It's no wonder that the initial section of Teresa Wong's graphic memoir All Our Ordinary Stories is titled "Mother Tongue". Language is a key element in defining ourselves, connecting to our past through family, and allowing us to interact with the wider community arounds us. For second generation Canadians, language is often the tie that binds or breaks the generations. That is one of the underpinning points that drives Wong's narrative as well. She ponders if her lack of language skills is the barrier that has created the distance between her and her parents, or something fundamentally more personal? And no matter from which corner of the world one's family originates, it is a story to which many children of immigrant parents can relate.Throughout the progression of her book, Teresa Wong describes how her parents escaped Mao's regime and arrived in Canada having very little language with which to cope with daily life. It brings to mind my own mother's experience with her family as post-World War 2 economic refugees from a Nazi occupied country. A teenager made to sit with the primary children in a one room Ontario schoolhouse because she had no English, she soon left school to support her family. My mother learned English as she worked.
Teresa struggles to draw from her parents' details of their past. These details may be passed off as "ordinary" by her mother, but to Teresa they are definitely not. They are tales of harrowing near escapes, jail, and dangerous crossings. Could calling them ordinary be a defense, a means of self-protection from the trauma of those times? I can only speculate, as it took many years before my own parents could talk about the war. In fact, I only found out recently, after 61 years of being my mother's son, that her family was made to billet a Nazi officer through the height of the occupation.
But the stories are there and can be coaxed out and collected. And, whether set in Maoist China or Nazi occupied Europe, or some other corner of the world, it is in this collection of the tales our parents tell, that we form part of our own identities. This may in fact be universal for all people, immigrant or otherwise, and hitting upon the universal is what makes for good literature.
For further reading about relationships between generations in families, you can take a look at this list:
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