Edward Y.C. Lee
About the Author
I have always loved books. As a child, I remember browsing through my older brother’s Batman comics, trying to decipher the word balloons and inventing dialogue for the mysterious costumed characters. It wasn’t until kindergarten that I learned my ABCs, but I have never forgotten my teacher, turning the pages of an enormous book, as she introduced us to Dick, Jane, and Sally. I was immediately transfixed. How amazing that mere blots of ink could magically transform into stories!
In no time, I became a voracious reader. Soon, I discovered I loved writing as much as reading. I began keeping a journal at the age of ten. All through elementary school, I wrote fifty-page “projects” about Ecuador, Timber Wolves, and the Triceratops. Very early on, I dreamt of becoming a novelist. More than anything, I wanted my very own book.
Nevertheless, in the Chinese immigrant household where I grew up, writing was not considered a suitable profession. It was too unstable, too unlikely, and too uncertain. Throughout high school, I continued to journalize my life, all the while holding on to an inchoate desire to become a writer. Despite this, I took no action to fulfil my secret fantasy. It wasn't just that writing as a career had been disparaged at home. For the life of me, I didn't know what to write about.
I stumbled into university and studied biology. Later, seduced by my love for words, I entered law school, and embarked on a career in the stability of the legal profession.
As an adult, I moved to Toronto, where I toiled at my solitary law practice. One summer, dissatisfied with my worklife, I enrolled in a week-long course at a fiction-writing school. Although the teaching staff spoke incessantly about how hard it was to break in as a first-time novelist, I was hooked. For the first time, I gave myself the permission to believe I might one day become a writer.
Galvanised, I decided I would write for others, with the expressed goal of publication. I still had no idea of what to write about, so I penned stories of science fiction and fantasy, a genre I had loved since adolescence. These early efforts brought me only rejection slips, but a chance encounter at the Toronto Public Library with the writer, Katherine Govier, changed everything.
She praised my sci-fi story about a band of humans living like a wolf pack in a post apocalyptic world, but then looked at me shrewdly.
“What do you really want to write about?” she asked.
I had never really considered that question. “Myself,” I answered, to my own surprise. “What it was like to grow up in a Chinese-Canadian home in Montreal. The Asian immigrant experience.”
Katherine nodded. “Well, what are you waiting for?”
At last, I knew.
My Writing Career
My writing career began when my short story, In the World of Lofan, was published in the Toronto Star in July 1995. I wrote the story for my grandfather, who had immigrated to Canada in the early 1900’s, and paid the $500.00 Chinese head tax that had been levied on all the Chinese of that era. He lived separate and apart from my grandmother and his children in China for almost forty years.
Other stories, essays, and news articles soon followed. I wrote for the Facts and Arguments page of the Globe and Mail: A Marriage of Woman and Man was published on September 21, 1995, and So Many Writers, So Little Talent appeared on March 15, 1996.
My personal essay, Chinese Fathers, Chinese Sons, was published in 1997 in Millenium Messages, an anthology edited by Kenda Gee, who later co-produced, co-wrote, and starred in the award-winning feature-length documentary, Lost Years: A People's Struggle For Justice.
My short story, Son of the Dragon Queen, was published in Descant Magazine 98, Fall Fictions in 1998.
My news articles appeared in the Toronto Star. Refugee Outcry Based on Racism? was published on September 10, 1999, Canada’s Chinese Still Stereotyped on December 15, 1997, and Denigrating Asian Men on August 4, 2003.
Excerpts of my first novel, Into a Far Country, were published in Strike the Wok, An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Canadian Fiction, in 2003, and in Descant Magazine 126, Love(s) That Dare(s) Not in the fall of 2004.
Vanishing Father appeared in TOK, Writing the New Toronto, Book 1, in 2006.
In 2005, I created the radio documentary, Tiger Balm, Batman Comics, and Barbecue Pork (indexed as Tiger Balm and Batman Comics) for CBC Radio Outfront.