Adam McPhee Reviews:

Wayne Ng, Johnny Delivers, Guernica Editions, 2024 
David Spaner, Keefer Street, Ronsdale Press, 2024

It’s 1977 in Toronto and Johnny Wong, protagonist of Wayne Ng’s Johnny Delivers, isn’t sure what he wants in life, but it isn’t this. He’s 18, almost finished high school and a delivery driver for the Red Pagoda, his parents’ Chinese restaurant. A child of immigrants, he feels like he spends more time parenting them than they’ve spent raising him.

Johnny starts the novel by fetching his mother, who has snuck off once again to play mahjong at the Wong Association House. His high school buddy Leo works as a doorman at the house, and it’s from Leo he learns that his mother has taken out a loan from Auntie, using their family restaurant as collateral. Auntie, who otherwise has a sweet spot for Johnny, intends to call the loan in, as ‘the uncles are cracking down on derelict debts.’ That’s bad enough, but recently the Toronto Star has reported the bombing of another Chinese restaurant in Toronto, suggesting it’s the work of the triads, recently arrived from Hong Kong. Johnny doesn’t know how seriously to take the report—it could be a Yellow Peril scare story—but he’s sensible enough to know it’s better not to find out.

His school days aren’t quite as precarious, but high school tends to generate its own heightened sense of drama. He has a pair of friends, fellow Rush fans whose immigrant experiences contrast with his own, but his most steadfast companion is Bruce Lee, at this point dead for four years but alive and kicking in Johnny’s imagination, offering guidance and aphorisms but also distracting Johnny from the world around him. Johnny’s love for Bruce Lee gives him something to talk to his Baba about, letting them bond over their love for kung fu movies and swap conspiracies about the star’s untimely death, and Johnny likes coming up with variations of Lee’s quotes for the restaurant’s sidewalk sandwich board: ‘Life itself is your teacher, and you’re learning so long as you eat Chinese food.’ But while Lee used his stardom to break Chinese stereotypes, in some ways he ended up reinforcing others—like the association with martial arts, and in a roundabout way this lands Johnny in the vice principal’s office for fighting.

While the vice-principal takes an interest in Johnny, so too does Johnny’s old friend Barry. The two were in foster care together years earlier (detailed in Ng’s earlier novel, Letters from Johnny), but now Barry’s going down a different road, showing Johnny a seedier side of the city at odds with the image of Toronto the good and pitching a scheme to sell weed out of the Red Pagoda. Johnny improves Barry’s business plan, hitting upon the idea of delivering weed to customers who order using a rudimentary code. Dealing brings a taste of popularity to Johnny and the restaurant, but not all attention is good, and it isn’t long before a pair of triad soldiers show up and speak with Johnny’s mother.

A number of catastrophes finally bring the different lives Johnny has built for himself colliding together such that he is forced to act: there’s a botched order, the restaurant’s debt, triads, his mother’s gambling and her intuition about his life, a kidnapping and, finally, a family revelation involving paper sons and paper daughters worthy of this Star Wars movie Johnny keeps hearing about. Johnny Delivers is a coming-of-age novel as a thriller, deftly weaving these strands together to build momentum as Johnny rushes headlong into adulthood.

Keefer Street by David Spaner is also a novel about a child of immigrants. Jake Feldman is coming of age in Vancouver’s Jewish community during the Great Depression, living with his mother and siblings—his father has separated from the family and runs a men’s clothing store in the fictional town of Fort Harold, in northern BC.

A visit to Toronto sees one of Jake’s great passions—baseball—awaken his antifascist politics when a mob of Nazi sympathizers interrupts a game in what becomes known as the Christie Pits riot. As he’s Jewish, the fight against fascism has a personal significance for Jake, but unemployment becomes the more immediate threat. Soon after, Jake finishes school and goes to work in a relief camp. Here he meets Wobblies and other leftists and takes up an interest in socialist literature. On returning to Vancouver, he becomes active in street protests, sometimes getting arrested for his efforts. When news breaks of a Nazi warship’s impending visit to Vancouver, a coalition forms to protest. Jake is with the Worker’s Circle, a Jewish group, working in league with other ethnic organizations, as well as unions, organized relief camp workers and an assortment of leftist groups, all opposed to the mayor’s plans to honour the Nazis. Lena, the girl Jake has a crush on, is one of the leading antifascist organizers. She wants a peaceful protest, but Jake sides with those who think that more is needed. This is a fictionalized take on an event that really happened (the Karlsruhe becomes the Karlsbad), and offers a look at the strategic tradeoffs involved in political organizing, as well as some much-needed catharsis when Jake and his comrades are able to storm the ship and torch a Swastika flag.

Aside from socialism, Jake has his social life: he throws a party and has his records stolen by someone he thought a friend, an awkward romance with Lena fizzles out and he has a stint working with his cousin Sam in his father’s clothing store. With the Spanish Civil War making headlines, Jake decides to sign up with the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, the Canadian section of the Spanish Republic’s International Brigades, volunteer soldiers in the fight against fascism. We pick up Jake’s life on the other side of the war, when the International Brigades’ veterans were labelled as communists and ‘premature antifascists.’ Jake has trouble finding work, and despite his experience, he’s unable to join the military to fight in World War II; he’s even tempted to change his name. As the war fades into the background, he ends up working at his father’s shop, raising a family in Fort Harold and enjoying a small part of North America’s post-war prosperity. His wife yearns for the city, but like his father, he finds he’s unable to follow her. It’s only during the rightward turn in the eighties that his adult son is able to reignite the idealist spark that once fired him, leading him to connect with the Mac-Pap veterans.

His actual experience in the war elided, each chapter of Jake’s life is juxtaposed with a chapter set during a 1986 return to Spain on a trip for veterans of the Mac-Paps.

Jake’s trip to Spain examines the contradictions of the war and the consequences faced by the Spanish veterans. While World War II vets are among the most honoured citizens in Canadian history, the Mac-Paps—who volunteered to fight the same enemy earlier and used their own resources to get to Spain—can hardly get their own government to acknowledge they exist. One Mac-Pap vet in the group, like many Canadians, later enlisted in the American army to fight in Vietnam—to do this, the Canadian government was more than willing to ignore the law it wrote in an attempt to keep Canadians out of Spain. For most of the trip, Jake remains something of a cipher. While he sticks up for a friend who is maligned by a military attaché during a reception at the Canadian embassy, he seems neither particularly proud nor overly regretful about his time in Spain, slowly evaluating each aspect of the war he encounters on its own merits. Likewise, the narrative of Jake’s life is a sober chronicle of the 20th-century Left, following Jake as he lives through moments of solidarity, and then ruminating over various defeats.

If, in Johnny Delivers, Johnny’s lives threaten to collide into disaster, then Keefer Street’s Jake has lives that threaten not to cohere––after the war he grows listless without a cause, atomized as he retreats from his community and family. It’s only when Jake reconnects with Rebecca, an American nurse who tended to him after he was wounded, that he’s able to reconcile his domestic and political lives with the world of war that he lived in, briefly but intensively, during his time in Spain in the forties.

—Adam McPhee