By Wayson Choy. Doubleday Canada, 208 pp, $27.95, hardcover

On an August evening in 2001, Wayson Choy “endured a severe asthma attack” and “multiple cardiac events”, the first of two health crises that bracket his latest book, Not Yet: A Memoir of Living and Almost Dying.

Among the most prominent writers of Asian Canadian literature, Choy, who was born in Vancouver, examines Chinese families within Canada’s Chinatown communities, their traditions, and their collective histories.

Not Yet is a contemporary continuation of these themes, the concept of family now referring to the author’s own family of friends, a clan related not by blood but by profound friendship.

Unlike those of his previous books—the Trillium Book Award–winning novels The Jade Peony and All That Matters, and the Governor General’s Award–nominated memoir Paper Shadows: A Chinatown Childhood—Not Yet’s primary narrative occurs in the present day. Choy experiences an asthma attack at home in Toronto, is admitted to hospital, and is diagnosed with “acute respiratory distress syndrome”. The days that follow become a haze of medications, the author imagining himself massaged by James Dean and deprived of water by the spectral “Queen of Water”.

Surrounded by a family of former students, colleagues, godchildren, and assistants, Choy begins to recover, undergoing physical therapy before eventually returning home.

He travels to China for the first time, to film a documentary on Confucius, and reconciles his cultural identity. “Here, everything surrounding me was Chinese. Yet I felt no pride, and I did not feel Chinese.” Returning to Canada, he observes, “I knew now, with certainty, where my bones belonged.”

This central plot line is interspersed with episodes from Choy’s past—including his graduation from UBC and his parents’ conflicting feelings about their son’s desire to write—a technique he often employs to telegraph personal histories into the present narrative.

Later, while he’s in Vancouver on business, an acquaintance informs him that he is being followed by two ghosts. Although skeptical, Choy eventually participates in an exorcism conducted at a Vancouver Buddhist temple.

It is only in the final pages of the book, in the autumn of 2005, that he experiences “unstable angina” and is readmitted to hospital. His family of friends returns to his side.

Much more than an account of illness and recovery, Not Yet is a tribute to the relationships that sustain one’s reason to live.