What We All Long For

“They shared everything: money, clothes, food, ideas. Everything except family details. There was an assumption among them that their families were boring and uninteresting and a general pain, and best kept hidden, and that they couldn’t wait for the end of high school to leave home.”

Their families are not boring, of course, particularly to each other, and as the novel progresses, the suggestion becomes more that they are bothered by their parents and are attempting to forge their own selves in opposition to their parents. To what extent they are successful is yet to be determined.

“Carla knew that she never got the whole truth. For one thing, he was never to blame. So while it was true that the police were motherfuckers, Jamal was also troubled and she knew this, he was her brother.”

Part of the ever-shifting conception of self in the novel is the duality of the self and the duality of circumstances. Jamal, like Quy, is not one thing: he may be messing up, but he is messing up in a world that is designed, and wants, for him to mess up. The novel makes a clear argument that this is difficult to escape, particularly once you are in it. It also argues that this shouldn’t preclude those caught in the mire from getting assistance.

“Lam and Ai had become shadows; two little girls forgotten in the wrecked love of their parents. At times Lam had felt wrong for surviving, wrong for existing in the face of her parents’ tragedy.” 

Lam and Ai are only present in the novel for a couple of short scenes, but in this moment there is a reminder of the incredibly complex nature of the hole left by Quy’s disappearance. Cam and Tuan, of course, are never able to get over the guilt, and Binh and Tuyen struggle to fill that hole. Lam and Ai become tragedies themselves, forgotten but restricted children whose dreams of a new life in Canada and new freedoms are dashed by the disappearance of their younger brother. As a result, they are bitter and resentful, but this comes from their own form of guilt.

“When you are a child, you concentrate on small pebbles, small looks, you look at the ground, you get shoved and pushed. You get shoved and pushed so much you look for something smaller to push back.” 

Quy here both defines his worldview and also suggests a duplicity only hinted at thus far, for it is in this moment that he indicates that what he did to the boy was both knowledgeable and purposeful. Earlier in the chapter he claimed that he didn’t know even that the boy was dead, but here he suggests strongly that he wanted to harm the boy because he needed something smaller to bully.

“They were the first places people headed on the nights that the men didn’t hit the strip clubs. On the weekends, that is. They were the places people went to feel in their own skin, in their own life. Because when a city gets finished with you in the daytime, you don’t know if you’re coming or going. After you didn’t get the job, or got the job and it was shit, or you were tired of the job, the Paramount was a place of grace—like church.” 

It would be easy to criticize Jackie’s parents for going out all the time, or even for moving to Toronto in the first place seemingly to take part in nightlife culture. However, the case is made here that part of the purpose of that culture is to escape from a city that didn’t accept them for their culture and skin color. The Paramount is described as a club known by Black people, but unknown otherwise it is a club that serves as a refuge, as well, and as such, serves an important institution. When it dies out, there becomes a question of what dies with it.

“A city hemmed in by snow was a beautiful thing to her. Cars buried in the streets, people bewildered as they should be, aimless and directionless as they really are. Snowstorms stopped the pretense of order and civilization. The blistering winds whipped words right out of people’s mouths, they made all predictions and plans hopeless.” 

This is an interesting callback to the first chapter’s connection between snow and society, and how when it thaws, the city thaws with it. The excerpt suggests the main characters’ worldview, which at times reflects an inherent bitterness due to the dichotomy of the worlds they straddle. Snow represents the larger, looming events that transpire in life, such as a young Quy boarding the wrong ship. The excerpt also hints that despite whatever plans the main characters may attempt, their efforts are essentially fruitless, and greater life circumstances will foil them. However, it is also suggested that this is the natural order of life.

“This was not a home where memories were cultivated, it was an anonymous stack of concrete and glass.”

Later in the text, Oku will consider what Alexandra Park might be like if someone had cared enough to spruce it up. Here, Carla considers something similar when thinking about the drabness of the building. She reflects on how beauty is reserved for the wealthy and what this means.

“Doesn’t life leave traces, traces that can attach themselves to others who pass through the aura of that life? Doesn’t a place absorb the events it

witnesses; shouldn’t there be some sign of commemoration, some symbol embedded in this building always for Angie’s life here?” 

