Stalking the thieves of Bay Street
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Vol. 20, No. 6 • July/August 2012
3 Trading with the Sharks
18 A Post-War Masquerade
A review of Thieves of Bay Street: How Banks,
Brokerages and the Wealthy Steal Billions from
Canadians, by Bruce Livesey
Michael Decter
5 One Brief Shining Moment
A review of The Best Place to Be: Expo 67
and Its Time, by John Lownsbrough
Daniel Francis
7 Rogue Proteins
A review of Fatal Flaws: How a Misfolded Protein
Baffled Scientists and Changed the Way We Look at
the Brain, by Jay Ingram
Helen Branswell
8 Under Unblinking Eyes
A review of Eyes Everywhere: The Global Growth of
Camera Surveillance, edited by Aaron Doyle, Randy
Lippert and David Lyon
Steve Hewitt
10 Canada’s Benedict Arnold
A review of The Imposter Bride, by Nancy Richler
Ayelet Kuper
19 Strange Enough to Be True
Michael Valpy
A review of Racialized Policing: Aboriginal People’s
Encounters with the Police, by Elizabeth Comack
John D. Whyte
Moira MacDougall
20 As Others See Us
Steven Hayward, Esi Edugyan, John Ralston
Saul, Philip Slayton, Bronwyn Drainie, John
Geiger, Mark Lovewell, Michiel Horn, Paul
Wilson, Anna Porter
RESEARCH
23 New Music for Canada
A review of Weinzweig: Essays on His Life and
Music, edited by John Beckwith and Brian Cherney,
and Unheard Of: Memoirs of a Canadian Composer,
by John Beckwith
17 Oysterville
A poem
James Arthur
17 A sea monster tells his story
A poem
David Clink
Art throughout the issue by Shantala Robinson,
an illustrator and graphic artist based in Vancouver.
Her work has been published in several magazines
and she participates in art shows in Canada.
A review of The Canadian Federal Election of 2011,
edited by Jon H. Pammett and Christopher Dornan
Anthony Westell
July/August 2012
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22 An Imperial Crisis
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1
Strange Enough to Be True
A skillful tale of survival in Vietnam.
James FitzGerald
The Headmaster’s Wager
Vincent Lam
Doubleday
393 pages, hardcover
ISBN 9780385661454
I
n his 2006 Giller Prize–winning collection of linked short stories, Bloodletting and
Miraculous Cures, Vincent Lam introduced a
cameo character, Percival Chen, the tuxedo-clad
headmaster of a private English academy in Saigon,
sleeping off a hangover after a debauched night
of gambling and whoring. In Lam’s first novel, The
Headmaster’s Wager, Chen reappears as the fully
fleshed-out protagonist, inspired by the author’s
larger-than-life (and large-as-fiction)
Chinese grandfather.
As a teenager growing up in
Ottawa, Lam absorbed dramatic
family stories of the expatriate
Chinese community in Saigon during the Vietnam
War, and dreamt of writing a book. A decade ago,
still only in his twenties, he started a first draft only
to realize he was not emotionally ready; after shifting to short stories—drawn on his often harrowing,
real-life experiences as an emergency room physician at Toronto’s East General Hospital—he shot to
sudden literary prominence.
The suspended, family-infused novel has now
arrived fully realized; if some of the literati may
have envied a precocious 32-year-old doctor enjoying the good fortune of a Giller win with his first
stab at fiction, they will turn an even darker shade
of green encountering the extraordinary sophistication and maturity of The Headmaster’s Wager. The
science half of his brain aside, the man is a born
storyteller.
The multi-layered plot hinges on the passing
down from generation to generation of a family
good luck charm—a small, rough lump of coal—
that serves as a perpetual reminder that “one never
knows the form wealth takes, or how luck arrives.”
Having left his Chinese village in search of “mountains of gold,” Chen’s father, an opium-addicted
rice merchant, longs to return to his homeland
with his newfound wealth, but never does, enacting the timeless immigrant dilemma: is it better
to live poor at home or rich abroad? The terrifying
Japanese occupation of Hong Kong in 1941 propels the next generation, the young Chen, to the
Chinese quarter in Saigon with his haughty new
wife, Cecilia. She derides him as a country bumpkin, yet prefers to escape under the protection of an
arranged marriage rather than risk rape and starvation at the hands of the Japanese. After sex with her
husband—“even a peasant is good for the animal
things”—she unleashes a torrent of insults.
In Saigon, Chen makes his fortune—the word
vibrates with double meaning—as the headmaster
of an elite English academy. Greased by his bribery
of local officials with whom he carouses, Chen’s fat
profits are made by educating translators for the
American military bent on their futile mission to
win Vietnamese hearts and minds. Trouble starts
when Chen is pressured to include the Vietnamese
language on a curriculum that contains no politics
or history, a reflection of his tragic flaw—political
naiveté.
luck; in the adrenalized feeling of risking and losing
everything lies “a tantalizing, terrifying freedom.”
