AlliterAsian by Allan Cho Read Free Book Online

previous covers, this new design is a breath of fresh air. It also catches me off guard. Does the mysticism that surrounded Evelyn Lau even still exist?
    Evelyn and I meet in a coffee shop in downtown Vancouver. When I first see her, I’m struck by how pretty she is. She has a smouldering presence attached to her plump lips, high cheekbones, and smoky eyes. She greets me with a warm smile and a firm handshake and apologizes for blowing her nose due to environmental allergies. She’s drinking an apple juice because she doesn’t like coffee. I notice a small scar near her neck and wonder what it’s from. I never bring myself to ask.
    I anticipated meeting a sombre and serious woman, but Evelyn puts me at ease. She’s chatty, funny, and engaging. We immediately commiserate over our love of literature. It’s obvious that Evelyn is both passionate and knowledgeable about writing. She’s managed to harness and direct her talent and creativity, though she’s entirelyself-taught and never received a formal education. She tells me that one of her favourite writers is John Updike, and she considers Alice Munro to be our greatest Canadian writer. Both authors are experts at writing stories that focus on the nuances of human interactions and relationships—also passions of Evelyn’s.
    When I tell Evelyn she’s rumoured to be a private and serious person, her laugh proves otherwise.
    â€œPeople think I’m serious because of my subject matter. But I’m not. I love to make people laugh, I always wish I had more humour in my work because it’s the best way to engage readers.”
    You could assume that because Evelyn is a Chinese-Canadian, her family’s experience of immigration would be one of her main influences. “I don’t see myself as being a Chinese-Canadian writer, because I don’t write about it.” She says part of writing is about tapping into your sense of being an outsider and of otherness from the community, society, and family. Evelyn’s own focus on the nuances of human interactions and relationships is shaped by her time on the streets; she thinks of that time in her life as her sense of otherness rather than her Chinese-Canadian heritage.
    Evelyn was born in Vancouver and still resides there. It’s interesting that she still feels comfortable in the city, as it was there that she fell into prostitution and drug addiction. Evelyn admits that she wrestled with her feelings about Vancouver while she was in her twenties, but now “Vancouver is home. It’s changed a lot in the past few years. I tend to think of it as a collection of distinctive neighbourhoods.” You might think the distinctive neighbourhood of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, infamous for street life, drug addiction, and prostitution, would stigmatize Vancouver for an ex-street kid. But Evelyn realizes that the life she lived in this space is one of many lives the city has to offer. Vancouver is a multilayeredcity, with different aspects of personality, much like Evelyn herself. In her collection of short stories, Choose Me , written from the perspective of seven different young women, Evelyn explores the relationships between home, space, and self.
    Besides, living on the street didn’t cripple Evelyn’s writing career; it brought into existence her first commercial success, Runaway . But how did Evelyn manage to publish her first book while living such a transient and unstable life? She explains that while living on the streets she won a number of literary contests. She applied for and received financial funding from the Canada Council through the Explorations Program for new writers, which in recent years has ended due to government cutbacks, though today, alternative programs like Outreach offer grants for emerging and established creative writers.
    Despite her obvious potential, publishers were leery about the book, unsure about the public’s