Dandelion by Jamie Chai Yun Liew
CBC Books | Posted: January 9, 2025 2:58 PM | Last Updated: 11 hours ago
A novel about a woman tracing mother's past journey in order to learn who she is and where she belongs
When Lily was 11 years old, her mother, Swee Hua, walked away from the family, never to be seen or heard from again. Now a new mother herself, Lily becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to Swee Hua. She recalls the spring of 1987, growing up in a small British Columbia mining town where there were only a handful of Asian families; Lily's previously stateless father wanted to blend seamlessly into Canadian life, while her mother, alienated and isolated, longed to return to Brunei. Years later, still affected by Swee Hua's disappearance, Lily's family is stubbornly silent to her questioning. But eventually, an old family friend provides a clue that sends Lily to Southeast Asia to find out the truth.
Winner of the Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award from the Asian Canadian Writers' Workshop, Dandelion is a beautifully written and affecting novel about motherhood, family secrets, migration, isolation and mental illness. With clarity and care, it delves into the many ways we define home, identity, and above all, belonging. (From Arsenal Pulp Press)
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Liew is a lawyer, law professor and podcaster based in Ottawa. Dandelion is her first novel, which won her the Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award from the Asian Canadian Writers' Workshop. She also wrote the nonfiction book Ghost Citizens. Liew was named one of CBC Books writers to watch in 2022.
Why Jamie Chai Yun Liew wrote Dandelion
"I wanted to explore themes of belonging and place from an emotional place. I wrote about it academically in terms of how the law creates foreigners, but I wanted to explore how that feels — what that does to the psyche, how that affects someone's mental health.
I wanted to explore themes of belonging and place from an emotional place. - Jamie Chai Yun Liew
"There are a lot of assumptions about why people are stateless and the first one is that they are foreigners or migrants. And some stateless people are, but a lot of stateless people — millions around the world — are living within their home countries and overwhelmingly people told me, 'I'm being treated like a foreigner in my own country.'"