Shanzai
Fred Wah
$6
CALL OF DUTY
(sub for Fleetwood Mac “Dreamin”)
Is this the Dream?
Mm…
Mm…
Now here we go again
I say I want my freedom
So what’s the fuss to keep me down?
It wasn’t right I had to pay
my way you know it.
But listen carefully
to the sounds of my loneliness,
like the boat that brought me here
In the sadness of remembering what I’d left,
and what I dream for, and what I’d left
and what I dream for.
This shallow life is not what I was dreaming
Deep down inside the emptiness is screaming
Other dreams will come and they will go
If the mountain turns to gold
I’ll know, I’ll know.
Now here I go again, my trans Pacific vision
American as railroad pie
It’s not just me
who looks for freedom in a dream, that
liberating dream I’ll have to buy.
Days of loneliness
Empty dreaming drives me mad
In the sadness of remembering what I had,
and what I lost, and what I had,
ooh what I dream for.
This shallow life is not what I was dreaming
Deep down inside the emptiness is screaming
Other dreams they will come and they will go
If the mountain turns to gold, I’ll know.
Oh yes, I’ll know.
ABOUT:
On Labour Day weekend in 1988 I became the Writer-in-Residence at the University of Alberta. My wife, Pauline Butling and I, had arrived in Edmonton from South Slocan in southeastern B.C. I had a sore back which prevented me from joining Pauline and our friend Pamela Banting on a hike that weekend, just before the school term started. Earlier that summer, I had been teaching with bpNichol at a workshop in Red Deer and bp had encouraged me to try my hand at the 3-day novel writing contest put on annually by Arsenal Pulp Press. While Pauline and Pamela went off hiking, I stayed home and decided to try writing a 3-day novel. I managed about 60 pages of anecdotal biotext. On Tuesday morning at school when Rudy Wiebe asked me what I’d done for the weekend I told him I had written a novel. I had never felt very comfortable writing prose (which was really the reason bp had urged me to try this contest; his novel Still had won it in 1983) and the results of my marathon writing weekend reflected this. I put that effort aside, though I pecked at it a little. A few years later my colleague and editor Aritha Van Herk helped me shape the manuscript into a book of short fiction, Diamond Grill.
Over the past twenty years the discourse generated for me by writing Diamond Grill extended into other writing. A major project for me was a collaboration titled High Muck a Muck: Playing Chinese (https://highmuckamuck.ca/), a multimedia project involving video, music, oral history, performance, and text.
The text for this chapbook, Shanzai, is some of my writing salvaged from that project. Suitably, for this 50th Anniversary of the U of A’s Writer-in-Residence program, it was seeded during my residency of 1988-89.
published in Ottawa by above/ground press
May 2026
produced in part for activity at Banff Centre, May 11-18, 2026, as part of the 50th anniversary of the University of Alberta Writer-in-Residence program
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy
Fred Wah was born in Swift Current, Saskatchewan and lives in Vancouver and the West Kootenays. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada and a former
Parliamentary Poet Laureate. His writing includes
Diamond Grill, a biofiction about growing up in a small-town Chinese-Canadian café,
Sentenced to Light, collaborations with visual artists,
is a door, a series of poems about hybridity. More recent books are
beholden: a poem as long as the river with
Rita Wong and
Music at the Heart of Thinking: Improvisations.
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