Book Of The Month: That Time I Loved You
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“1979: This was the year the parents in my neighbourhood began killing themselves. I was eleven years old and in Grade 6. Elsewhere in the world, big things were happening. McDonald's introduced the Happy Meal, Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran and Michael Jackson released his album Off the Wall. But none of that was as significant to me as the suicides.”
This line launches the curious work of literature that is That Time I Loved You by Carianne Leung. A collection of sketches of different individuals living in the same white-walled, manicure-lawned, picket-fenced suburban neighborhood in the late 1970s in Toronto, That Time I Loved You is a fascinating read that will pick your brain. It is a series of short stories that examine the face of things, or rather what can lay under the outward face.
That Time I Loved You
Originally Published: 2018
Pages: 224
Available on: Kindle, Paperback, Audiobook
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Each interweaving chapter is articulated by a kaleidoscope of diverse protagonists who constitute this seemingly innocuous community of families of all different cultural backgrounds. These eclectic perspectives offer disquieting insights into what happens behind closed doors, and ultimately expose the dark side of social pressure, false self-representation, and hidden identity.
““She had known for a long time not to trust appearances at first glance, and that, eventually, people leaked secrets like a pesty tap. If only you watched long enough, it inevitably dripped.””
With its dark humor and haunting, artistic disenchantment, That Time I Loved You will surprise you. The main character is June Lee, an adolescent girl whose parents are first generation Chinese immigrants, who moved to a brand-new neighborhood in which every family is eager to socialize, befriend, and gain the approval of their neighbors, all the while shutting away the truth of their inner demons inside their outwardly idealistic homes. Instead, they focus on neighborhood grill-outs, children playing street hockey, local gossip, babies, after-school clubs, and the length of grass blades on their front lawns.
At least, they had been able to focus on these things, until suicides begin to suddenly—and regularly—occur within their safe community, just doors down. These are neighbors that they would pass everyday on the street: sweet Mrs. De Silva swallowed bleach in the garage; Mr. Finley blew out his brains in the basement with a rifle; Mr. Lems’ body lay unfound for days with a bottle in one of his lifeless hands. These deaths shake the community, scattering closet skeletons, snapping the fragile structure of nonsensical social status, pulling off masks, revealing what lies beneath: depression, theft, broken marriages, abuse, racism—just to start.
The neighborhood suicides make everyone uneasy within their own lives and distrustful of one another: Who else is on the edge, they wonder? Could it even be…themselves?
““She would seal her secrets in a tight box and never open it again. This is what everybody did, she now understood... Every day presented choices to be made, who to love, who to be. Every day was a collective starting down into a deep hole of one’s own making and imagining. Having come close to the edge, Francesca decided she would pull herself away. From now on, she would only live on the flat surface where the light caught everything, reaching even the corners. “”
Other fascinating figures besides June take the lead in turn, including a newly married woman who strives to be happy as a housewife but inevitably casts a wandering eye on her handsome neighbor. Another story is led by a Chinese grandmother nicknamed Poh-Poh with limited English, but an insatiable sweet tooth who shrewdly, cynically, and endearingly observes the modern, sheltered life of her granddaughter, June. Yet another sketch depicts the social ostracization of the neighborhood sweetheart who is dramatically revealed to be a kleptomaniac and hoarder, picking up meaningless items on social visits with her neighbors and then storing her stolen treasures in her “craft room.”
While this collection is a great satirical piece on the dark side of suburban living and the false appearance of idealism that it heralds, the greatest aspect about this book, in my opinion, lies in a slightly alternate vein. Hand in hand with the disillusionment of the suburbs is Leung’s exploration of how all people—no matter where they come from, how they have come to be where they are, or how they present themselves—struggle with similar inherent challenges to identity and self-awareness. Race, gender, age, social status, and career all fall away, and under that fine, socially-acceptable mask that everyone feels impelled to carry, these characters inherit the same struggle to find, and remain true to, their own identity.
Leung selected the perfect setting for her story, the new age 1970s, when families were focused on cultivating and constructing shinier lives in shinier communities, ones that they could control and maintain order over, in an attempt at fortune, success, and peace. There was a price to this attempt at perfectionism, and Leung depicts truth as that sacrifice. Merely pretending at the nonexistence of personal issues only fans the flames of desperation and discontentment in That Time I Loved You.
Leung’s stories signify the fatality of self-deception and manipulation of truth; it is deadly to self-awareness, to happiness, and to human connection to put up false social barriers. When vulnerability and identity are not aired and expressed, when the truth is coated thinly but consistently with white paint to blot out flaws, when it is boxed in with neatly measured lines and fences, it turns out that a house on a hill can become a prison.
Leung’s stories turn on a reader’s own curiosity of how much self-deception plays a part in their own life and how the manipulation of self-image unintentionally damages identity. Who we want to be, and who we are, are oftentimes two completely different persons. To what degree are each of us pretending to society (i.e. our neighbors) that things are fine, when they truly are not? To what degree does each of us fall victim to the urge to look perfectly capable and functioning, at all times?
Social pressure exists to this day, obviously, not just in 1970s’ suburbia. These are struggles that have grown exponentially since this time, with the advent of social media and the increase of personal life becoming public property. How much of our personal life is now broadcasted to people whose opinion we really should not care about? Picket fence, fresh paint, closed doors—social deception takes shape in different forms today.
““Once, I asked Poh Poh if she wanted to return to Hong Kong, and she said that once you left a place, you could never go back and expect it to feel like home. Places change, she said, and so do people. Memories sometimes lie.” ”
Check out this book if you like short stories and satire, and if you enjoy seeing the suburbs being single-handedly torn down in print.
If you are looking for similar titles, consider reading one of our previous selections for Book of the Month, Everything I Never Told You. Like That Time I Loved You, it is an artistic, unexpected portrayal of the suburbs- such a commonplace, innocent, and privileged environment that hides deeper, darker secrets, and also happens to be written by an author of Asian American descent, who brings this cultural aspect into the novel.
Published in 2018, That Time I Loved You won literary attention and several awards. If you want to learn a bit more on the backstory of Leung’s writing process, check out her interview here. Another insight into the author’s life can be found here.
One interesting quote from Carrianne Leung about her book.
“”I never wanted suicide just to be some literary device. I didn’t want to reduce it to a metaphor or backdrop for the characters growing up... The book is not so much about why or how, but more about what’s left behind. What are the questions that suicide brings up in the survivors around how to bear life? Sometimes life isn’t very bearable and how do we make those decisions to live everyday?””