In some respects, this is the question the novel is most concerned with: What traces do we leave upon one another? What trace does life leave upon us? One way to think about this is to connect it back to the comment in the first chapter about anonymity. Carla’s questions may suggest that we as people should not be anonymous and that perhaps we are. This excerpt reinforces the individual distances the main characters face throughout their lives—distance from their culture, from their family, from their romantic desires, and even from their unrecognized dreams. This distance creates feelings of isolation, which Carla identifies in the loss of her mother.

“She considered them somewhat childlike since her power over them in the form of language had given her the privilege of viewing them in this way. And her distance from them, as the distance of all translators from their subjects, allowed her to see that so much of the raison d’être of their lives was taken up negotiating their way around the small objects of foreignness placed in their way.”

Language as power is an important theme, and this quote illustrates the way Tuyen’s feelings of power over her parents—her belief that she knows more—stems largely from the fact that she has the language and understanding of their society that they don’t. She is an outsider in her own way, but she is more of an insider than they can be, and without realizing it, she wields that over them.

“She didn’t mind caring for people who were not her family—it was so much easier; they actually did not expect it and were more than grateful for it.” 

A question the novel takes up is what it means to love someone or feel responsible for them. Tuyen, like many people, feels more comfortable with friends rather than family because caring for friends doesn’t carry the same sense of obligation; for her, it feels rewarding rather than required. 

“‘Do not bring trouble, Binh. The danger of the sky is that we cannot climb up into it.’” 

Tuyen is being uncharacteristically traditional, something her brother immediately calls her out on. In one of Quy’s later chapters, he uses the full quote—“the danger of the earth is the mountains, rivers, and hills—constant pitfalls—seek and you gain a little” (286)—which not only completes the thought but reinforces the structural theme of taking past ideas and building upon them to create a fuller picture. 

“It’s like this with this city—you can stand on a simple corner and get taken away in all directions. Depending on the weather, it can be easy or hard. If it’s pleasant, and pleasant is so relative, then the other languages making their way to your ears, plus the language of the air itself, which can be cold and humid or wet and hot, this all sums up into a kind of vocabulary.” 

Language as power is a recurring theme, but also linguistic diversity as a conceptual framework for what it means to live in a city. The four friends more or less reject their parents’ argot, but the diversity of language still feels important to them. 

“Some of his friends didn’t. They resisted, they talked, they asserted their rights. That only caused more trouble. They ended up in the system fighting to get out. They ended up hating everyone around them. Homicidal.” 

This quote suggests two possible ways of dealing with institutional oppression, but underneath is the implicit understanding that it must be dealt with. Oku’s response is to roll with it and continue living, but with that is the acknowledgement that it is still present. It’s an important distinction.

“Reiner was safe. Reiner was white. Musician, bullshitter, and Reiner did not, could not possibly see the city as a prison. More, Reiner must see it as his place—look at how he took possession of it.” 

Oku will revise this slightly later in the novel, but it’s an important moment in considering how people are able to navigate the city in different ways. Oku’s ideas stem from jealousy, but he isn’t wrong—the city is open to Reiner in way that it isn’t for Oku. There’s an implicit power that’s obvious to Oku even if it isn’t to Reiner. 

“The barbershops were universities of a kind and repositories for all the stifled ambition of men who were sidelined by prejudices of one sort or another.” 

A theme of the novel is the rejection of institutions, and many characters reject educational institutions in part because of an imbalance of power in them. Here, Oku observes one of the informal versions of institutions that arise. Due to systemic racism, places such as the barbershop become important centers for debate, suggesting the necessity of such debate to social life. 

“This was how Oku experienced his mother and father each day. As people who somehow lived in the near past and were unable or unwilling to step into the present.” 

Of course, Oku is currently living in one moment of casual sex between him and Jackie a long time ago. But, aside from that, this quote dovetails with much of the novel’s concerns—Oku sees this in his parents, but in a sense, every character lives like this, even if it is not their own near past that they live in.

“A dog will bite you too, and if you let go the chain, he will ravage you. So Loc Tuc chained me up with his books and paper. But I was still a dog. He knew. I knew.” 

This works as a similar metaphor for a kind of educational critique that runs through the novel. Quy is allowed an education, but that education is delivered by his oppressor and used in order to keep him in a kind of chains. In many ways, this is the same reason Oku left university—the works he was reading were the canonical works of dead white men, as it is so often criticized, and as such he was being afforded a version of freedom while still living in a society that denied him the real thing.

