Celebrating the depth and diversity of BC publishing
On Friday, September 15th at 6pm, join Massy Arts, Massy Books and Guernica Editions in celebrating the Vancouver launch of Wayne Ng’s The Family Code.
Wayne Ng talks with Wiley Wei-Chiun Ho about his new book, The Family Code, his first work not featuring an Asian protagonist. They will discuss both straying from and remaining within the lane of immigrant tropes.
This project has been made possible by the Government of Canada. Ce projet a été rendu possible grâce au gouvernement du Canada.
Venue & Accessibility
The event will be hosted at the Massy Arts Gallery, at 23 East Pender Street in Chinatown, Vancouver.
Registration is free and required for entrance.
The gallery is wheelchair accessible and a gender-neutral washroom is on-site.
Please refrain from wearing scents or heavy perfumes.
For more on accessibility including parking, seating, venue measurements and floor plan, and how to request ASL interpretation please visit: massyarts.com/accessibility
Covid Protocols: Masks keep our community safe and are mandatory (N95 masks are recommended as they offer the best protection). We ask if you are showing symptoms, that you stay home. Thank you kindly.
About the book:
The Family Code by Wayne Ng
Every family has rituals and routines holding them together. But sometimes they are the very things that tear them apart. The Family Code is a gritty family drama featuring the troubled life of Hannah Belenko, a young single mother dogged by the brutality of past traumas and a code of silence that she must crack in order to be free—or else lose everything. Hannah was raised by this code and rules her own family by it. When she loses her daughter to the state and her boyfriend threatens her, she flees from Ottawa to Halifax with her remaining son, six-year-old Axel. While she bulldozes her way through everything and schemes to protect him, Axel flounders in the chaos. He begins to doubt his mother and her dream of a way out. With her life crashing down, Hannah is driven by desperation to survive yet hangs on to elusive hope. With unvarnished and high-voltage prose, The Family Code unabashedly reveals the power and perils of parenting, but also the longing and vulnerability of children.
About the author
Wayne Ng was born in downtown Toronto to Chinese immigrants who fed him a steady diet of bitter melons and kung fu movies. Ng works as a school social worker in Ottawa but lives to write, travel, eat and play, preferably all at the same time. He is an award-winning author and traveler who continues to push his boundaries from the Arctic to the Antarctic. His previous books are Letters From Johnny, which won Best Crime Novella at the Crime Writers of Canada Excellence Awards, and Finding The Way: A Novel of Lao Tzu. Connect with Wayne at WayneNgWrites.com
About the host
Wiley Wei-Chiun Ho is a freelance technical writer, blogger and creative non-fiction writer. Her short stories and personal essays have won awards and been published in the literary journals PRISM international, Ricepaper, River Teeth, and Room. Wiley is in the throes of completing her first book, a memoir about growing up with parents overseas, in a Taiwanese-Canadian “astronaut” family.