What We All Long For

Dionne Brand's What We All Long For was my first read in 2008 and it was a good one.

It's set in Toronto and is about 4 friends who are second-generation Canadians, one of whom, Tuyen, is a Vietnamese-lesbian-starving artist that I identified with - not so much the lesbian or starving artist part, but the part in which she describes growing up "Western" and having to act as an interpreter for her parents (See Ch. 5).

My mother's English is fair, but she will still, to this day, ask me to impersonate her if there's something she doesn't want to have to deal with by phone with, say the bank or the cable company, and I always feel a slight twinge of guilt because there's a part of me that thinks the person on the other end will see me as a fraud. This feeling is amplified when I hear the recorded message about how the call may be recorded or monitored for training purposes - I wonder if they file all the calls away from a particular customer and then go back and review them at a later date because if they do, they'd hear that one day my mother had clear, unaccented English and on another, not. Ridiculous, I know, but I still wonder.