But just thinking about hope and how you write toward possibility without making hope feel too trite or glossy, and maybe the answer is even in what you just said too, which is that you didn't go toward answers, but towards presenting the question.

Yeah.

The hopes to me is not some kind of thing that necessarily gets handed to us, but hope as a practice, and I wanted the book to maybe talk about the characters having to practice hope in order to live.

And I think also, like, since I've been thinking about it, I was asked to speak at Stratford recently.

They were staging Waiting for Godot and Death of a Salesman, and they were thinking about, like, existentialism and themes like that, and I think that was why I was invited.

I think they thought somehow that my novel touches on existentialism, so it made me kind of have to think about that.

And I realized that as I was writing the book, I wanted to make a case that despair is also as generative as hope, that it's okay for us to feel despair.

Speaking of lessons, I was wondering if you would be willing to do a short reading, and then maybe we could do a generative imitative prompt that invites readers to apply a technique or concept to their own writing from your work?

I imagine, like, what it was like for you growing up is not what it is now.

Well, when I-- So when I was growing up, just, just to tell you a bit about what the Scarborough I grew up in was, it was very white and middle class.

Um, and when we moved in, like, in the early '70s, I think, like, I thought we were the first Chinese people who ever landed in Scarborough.

Um, and now I think, you know, the area in Scarborough that I live in is, like, nicknamed Asian Court because it's majoritively, um, East Asian people, I think, that live there.

Uh, I think, you know, it, it was -- And I saw the kinds of changes that were happening and the resistance to that change because the first Chinese mall in Toronto was actually, uh, built in Scarborough.

And the homeowners of that pocket where the mall was going to be, they had community meetings, and they, like, fought against that mall coming in, right? So there was just already these racial tensions and these class tensions, and I think that that's, like, in every space of the city, um, that just shows the kind of global changes that are happening.

And now I just think it's like, it's such an interesting place because Scarborough's having its heyday.

I do feel like there is that kind of magical realism element that does remain.