Life as an astronaut child: a memoir

BY DANIEL BUMANGLAG

For many kids, being unsupervised without a parental figure is like winning the lottery and living life without rules.

But for Wiley Wei-Chiun Ho, the only rules she lived by as a kid was to “study hard and stay out of trouble.”

Ho, a writer whose family  migrated to Vancouver in the early 1980s when she was nine, has just published a memoir. She recounts her experience as an “astronaut child” in a new country when her parents returned to Taiwan three years later, leaving her alone with her four older siblings.

In her memoir, The Astronaut Children of Dunbar Street, she explains what that experience meant for her and her siblings through the years.

The book goes into detail about her parents making the decision to leave Taiwan because of the political uncertainty and the long-term safety to send her and her siblings to Canada.

Ho spoke with the Voice to discuss her experience.

Why did you write the book?

It took me a long time to write this book, and now I recognize that I’ve written it for my 12-year-old self, which is when my parents left to go back to Taiwan to work. I started off writing it as fiction and short stories.

What was it like to be an astronaut kid in Vancouver?

I grew up in Vancouver in the ‘80s, when it was still very white and the neighbourhood I was in especially Dunbar, there were no other Asian families around, let alone other astronaut families. So, I felt like an alien. I remember pretending that I was like everybody else like, “oh, our parents are just travelling.” I also remember lying a lot. I would lie to my neighbours and my teachers.

Can you describe the emotional challenges of being unsupervised as a child in a new country?

I do have four older siblings. The oldest was my brother who was 21 at the time and he was trying to get into university and having a tough time because there’s all this expectation that we should do well in school. The unspoken pact was the parents would work really hard while the child’s job was to study hard and to do well in school. It really was this idea that I knew that my parents were working hard and that they were doing everything possible for us, but from far away. There was this feeling of like, very jumbled up, fear, confusion and resentment. I think it was just like this complicated grief of knowing that they were doing everything for us, but they couldn’t be there for us.

How did you approach balancing personal storytelling with historical and political context?

I landed on facts, rather than opinion. I think all the things that I put in the book ended up being factual. I pulled out my personal commentary as much as I could because I want the reader to decide what it means for Taiwan to be in this place, much like its astronaut children.

Were there any specific memories or moments that you knew had to be in the memoir?

Yes, I did think that I needed to write the scene about at the airport when they were leaving, and the eavesdropping scene where I’m listening to my neighbours have dinner because those were moments that were seared into my memory of longing and wishing things were different.

What do you hope readers, especially other astronaut children take away from your story?

I hope that if it’s the children who are reading, I hope that they see themselves and that they’re definitely not alone and perhaps it’s okay to start the difficult conversations with their parents earlier because I think I left mine too late.