The Chinese Knot

By Lien Chao. Tsar Books, 176 pp, $18.95, softcover

“If you plant a melon seed, you will harvest melons; but if you plant a thorn, you may have roses, or you may have only thorns,” Rose’s husband chides her after years of separation.

This line from the short story “Rose” evokes the acidic relations between husbands and wives during times of migration and upheaval, a recurring theme in Lien Chao’s new collection The Chinese Knot.

Based on real-life accounts by Chinese immigrants whom Chao has met in Canada, the stories weave together vignettes of their experience in present-day Toronto, redrawing these encounters and building characters who find love, face loneliness, confront death, and deal with racism.

The protagonists are disillusioned females who have spent years struggling to adjust to a new home only to see their marriages dissolve. While Rose’s husband and daughter distance themselves from her after they arrive in Canada, Katherine’s husband, in “African Lion Safari”, walks out on her despite years of hardship together.

In “A Wanton Woman”, Yi Mei and Ai Hua’s disappointment with marriage becomes not only a bonding experience but the source of a romantic relationship between the two women.

The final story in this collection, “The Chinese Knot”, ties all of the book’s themes together and is the most memorable piece of all. Its central character, a teacher and divorced single mother named Luanne Lu, faces a slew of moral dilemmas when her ESL students, out of desperation to stay in Canada, request one by one that she help them cheat the Canadian immigration system.

When Mr. Zhong, her brightest pupil, asks for her hand in marriage for the sole purpose of obtaining citizenship, “Teacher Lu”, as she is affectionately known, comes to an impasse in which she searches for her own reasons to be proudly Canadian and yet dutifully Chinese.

Chao is already an eminent figure in Asian Canadian literary circles, particularly for editing 2003’s Strike the Wok. With The Chinese Knot, she has established herself as an emerging author in her own right.