What We All Long For

The novel begins with the narrator speaking directly to the reader, describing the city of Toronto: “Winters here are inevitable, sometimes unforgiving” (1). The narrator describes the harshness of winter, then the stench of spring as “Garbage, buried under snowbanks for months, gradually reappears like old habits” (1) while people “on their last nerves” are “suddenly eager for human touch” (2).

The narrator then places the scene as eight in the morning on a Wednesday in early spring and describes a group of young friends on a subway train whom we will later understand to be the novel’s main characters: an Asian woman, Tuyen; a young Black man, Oku; and another woman who “might be Italian, southern” (3), who is Carla. The narrator also describes their conversation about another woman whom the young man is in love with; this woman is Jackie.

The narrator describes the way the free, playful, youthfulness of the three friends might affect everyone else on the train: “Now that conversation has entered everyone’s heads, and will follow them to work; they’ll be trying to figure out the rest of the story all day […] someone will think, Why isn’t my life like that?” (3).

The narrator then turns to a man “jammed in a seat down the car […] who hardly understands English at all” (4), but who is surprised and pierced by the laughter. This man is likely Quy, although this is less clear from this initial description.

The narrator then retreats to consider the diversity of the city: Italian, Vietnamese, Chinese, Ukrainian, Pakistani, Korean, and African neighborhoods throughout the city: “Name a region on the planet and there’s someone from there, here” (4). The narrator describes this as complicated rather than harmonious: “In this city, like everywhere, people work, they eat, they drink, they have sex, but it’s hard not to wake up here without the certainty of misapprehension” (5).

“Quy” Summary

Quy begins by telling us that his name means “precious,” and that “people underestimate [him] all the time because of” his name (6). When Quy was a young boy, he and his family fled Vietnam; Quy was carrying his parents’ life savings in the form of diamonds sewn into his belt. They eventually made it to the water, but Quy was separated from his parents and sisters and ended up on the wrong boat, not realizing he was no longer with his parents until he was in the middle of the South China Sea.

The journey to Pulau Bidong took eight days. Even though Quy was mistreated, being no one’s child, he realized later he was lucky he wasn’t simply thrown overboard. At one point the boat was boarded by pirates, who knew to look in his belt for the diamonds and took them from him. He was almost kidnapped, but he bit the pirate, who knocked him out and left him on the boat.

Quy spent seven years at the Pulau Bidong refugee camp living as an orphan and beggar. He began to wish that the pirates had taken him so that at least he “would have had a destination and another fate” (9).