Another great first!

Every aspiring writer just LOVES to look back at their old work and rehash the wonder of their scribblings. Sometimes they're good...and something they're cancerous.

Well, now I present to you a regular (I hope) feature of scans from my childhood works. See, at my old elementary alma mater, the curriculum encouraged a lot of creative writing and drawing, so every day in Mrs. Sheldon's class, we would spend a part of the morning writing and illustrating a little story in our workbooks. We were also required to dictate stories to the teacher, who'd write them out for us in her neat printing, while we illustrated.

Here I present my first story, untitled, a gritty vignette about urban domesticity among working-class, first generation Canadian-born Chinese in downtown Toronto.

I wrote this on my first day of grade one, when I was six years old. This is probably the first piece of writing I have ever done.


If you're trying to figure out what everyone in the picture is doing: Jenny is watching TV (as evidenced by the cable box with the rabbit ears); my Dad is feeding fish in the tank; I am at the table eating; Fiona is skateboarding (there's lots of skateboarding in my stories); and my mother is drinking coffee (you can tell my the brown steam lines).

I think the story pretty much sums up our life twenty-three years later.