“I’ve been a journalist for a little over a decade. With any kind of Vancouver phenomena, I wanted there to be this kind of origin stories of things people see every day around the city,” says Cheung.

Whether you are curious about the Vancouver Special or larger-than-life characters like the Baklava Man who sold baklava in downtown Vancouver and who, long ago, was a Syrian politician, Very Vancouver serves as “a collection of fifteen short stories all about the city that’ll give readers a different lens on the place that they live.”

Vox Vancouver

For 10 years, Cheung worked at The Tyee, Metro, and the Vancouver Courier, writing articles that provide simplified details of aspects of Vancouver culture. In the last two years, he has combined the interviews of around 70 individuals to create 15 unique stories in Very Vancouver, each told like a fictional narrative that speaks of nonfictional histories, struggles and successes.

“I really love narrative nonfiction, literary journalism,” says Cheung. “In writing this book, I felt like I wanted to give this book that kind of treatment [of narrative nonfiction], so that it would feel like fiction when you read these stories.”

Inspired by the myths and short stories he read from his youth, Cheung formats the 15 tales in Very Vancouver as though he were unpacking the “mythology” of Vancouver’s iconic features.

Although Very Vancouver is an anti-tourist book as Cheung describes it, it is nevertheless a tour-de-force of inspiring tales about “people we don’t often hear from,” whether they are the Vietnamese chefs who make your favourite bò viên or pho or Filipinos defending their livelihoods in Joyce Street.

“I feel like our city is a very consumerist city,” says Cheung. “Oh, what should I eat? What should I go see? And I really don’t like the idea of treating the city as a product.”

Very Vancouver explores the reasons why so many diasporas occur in the city and why so many, in spite of postcolonial setbacks and racial biases, choose to stay.

“The roots that people are putting down here, it’s for a reason,” says Cheung. “And that [readers] can get to understand their class background and how they ended up here.”

Beyond the brochures

Growing up on Ontario Street, Christopher Cheung has long thought on the idea of borders for all his life. In his time, people would associate the east side of Ontario Street as “being kind of sketchy,” whereas the west side was the more aspirational location to reside.

“But a lot of that is hearsay,” says Cheung. “Who decides what is sketchy? Who decides which part of town is valuable or not?”

Vancouver, Cheung feels, is a city of surface impressions and lifestyles. A city, great for the outdoors, and other popular slogans. But Very Vancouver focuses on “people just making a living, and people thinking about how to create a future in this place.”

Binners who collect cans and bottles for a living, the Sunrise employees who make tofu, the spread of Himalayan blackberries – these are just some of the many stories told in Very Vancouver.

“On one level, you can read this as a storybook,” says Cheung. “It’s a real storybook about real people, and how they make life in different pockets of the city.”

Very Vancouver is very much for anyone who cares about Vancouver. Whether you are a local or a visitor, Cheung hopes for readers to feel challenged or affirmed by the stories in his latest book.

To learn more about Very Vancouver, head over to the Vancouver Public Library (VPL) on Sept.23, 7:00 pm – 8:15 pm, for a conversation with Christopher Cheung as hosted by CBC Radio’s Margaret Gallagher.

More details in this link: https://vpl.bibliocommons.com/events/6a7bb114452bb101b57488d6