GHOST FOREST

Spurred by her father’s illness, a Chinese Canadian woman explores her family’s past.

When the unnamed narrator is 3, her family immigrates to Vancouver—she, her mother, and her grandparents. Everyone, that is, except her father, who helps them settle in but then returns to Hong Kong, worried that he won’t be able to find a job to support them in a new country. They become an “astronaut family”: “It’s a term invented by the Hong Kong mass media. A family with an astronaut father—flying here, flying there.” In very short, matter-of-fact fragments, the narrator accumulates memories of growing up, adjusting to life in Canada, and handling an often difficult relationship with a father she sees only twice a year. These memories mingle with those of her mother and grandmother, which the narrator begins collecting after her father falls ill from liver disease and the family assembles in Hong Kong. Her mother recalls high school basketball triumphs and, later, the process of caring for the narrator’s younger sister, born with a blood tumor; her grandmother relates, with impish humor, a childhood spent reading classical Chinese novels by night amid war (“Sometimes we couldn’t turn the lights on after sunset or we would get bombed”) and the one time she happened to write an opera. At one point in this nonlinear book, the narrator studies abroad in China during college and learns a spare technique of Chinese ink painting called xieyi. “They left large areas of the paper blank because they felt empty space was as important as form, that absence was as important as presence,” she tells us. “So what did they seek to capture instead? The artist’s spirit.” Debut author Fung seems to be describing her own narrative technique as much as this historical style, and its spareness does occasionally lend the narrative a fittingly agile sense of itinerancy. Largely, though, the details come across as somewhat mundane: They never really cohere into something bigger than their sum, and the characters remain unconvincing collections of attributes. As a result, the ending in particular feels merely sentimental rather than moving.

Occasionally touching but ultimately insubstantial.