This is a story not just of melded nationalities, but
melded everything—politics, sex, violence, drugs,
money, luck, food, race, class, family.
The Tet Offensive of January 1968, when the Viet
Cong smuggled weapons into Saigon under the
noses of the Americans and unleashed squads of
assassins, forms a high point in the action. A knot
of coincidences, lucky and unlucky, at first strains
the credulity of the reader, but then we think, “No,
this is strange enough to be true.” The remainder of
the plot, riddled with sharply ironic twists and turns
we can only find in real life, cannot be revealed
without spoiling the pleasures of surprise—and
shock. Suffice it to say that, consumed by his appetites, Chen plays out his fate as an unwitting pawn,
oblivious to the machinations enveloping him; private friends turn into
public enemies and vice versa.
With the deft use of dreams and
flashbacks, Lam fills in the family
back-story without losing the forward momentum of the gripping political tale that echoes the
intrigues of Dr. Zhivago and Graham Greene.
Arresting poetic images of pleasure and pain, of
sex and death, are stitched together with surgical
precision: “He filled his mouth with her, lest he say
something that might frighten them both”; a few
pages later, we encounter a Buddhist monk setting himself alight, his “mouth a black hole within
his melting face.” Repelling successive waves of
Chinese, Japanese, French and American invaders,
the Vietnamese people endure and survive as subversive, indomitable benders-with-the-wind; “the
land itself bleeds.”
An alchemist who has turned rough familial
coal into literary gold (and with any luck, cinematic
gold), Lam has forged a testament to the immutable power of the filial bond, mapping the conscious and unconscious transmission of gifts and
curses of a single family, and therefore all families.
Paradoxically, in finding great wealth, we lose our
true homes: “Once you have left a place, you can
never go back … The place of your memories will
have vanished, and you will have new memories.
They will make the old ones feel different … the gold
lump doesn’t even matter, except for what it helps
you to remember.”
With his worldly-wise, irony-rich piece of ancestor worship, Vincent Lam has successfully emerged
from the emotional emergency room of his family
history. Time will tell if he chooses to emulate
such former physicians as Anton Chekhov, Arthur
Conan Doyle and Somerset Maugham and surrender to full-time bloodletting, also known as writing. Whatever path his healing gifts take, literary
or medical, I predict good fortune—perhaps even
miracles. The Headmaster’s Wager is a tough act to
follow, but I like the man’s chances.
Lam has forged a testament to the
immutable power of the filial bond.
James FitzGerald won the 2010 Writers’ Trust NonFiction Prize for his family memoir, What Disturbs
Our Blood: A Son’s Quest To Redeem the Past
(Random House). His first book, Old Boys: The
Powerful Legacy of Upper Canada College, was
published by Macfarlane Walter and Ross in 1994.
July/August 2012
Out of blind patriotism rather than communist sympathies, Chen is eager to return home to
support the Great Leap Forward, but to maintain his high life he must remain in Vietnam. He
deeply loves his son, Dai Jai (born in 1949 just as
Mao seized power)—perhaps too much: he wants
to control Dai Jai’s romantic choices even as he
­indulges his own promiscuity. At the same time, Dai
Jai must tacitly learn how to play the game: “Son, if
you wish to do something, it is often best to give the
appearance that you have done nothing at all.”
As the Vietnam War peaks in the late 1960s, the
teenaged Dai Jai, politically bold in the face of his
father’s discretion, is arrested as a pro-Chinese
dissident. In a chilling scene of the insidious but
devastating effects of slow-dripping water torture—
“finally, with one important drop, the boy’s head
tears open like paper”—Dai Jai’s tormenting
policeman mocks ambiguity as worthless, in this
the most ambiguous of worlds. Chen scrambles to
raise his son’s ransom of $50,000 in games of mahjong. Concurrently, Dai Jai dreams of flying over his
father’s gold mountain; even as his father nods with
approval, enjoining the son to surpass the father,
Chen falls Icarus-like from the sky, “impaled by
gold shards.”
In another game of mah-jong, Chen wins
Jacqueline, a beautiful young courtesan of mixed
French-Vietnamese blood, forced to sell herself
after the death of her mother. “The Americans are
not so good at hiding their appetites, which makes
them easier to read,” she tells him. “You Chinese
are no more virtuous, just more circumspect.” The
ancient Chinese game of skill and chance, banned
by Mao as corrupt, stands as an apt metaphor for
what drives Chen: the tiles, stolen from other players, are then “melded” into a winning hand. He
believes the intensity of his own desire can bring
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