Wayson Choy profile

“Ghosts are everywhere,” Wayson Choy writes in his forthcoming memoir, “but I do not believe in them.” A work in progress that’s due to be released in spring 2009, Not Yet will describe Choy’s journey through near-death experiences in both 2001 and 2005. According to the author, the title reflects his “not being dead yet”.

In August 2001, while completing his second novel, All That Matters—the follow-up to his break-out 1995 work The Jade Peony—Choy experienced an asthma attack so severe that doctors induced a coma and used a ventilator to keep him alive. Three days later, he suffered a heart attack. After four months in the hospital and a year of physical rehabilitation, he returned to his writing. “After I recovered, I revised the novel quite a bit. I wanted to say more,” Choy says of All That Matters, which was released in 2004 and went on to win the Trillium Book Award and a place on the short-list for the Giller Prize.

Choy’s second heart attack, which occurred in 2005, required a quadruple bypass. “My second near-death experience proved to be fortunate,” Choy explains by phone from Toronto, “because in many ways, it became a near-life experience.” As a result of his two heart attacks, Choy wanted to examine his life more closely, to put into perspective his appreciation of the extended family and friends who watched over him while he was sick. “In the absurd face of one’s own dying,” he says, “what is the meaning of their acts of decency? What is any life about?” Not Yet offers him an opportunity to explore such questions.

“I have always been a disbeliever of ghosts,” Choy says, “nor am I a religious person.” But at a fateful lunch in 2003 at a Thai-Vietnamese restaurant on Commercial Drive, he came to believe that signs were being given to him to take stock of his life. The restaurant hostess told Choy that she saw two spirits around him, one an old lady and the other a young man. He came to believe that one was his biological mother, who gave him up for adoption when he was a baby. The other, he felt, was a 19-year-old who had died of leukemia in 1956, a young man whom Choy had fallen in love with when he himself was only 17. Why had they suddenly shown up? And why did the hostess tell Choy of their presence?

In the course of writing Not Yet, Choy did research on ghost stories. “What occurred to me was that ghosts are universally common among cultures,” he says. Writing the book allowed him to think more deeply about mortality. “There’s a reality beyond the flesh that we don’t quite understand,” he says. “For example, there are deeper levels of consciousness that come to life when I’m focused. Something else happens to my writing that is more than just imagination.”

His journey continues: Choy is currently in the process of revising and, as he puts it, “re-creating and deepening” the final draft. “My editor asked me, ”˜Where is Wayson Choy in this book?’ She was right. There’s much more left to discover.”

Award-winning author Wayson Choy spoke to a capacity crowd about the writing of Not Yet at the McGill branch of the Burnaby Public Library on April 16.