As I write this post, I’m now entering the second year of my program. Things are unimaginably different from when I started. My class in Career Counselling will be online. What is called Clinic at UBC, a practice-based course where we counsel real clients for the first time, will meet at UBC, but our clients will be online, too. COVID-19 rates in British Columbia are still ticking up, after staying flat for a month or more after the lockdown ended. This should be the time for me to reflect on the program itself, and my changed sense of self and where I am in the world. Yesterday, I was reading through a series of notes that I’d written about my situation just as I left Singapore, over two years ago. One was a statement of my position that I thought of releasing on social media, and which I ultimately decided not to. The second was a much more experiential account of the day that I came home from a trip overseas, and found the letter turning down my application for Singapore citizenship in my overstuffed mailbox in the void deck. Reading these documents, I was struck by what a different person I’ve become over the last two years: the person who wrote those notes, in early 2018, was of course me, but also not the person I am now. Yet I’m not sure I want to confront those changes fully yet. I’ve dived fairly deep into my studies, and it’s more difficult than I thought to surface, and to look around and look back. In the last three weeks, though, I have had a pause from the seemingly endless stream of courses I took over the summer, those long hours on my computer in Canvas or Zoom sessions. I went on two journeys, from which I’ve now returned.

The first was a physical journey. We drove east out of Vancouver to Hope, at the very end of the Fraser Valley, where the mountains begin to cluster together. We made a detour on the road up into the mountains on Highway 5 towards Manning Park, up the highway built by interned Japanese Canadian labourers to a place called –not entirely appropriately when we were there—Sunshine Valley. We stopped at Sunshine Valley Tashme Museum, where one of the biggest internment camps for Japanese Canadians was located. Then we backtracked to Merritt, and drove down the Nicola valley to spend the night at Spence’s Bridge, where James Teit lived, where the Thompson and the Nicola rivers meet. Another day and night and we were up on the Chilcotin plateau, driving through dry grassland with the mountains of Tweedsmuir Provincial Park rearing up on our right. And a day later we were in those mountains, having flown in to Nuk Tessli on Whitton Lake via floatplane. We had a cabin there, with a log cabin that needed feeding with logs all night. We’d hike high up into the mountains or canoe on the lake during the day and, at night, when we could make ourselves come out from under the comforters, go to the dock, listen to the wolves howling, and look up at a sky full of stars.

Nuk Tessli was first built by Chris Czajkowski, a British woman who hiked in with nothing, built three cabins, and wrote of her experiences in books such as Nuk Tessli: The Life of a Wilderness Dweller and And the River Still Sings: A Wilderness Dweller’s Journey. We’d read the books before coming, and I found them both intriguing and yet puzzling: very practical accounts of survival and cabin building, but with very little sense of an inner life or a spiritual connection with nature. The resort, now expanded by a few more cabins, was now run by an Israeli family, with the assistance of German, French, and Australian volunteers. I had thought we’d find contemplation, but Chris’s influence still pervaded the place. Every day seemed full of the rituals of eating, or physical activity: we brought books, but there seemed to be little time to read or even to contemplate. After we left, though, driving this time down from the plateau to Williams Lake, and then across to the Fraser canyon at Lillooet, returning to Vancouver via Whistler over the slow, high switchbacks of Duffy Lake Road, I realized that the enforced activity had been its own form of meditation. Unexpectedly, I felt fully refreshed.

The second journey was an internal one. In the days after I finished my summer courses I made my first trip after the lockdown in March to the recently reopened Vancouver Pubic Library. I’d ordered some volumes of contemporary Canadian short stories, but found them difficult to focus on. On the first floor of the library, though, the serendipity that only seems possible when you are physically in a library building returned. Browsing the shelves, I came across Forgotten Journey, the first volume of short stories by Silvina Ocampo, the Argentinian modernist writer who began writing in the first half of the twentieth century. Ocampo’s stories, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Katie Lateef-Jan in this collection, are short, and often fragmentary. Born into privilege herself, she structures many of the stories around relationships across class, particularly those between children who evade social expectations, albeit for only a brief time. The daughter of the house appears, but then meets and plays with the caretaker’s daughter, or the cleaner’s daughter. Ocampo’s stories are often told from distorting perspectives – a skylight that is the ceiling of the room which the narrator occupies, for instance, but also the floor of another room in which they story’s action takes place. The architecture, the different levels of houses, their elevators and staircases, somehow reflect the interior pathways — or perhaps the plumbing — of the human heart. And the stories, though short, often move from apparent realism so far into the fantastic that you are unsure whether you have entered a dream.

Returning to Vancouver, I had a similar experience, I went to the library again, hungry for contemporary Canadian Literature. I picked up a collection of short stories about the West End that I’d ordered. But I also made a random find the short stories of Peruvian author Julio Ramón Ribeyro, collected as The Word of the Speechless, and smoothly translated by Katherine Silver. Ribyero is not as inventive as Ocampo, and his gender politics are much more conservative. But there are two beautiful things about the collection. The first is a sense of marginality, not so much socio-political, but rather internal. There are stories that make social interventions, such as “At the Foot of the Cliff,” about those at society’s margins who try to make a dwelling in Lima, as stubborn as the higuerilla plant that grows in the most difficult places where no other vegetation can establish itself. But most are about failures to live up to roles: the aspirant teacher become tax collector who, when offered the possibility of relief teaching, arrives at the school only to be so intimidated that he turns to leave, and then, when pursued by the security guard, says that he is not the new teacher but a tax collector. And there are other, more complex attempts to find meaning, particularly as one ages. In “Silvio in El Rosedal,” in which the lead character is convinced that the rose garden of his hacienda contains, in the arrangement of its rose beds, a pattern that is a message for him, or “Nuit caprenese cirius illuminata,” a crazy indecipherable title that is attached to a story about the return of lost love that is also perhaps a solipsistic fantasy, hints of Murakami but with a self-reflexivity that the latter author lacks. The second is a sense of form. These stories often tend towards a hoped-for denouement that is never reached, or reached in quite the way that one expects, but they all have a strong sense of structure, a narrative line that hooks you and pulls you through the story. 

I’m not sure what it means that I turn away on this second journey from the contemporary Canadian short stories from that I feel I should read, to these strange cosmopolitan stories from places I have never visited and know little about. Perhaps they are in a paradoxical way Vancouver stories, in this city that is marked by cultural crossings and has everything but a sense of home. Or perhaps it’s my own sense of being like Silvio in his Rose Garden, able to read the plenitude of signs around me but unsure, in late life, of what they ultimately signify.