I marveled at how little I needed to survive
A Taiwanese immigrant recalls the pain of being abandoned at the age of twelve with her older siblings in Vancouver while their parents went back to Taiwan to earn more money.
April 08th, 2026
Wiley Wei-Chiun Ho is an award-winning writer of short stories and personal essays. Credit: SJ VISUALS.
“… during her teen years, Wiley Wei-Chiun Ho suffered from an eating disorder. She became so emaciated, her parents returned to Canada for an emergency visit to restore her to health. In the memoir, her anorexia and subsequent bulimia become a metaphor for her adolescence. It was an exercise in depravation, a desire to stop and reverse the sudden changes happening to her. In physically vanishing, Ho wanted to disappear from her current situation and slip back into her former life, as a child with parents who were there to care for her.”
Review by Susan Sanford Blades
The adults of the 1980s have been labelled the “Me Generation”—one in which both parents typically worked outside the home, putting their career aspirations ahead of the needs of their children. The children of the 80s, Generation X, have been jokingly referred to as being raised on hose water and neglect. It was the era of latchkey kids and TV dinners. Wiley Wei-Chiun Ho, a child of the 80s, was not, like many Canadian children, left alone with her siblings to watch shows like Kate and Allie and The Facts of Life for a couple hours after school. When Ho was twelve years old, her parents left her and her siblings for good, to live in Canada on their own.
Ho’s debut memoir, The Astronaut Children of Dunbar Street (D&M $24.95), tells the story of how her parents—nervous about Taiwan’s “ambiguous global identity” and in search of stability—immigrated with their children to Vancouver from Taiwan when Ho was nine years old. After staying three years and becoming Canadian citizens, her parents, still struggling to find work and to belong in a rainy, English-speaking land that did not recognize her father’s medical credentials, left her older brother in charge of her and her three sisters and moved back to Taiwan. There, “[t]hey would earn ten times what they could hope to make in Canada.”
Ho begins her book during the Covid era, when, as an adult, she is quarantining in a hotel room in Taiwan in hopes of seeing her dying father. From there, she guides us chronologically through her story, from childhood, packing only clothes, shoes and a rice cooker (because “[r]ice is home”) en route to Canada, to her lonely, unsupervised adolescence, and back to her present-day fraught relationship with her parents. Throughout, she tackles questions of what makes a family and a home. “In Mandarin, jiā means home and family interchangeably, the two meanings intertwined and inseparable. But in Canada, I discovered that they could be separated.”
Her feelings of abandonment, and their long-term effects on her and the relationships she attempts to form throughout her life, take centre stage in the memoir. Through Ho’s in-depth exploration of her feelings, she expands her own story into one that mirrors many people’s childhoods. It speaks to the same feelings of parental disconnection that Teresa Wong’s 2024 graphic memoir, All Our Ordinary Stories (Arsenal)—about her parents, who fled mainland China for Canada in the 1970s—displayed so deftly and devastatingly through both her words and the swathes of negative space in her illustrations. As a child of the 80s myself, even though both of my parents were born in Canada and physically with me throughout my childhood, I connected both with the Canadian cultural artifacts Ho enjoyed—the Choose Your Own Adventure novels she learned English with and the TV episodes of Wok With Yan her mother learned to cook with—as well as her feelings of abandonment from parents who valued financial stability over emotional stability.
In one of the most significant sections of the memoir, during her teen years, Wiley Wei-Chiun Ho suffered from an eating disorder. She became so emaciated, her parents returned to Canada for an emergency visit to restore her to health. In the memoir, her anorexia and subsequent bulimia become a metaphor for her adolescence. It was an exercise in depravation, a desire to stop and reverse the sudden changes happening to her. In physically vanishing, Ho wanted to disappear from her current situation and slip back into her former life, as a child with parents who were there to care for her. She states a recurring theme of her childhood: “I marveled at how little I needed to survive.”
Along with her emotional honesty, a strength of this memoir lies in Ho’s vivid descriptions, which she shapes to fit her age as narrator. During her childhood, on the one camping trip her still-whole family attempted in order to be “real Canadians,” their tent was “[a] lopsided monster with orange skin.” As a teenager, we feel the dark weight of her loneliness: “I imagined my words sinking into the Pacific, swallowed by its cold sunless depths.” And as an adult, she welcomes us into the sensory richness during her visits to Taiwan: “The screaming butcher always made me flinch. I would hold my breath against the bloody smells coming off his wooden block and squeeze past the meat hooks dangling dark, dripping organs.”
The Astronaut Children of Dunbar Street is a compelling and emotionally astute look at the challenges that immigrant families face, and an inquiry into the meaning of family, home, stability and forgiveness. 9781771624794
Susan Sanford Blades’ debut novel, Fake It So Real, won the 2021 ReLit Award and was a finalist for the 2021 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Her second novel, Girl on Paper, will be published by Nightwood Editions in spring, 2027.
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