‘For Today I am a Boy’ by Kim Fu

Reviewed by Brett Josef Grubisic

Leave the country. Catch the outbound train. Secure employment in a larger city. At the very least let mom and dad comprehend the devastating error of their ways.

As for the coming-of-age novel in which the protagonist completely appreciates the wisdom of her parents, happens upon a worthwhile career in his simple hometown, and settles into a comfortable yet fulfilling routine in the locale she’s always known and valued? That rare specimen falls well outside the genre’s archetypal trajectory, just ask James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, Sherwood Anderson’s George Willard, Alice Munro’s Del Jordan, or Jeanette Winterson’s Jeanette.

The opposite is the norm and, arguably, the point. Under the oppressive, unbending thumb of historical precedent, familial tradition, and social orthodoxy, the characteristic theme of the coming-of-age story—the DIY building project of selfhood—flails or fumbles while at home, succeeding only when an encouraging distant site is discovered and staked.

Utilizing a familiar literary blueprint to tell an engrossing if atypical story, Kim Fu’s For Today I am a Boy depicts Peter Huang’s long process of self-made personhood.

In an elegant and enchantingly told debut novel (with an assured but resolutely non-showy aesthetic that recalls the debut of another graduate of UBC’s writing program, Madeleine Thien’s Simple Recipes), Fu captures the rule-bound childhood and bewildered youth of Peter before addressing an adult stretch in which problems arrive with far greater frequency than solutions.

Though Peter is male, beginning at a young age he’s certain that he’s meant to be female, elegant in the way of Audrey Hepburn. Finding his true self turns into an arduous quest that’s three decades long.

Fu’s winning first chapters disclose Peter’s birth and childhood. The only boy in a family with three daughters, Peter learns early lessons about gender rules within his family and in the outside world. His stern father (who’s called Father, his first name never known to his own children) is an immigrant from China with his own “project of Westernization”—he’d fixed his “first language in the past” and hates his own accent. He nonetheless adheres to masculine privilege. This includes firm ideas related to “the man is king” and the notion that any domestic labour is woman’s work and beneath any man’s interest.

The outside world is Fort Michel, Ontario, a discouraging place of “awkward, middling size.” With grubby trees, high unemployment, bankrupt businesses, one Chinese restaurant, and “the good bar and the bad bar,” it’s a trap of a place (as in “Nobody ever leaves Fort Michel”) where dreams fail or remain stillborn.

And in the school yard, Peter understands, “Boys were ugly and foreign, like another species. Like baboons.” In his experience, relations between boys and girls turn into sexual assault or unwanted pregnancies. With an early declaration (“I want to be a Mommy”), Peter soon learns the necessity of passing as a heterosexual male with interests in becoming a fireman, and so on.

And following a remarkably punitive reaction by his father after Peter is spotted at home (by a neighbour, who is also his father’s mistress) wearing his mother’s girly apron, Fu’s protagonist takes on fraught and knotted forms of self-regard that are akin to dis-identification: “I didn’t have one of those things, that little-boy tab of flesh,” he says, and “the opposite of a phantom limb… that thing, that thing I loathed, was always there.”

Burdened in their own ways, his sympathetic sisters Helen, Adele, and Bonnie in time cope with family and environment with geographical distance, substance abuse, denial, and (in the case of Bonnie) juvenile delinquency that turns into a stint as Brandy, a stripper. Their raging mother just comes to think of them as “strange, disappointing children.” (Peter later recalls the mystifying lack of a category for his family’s tense dynamics: “There was no clean word to use, like alcoholic. That’s what most of my friends were, later on: alcoholics born of alcoholics, abusers born of abusers.”)

Realizing the death-in-life that Fort Michel stands for, Peter shaves his legs, grows his hair, and leaves for Montreal. There, he imagines, “beautiful things would start to grow.” Conceiving of his current body as a prelude, “a starter home,” he foresees this new location as freeing, a bounteous opportunity.

No such luck. After desultory sexual relationships with Margie, a middle-aged—and racist—sadist, and Claire, a lesbian ‘reformed’ under the tutelage of the Pathway to Glory ministry, balding Peter arrives at grim epiphanies related to suicide and solitude (feeling a loneliness that explodes “out of nowhere in a screeching swarm, dark and dense enough to blot out the sun”). He sees that putting on his “sisters’ decades-old makeup” and dressing up alone in an apartment will not suffice as a life. And though he finds an accepting group of colleagues at the restaurant where he works, he’s unable to free himself from years of self-loathing.

Fu handles the era after Peter leaves Ontario with notable rapidity. More than a decade passes and Fu’s episodic structure allows her to highlight key scenes and events of the entire Huang family. While one of the freedoms of first-person narration is revealing as little or as much as the narrator desires (and then relating that detailed—or tight-lipped—revelation to the character’s personality), the story’s rapid ‘greatest hits’ tour through adulthood allows Fu to avoid a detailed examination of selfhood in general and non-heteronormative selfhood in particular. It’s as though Peter’s thinking about identity slows to a crawl throughout his twenties and the narrative does too as a result. To a degree the novel here side-steps the central theme it has already established.

With the death of his father and the ongoing fury of his mother (whose ultimate stance includes: “Get out of my house…You garbage. You faggots and whores”), Peter takes refuge with his sisters, who are likewise seeking to begin again—envisioning the Huang Family 2.0.

While present-day Canada isn’t exactly as oppressive and parochial as Ireland seemed to Joyce’s Stephen, the novel does close with renewed migration. This elsewhere, it is hoped, will grant the travellers opportunities home never did.

HarperCollins | 256 pages |  $19.99 | paper | ISBN # 978-1443412643