metronome of knife to cutting board a chorus of sounds my eyes well up as she continues without a single tear down the hall, the piercing smells overtake us she …
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ricepaper
I didn’t know I was Japanese Canadian until almost four years ago. I was twenty. Growing up, I never blended the two words into a single neat term that hinted …
Chinatown Ghosts, originally published in 1986, is a collection of poems that Jim Wong-Chu wrote over a period of years. Some of them were later published in Ricepaper. I encountered …
It’s been almost ten years now since my grandmother died. My grandfather came to live with us later that year, and spent the whole time fighting with my dad. I …
I always had a penchant for doing things I wasn’t supposed to, especially as a child. One hazy summer, I was poking around on my mother’s silver MacBook, feeling quite …
Obachan is a force to be reckoned with. She guides me through Tokyo Station with the speed and efficiency of someone less than half her age. Her body, eighty-three years …
Rowena’s day used to start very early, long before the sky could conceive first light. She would see her husband off as he set out to sea, staying by the …
1942 draws to a close with the Watada family still interned in the abandoned town of Minto, BC, during the beginning of the Japanese Canadian ‘evacuation’. Terry Watada reimagines his …
My father was a handsome, rugged man; tough, fairly tall (five–foot-ten in his youth) and quiet. He was a lumberjack before WWII. In 1920, he was abandoned in Vancouver at …
My impressions of Montréal were a haze of summer memories: Leonard Cohen’s mural just off Boulevard Saint-Laurent, not far from where mourners gathered on his doorstep upon hearing the news …