For an instant, he wanted to barge in and shut off the TV.

“Jade.” He spoke to the back of her head. The volume from the TV was deafening and she was sprawled on the floor, her chin resting on her palms. A laptop, textbooks and a highliter littered the rug. His custody agreement gave him Jade one week out of every two, but whenever he saw her now, she seemed a little taller than before. In her volleyball sweats, her legs looked almost as long as her bed.

Published in TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Book 1. Purchase the book to read the full piece.

Home aka Snap Shots

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She doesn’t remember the exact date, only that it was a weeknight, early spring, 1983; it was dark outside. She closed the door and locked it. Turned around and quickly checked the windows across the street. Walked a block carrying her baby and a small valise. Hailed a cab.

For two straight weeks she had burned evidence in the Godin and on the stove, delivered the ash to the toilet, and flushed it down. The house was clean of evidence, but the reek of smoke was telling enough.

This smell is the only reminiscence of her home when she tries to remember it in later years. There will be times when she wishes her home was licked by a magnificent fire, a fire that wrapped around the whole thing, crumpled walls in a mad waltz of flames, transformed the people inside into the same magnificent fire.

Half-burned hastily by the timid flames of a gas burner, drowned in a toilet bowl shouldn’t be anyone’s fate.

Published in TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Book 1. Purchase the book to read the full piece.

Toronto locations referenced in this piece

“She loves the intersection of Bloor and High Park. The four of them spend the first two months as guests of a young couple, in a junior one-bedroom, in the grey, squat building . . . ” —Bloor and High Park

Globetrotter

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toronto is
amsterdam
adrift at sea

it breathes the open atlantic
where lines and angles blur
and bend into mist

toronto is
prague
without her anchoring of

narrow streets   narrow sky
and
virgin-tight apartment blocks

it is london long-jumping
her imperial shadows
trafalgar-ing into space . . . 
Published in TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Book 1. Purchase the book to read the full piece.
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