Wayson Choy recounts his struggles and the lessons he learned in Not Yet.
Wayson Choy is a wise man. With grey locks and a face framed by a thin goatee, he carries himself like a sage, comfortable with his hard-won knowledge and confident in the philosophy he has created.
But he’s not a philosopher, not in the traditional sense of the word. He’s a writer. He’s a damn good writer and his latest book, Not Yet: A Memoir of Living and Almost Dying, is captivating.
It’s easy to dismiss this book before reading it as just another cheesy memoir of one person’s struggle, something that is too often interesting only to the person writing the book. But this story moves beyond any preconceived ideas.
The memoir recalls Choy’s two brushes with death, almost dying from a heart-and-asthma attack and then suffering another massive heart attack four years later. Snippets of conversation flowing over the haze of drugs and surgeries and inbetween states of consciousness are intertwined with reflections on life and what it all means.
Sitting in Kensington’s Higher Ground coffee shop, the 70-year-old Choy exudes calm and kindness. It’s hard not to be captivated by him, particularly after reading of his trials and the lessons learned.
“I wrote the book because, as a writer, now more than ever I realize if I want to know what I understand, I write,” he says. “When I write I guess my mind and focus goes into deeper levels, and I’m quite surprised sometimes what I come to understand from writing about an experience.”
Choy says he struggled with how to involve readers in a period of his life that was so personal and so traumatic, to bring all his skills to the table and be able to properly convey how he was feeling and what he was going through. His use of rich, textured writing does just that.
But he doesn’t show off. Choy is humble and throughout the course of his illness had to come to terms with accepting the help of others. Not Yet opens with a detailed description of his coughing attack, just before everything falls apart. With a glimpse into his personality and his humour, he says if anyone was around to see it, he likely would have excused himself. “Certainly, a sneeze lacks any hint of funereal dignity,” he writes.
But it was the realization that he was not alone in this life and that there were people all around him who loved him and cared for him and stayed by his side that was the reward for his struggles. “Seeing myself there, suddenly feeling alone in the darkness that was overcoming me, with all the drugs and everything, I thought: ‘Is there anybody there?’ And suddenly I heard voices, there were people coming who were there and I could glimpse though my half-open eyes who they were. I thought: ‘I’m not alone,” he says.
This experience made Choy realize that all his books have been about discovering that family isn’t necessarily in the blood; it’s really those who love you. But is tragedy required to come to that truth?
“I think it does and it doesn’t. It did in my case because although I recognized that, I knew too that one has to be tested to see if that would hold true,” he says. “I happened to be the litmus test, lying there wondering if anyone would show up. And so many did, that they eventually had to set out rules and regulations [at the hospital].”
“The point of it is, good people turn up… but I find good friends simply don’t deserve you. You have to remember that I’ve not always been good. That’s the real test.”
There were points in his struggle where he almost succumbed to the warming, tired embrace of death, but managed to struggle through, braving intense physiotherapy and lying in rooms designed for the dying rather than those on the mend.
When you almost die, twice, you tend to come to some realizations about the way you live your life and they are eloquently spelled out in the book — respecting those who love you, cleaning and clearing clutter to avoid asthma attacks and taking it easy with work and touring. But like all lessons, some things fade. In Not Yet, he writes: “What other gifts do the gods grant us except these few precious seconds ahead of our next deep breath?”
But every breath does not bring the realization of a gift from the gods. “It sounds like a nice Zen thing to be able to do that every moment, but believe me one doesn’t,” he says. “To have the gift of not having to worry if the next moment will come, but then when there is a problem, it deepens your experience of life, or of what you’ve already gone through. That to me was amazing.”
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