Meena: Population Shift

Vancouver Dept: Gurjinder Basran s Everything Was Good-bye looks at some of the consequences of this dramatic population shift. She takes us into the Punjabi community on the outskirts of Vancouver, unlocking the door of an immigrant home in the suburbs, letting us hear the chatter, inhale the aromas, see the complexities of living in two cultures, according to The Star. We meet the main character, Meena, when she is a teenager attending a public high school in North Delta. Her dad has died after a construction site accident and her mother has taken on cleaning jobs to support her six daughters. One of Meena s older sisters, Serena, has married according to Punjabi tradition through an arranged match. The husband constantly beats Serena but Meena s mother insists she stay with him as a dutiful wife. Another sister, Harj, flees from home in desperation to escape the restraints of her community and i lived in Vancouver for a few years in the mid- 80s and, after moving from a multicultural Toronto, it seemed like a very white bread community. Few brown and almost no black faces on the streets and a Chinatown that had seen better times. I went back to work there again in the mid- 90s and it had changed profoundly as immigrants from Hong Kong and the Indian subcontinent flooded into the Lower Mainland. Everything was Good-bye is a sad story, ending in a misery born from that clash of cultures, but the writing is vivid, full of crackling dialogue, and the plot is completely absorbing. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.