“A stream of identities flowed past the bar’s window: Sikhs in FUBU, Portuguese girls in DKNY, veiled Somali girls in Puma sneakers, Columbian teenagers in tattoos. Carla had said it all, not just about her mother but about all of them. Trying to step across the borders of who they were. But they were not merely trying. They were, in fact, borderless.” 

A key element of the novel is the way identities flow “across borders” as they describe them here. The city is described as many things, but one is as a cross-current of diversity. The four of them exist not within a set culture or nationality but across cultures and nationalities; it’s complicated, of course, but less because of their own abilities and more because of societal constraints.

“Apart from that, the month had passed with a kind of calm. Ironically, she didn’t have to worry about Jamal. When he was out on the street, she lived with constant anxiety about the next phone call, the next trouble. Now she at least knew where he was.”

There is a complicated notion of what it means to be free throughout the book. On a more abstract level, Tuyen, for example, is “free”—however, though she has moved out, she still relies on her parents. Quy, too, was “freed” from Pulau Bidong, only to live in the service of Luc Toc, instead. Jamal’s incarceration provides an odd freedom for Carla. This isn’t to say that she prefers that he remain jailed, but as long as he is, she doesn’t have to live with the suspense of wondering when he will next be in trouble.

“[S]he realized that she’d always found him weak at the core, there was always a cowardice there, a shrinking, under expensive shoes, expensive cars, his face shaved so precisely around his moustache and his smell of rich colognes. Today she’d noticed a small protruding gut and an old conceit that in his younger face must have seemed like daring but now was a calcified lechery.”

The novel is concerned in part with the ways that the characters depart or progress from their parents and families to become their own people. Part of that can mean a different kind of freedom, in which they find a weakness they never fully understood was there. For Tuyen, this is more arrogant: what she finds in Tuan is a childishness that stems from language and culture; for Carla, this is the understanding that the man she has been working up the courage to face is, in fact, weak. Recognizing this allows her to move past it.

“Would it have killed them to splash a little colour on the buildings? Yes, it may have cost a little more in the first place to make the ceilings a little higher, the hallways a little less narrow, but in the last place think of the perspective: the general outlook might have been worth it.” 

As Oku wanders Alexandra Park, his mind drifts, and he thinks of the kind of change that could be made in the neighborhood if the people who live there could have the means to find beauty in it. Similar to Carla looking at her old, drab apartment building earlier, Oku finds Alexandra Park lacking. However, the point is the direction that flows: the neighborhood isn’t lacking because the people are lacking; rather, the people struggle because the neighborhood is designed to depress them. He’s making an economic argument for happiness and social well-being. By investing a little more in the construction of the neighborhood, or even in the maintenance of it, perhaps the social well-being of the neighborhood will improve.

“Pope Joan was a bar on Parliament Street. A bar that stood as the last eastern outpost of gay life in downtown Toronto […] There was an urgency to the place and a packed force. All that couldn’t be lived outside was lived in here, in the six or seven hours between when the doors opened and when they closed.” 

As with the Paramount, where Toronto’s Black population was able to escape the pressures and oppression of society and feel free, Pope Joan is a last reserve for the lesbian population. This is the first we experience it in the novel, and it’s important that Tuyen visits at a moment of transformation and self-acceptance. It isn’t her first visit—it’s implied she comes here somewhat often—but it’s the first scene in which she is here, diving back into her sexuality rather than haunting Carla’s apartment. 

“In the end that is what she meant, she realized, that is what she wanted. They deserved kindness, and Tuyen doubted whether this ghost could deliver it.” 

The title of the book is, of course, What We All Long For, and while the narrative doesn’t focus on Cam and Tuan for any extended period of time, here Tuyen’s ruminations suggest that what they believe they want might be complicated. During their time in Canada, they felt constant guilt, and her mother, in particular, seems unable to let go, convinced that she wants to find her son. But the photographs she has of him are of him as a young boy, and that’s how she remembers him. Tuyen wonders if they consider, assuming he survived all these years as an orphan, that he might be horribly changed, and if so, would they still want to know him then. This isn’t to say it is Quy’s fault, of course, but Tuyen here is hitting on something simple—the idea that what we long for may not, in fact, be what we want in the end.