(My sister Kathaleen’s plate. She is the fifth oldest in my family)
Mapping and memory presented by Fred Wah in Diamond Grill relates directly to one of my 3rd year Painting classes here at UBC. Our class visited the Richmond Art Gallery to view an exhibition of work by Canadian artist Landon Mackenzie. She is a painter interested in how maps are created: how historical, political and personal influences affect their outcome.
- Landon MacKenzie’s, Vancouver as the Centre of the World Commissioned by VANOC for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
- http://www.landonmackenzie.com/projects/project4.html
- Mackenzie relates map making to writing fiction. In an article by Alan Morantz in Canadian Geographic he writes:“Mackenzie approaches her painting in a way similar to how her friend, Canadian novelist Jane Urquhart, approaches her writing. Urquhart uses pieces of documented history and extrapolates a fantasy. Though maps do not have the same linear progression as a novel, they are still storytelling vehicles, so Mackenzie set out to create a different sort of historical fiction.”
MacKenzie paints Vancouver at the center of the world in her map and thus distorts the placement of other continents and cities of the world. She also overlaps many different maps to reveal how historical and political views operate the representation of the world.
http://www.landonmackenzie.com/reviews/shadowingmapmakers.htm
In the Diamond Grill, Fred Wah’s repetitive return to places and spaces reveals the Grill in a slow process like that of navigating along a route of a map. And, like most maps, our journeys often retraces and crosses-over sites repeatedly. Wah’s memory mapping of the Grill is nonlinear. Some places appear bigger and more commanding because of the descriptive detail given to them or because of the histories attached to them. MacKenzie also observes that some maps magnify their capital cities where other maps place no hierarchy upon any one place. When “mapping” the Grill in his novel, Wah use of repetition of certain spaces within the Grill also “capitalizes” them. The soda fountain and the swinging doors between the front of the café and the kitchen are two such spaces. These represent places of transitional power for Fred junior. The doors from the kitchen, the land of the oriental, take Fred junior into the front of the house, the land of the occidental. Like the hyphen of his Canadian-Chinese heritage, these doors allow or force Fred to identify as either Canadian or Chinese.
The soda fountain operates in a similar fashion. Here Fred junior’s Canadian self has an opportunity to experience a sense of power, overriding any stigma attached to being Chinese. All soda fountain orders must be given to Fred junior to fill. Here he is allowed an opportunity to affect business itself. He invents the “Grey Cup Special” and impresses his friends by serving them generous portions (41). Here Fred junior can play the role of proprietor rather than that of the soda jerk. He chooses to map the geography of this space, to “capitalize” it, and along with it, himself.
Works Cited: Wah, Fred. Diamond Grill. Edmonton, AB: NeWest Press., 2006