Novelist, memoirist, and teacher Wayson Choy

It seems too soon to be relegating Wayson Choy to memory. He was such a vital presence mere days ago. And he glowed everywhere he went. Often when I thought of what it meant to be charismatic, I thought of Wayson. He could tell the story of how, in his youth, he saw a clip of the writer Françoise Sagan bombing down the highway in her new red Ferrari, and Wayson decided that, yes, that was for him. That was the life he wanted. And he took us with him. He made us believe it, too, made us believe that what he was doing was noble, that he was noble, and that we could be too, if we just believed what he said. “You matter,” he often told us, and we believed him because we so wanted to. If you were to read his speeches on paper – a challenge since they were almost never written down – they would not have a fraction of the impact they had when Wayson, glowing with whatever aura he seemed to exude, spoke the words.

He could make origami butterflies for our daughters or sign a book with a calligraphic flourish, and it would all feel like magic. He could take you to a tacky dim sum diner and the dragons on the walls and birds of paradise over the entrance would come to life in his presence.

He seemed to belong to everyone and to be – more than loved – cherished by everyone. Yet he could not have come from a more marginal place. He was born in a Chinese ghetto in Vancouver in 1939, a boy who grew up to be gay, and later to discover he’d been adopted. So when he tried his hand at writing, he was breaking new ground for the oppressed mid-century Chinese community of Canada. But Wayson’s secret was that he spoke as clearly and eloquently to them as he did to everyone who felt marginalized. An Orthodox Jewish woman in one of his creative writing classes, for instance, who had to wear a wig and who couldn’t, by Jewish law, so much as touch a man. But she wanted to be near Wayson all the time, felt he could understand the struggle she had endured growing up in such a restrictive community – she had married a rabbi, had eight children by the age of 30, and could only crack the walls of her confinement through writing. She felt he could understand. And he did.

And look at who he was. I can’t even get my Autocorrect to accept his name. It changes it invariably to “Watson.”

Wayson was a superb teacher, one of those teachers you always remember, those great teachers you can count on the fingers of one hand. He was one of those teachers who loved his subject and made you love it too, even if he were teaching remedial composition at Humber College.

At Humber, I was the first of us to have a novel published; when I won the Leacock medal, Wayson turned to my wife and said, “Brace yourself.” When he told me that he, too, was writing a novel, I became anxious: he was such a good guy; what if his book was not very good? What would I say to him? The novel turned out to be The Jade Peony, a book that has gone on to become a Canadian classic. I wish I could write something approaching the brilliance of that novel.

Wayson’s body could not keep up with his ambition and will. He’d had two brushes with death before it finally beat him in April of this year, a week after his 80th birthday. (He recorded the near-death episodes inNot Yet, his fourth and last published book.) Except for a few moments of melancholy when he felt his age finally catching up with him, he rarely gave his mental and physical decline enough attention. He always looked healthier than he was, and certainly younger than he was. He dressed like an undergrad, in sweatshirts and jeans, and almost never wore his Order of Canada pin (he was invested as a member in 2005). He’d grown his hair out in the days when it was an act of rebellion to do so but kept it that length as if to remind us of who he truly was.

Who he was was a champion of the underdog, the marginalized, the overlooked, the struggling artist, the struggling student, the struggling friend. What he was was a great man.

Joseph Kertes founded Humber College’s writing and comedy programs. His forthcoming novel is called Last Impressions.