On Canada Day weekend in 1983, Wiley Wei-Chiun Ho and her family celebrated becoming Canadian citizens with a camping trip on Vancouver Island. Leaving their home on British Columbia’s Lower Mainland, the Hos, originally from Taiwan, intended to enjoy the great outdoors in Nanaimo. Mother Nature, though, had other plans.

This anecdote, depicted in the vignette “Camping for New Canadians,” grew into Ho’s debut, The Astronaut Children of Dunbar Street (Douglas & McIntyre, out now). Vital and nuanced, the memoir details the emotional costs Ho felt after her parents’ reverse migration soon after that summer sojourn.

Staying in Vancouver, she and her four siblings, then ranging in age from 12 to 21, were provided for by their overseas parents. The separation, however, left Ho, the youngest child, with “this really misaligned feeling. There should be nothing wrong – on the surface it looks good – we lived in this nice place and we had money, but inwardly why did I feel so impoverished?” she says today, at home in North Vancouver. “It’s that huge gap – that chasm – that I wish to address.”

Their parents’ return to Taiwan was a dividing line. “I was vaguely aware that something unsettling had entered our lives – a slow, sour bloom of betrayal unfurling beneath my ribs like a lie whispered into me without my consent,” Ho writes. “Just weeks ago, the seven of us had stood at the citizenship ceremony, waving Canadian flags. Wasn’t Canada supposed to be our stable home?”

The term “astronaut families,” coined by anthropologist Aihwa Ong, refers to households distanced by transnational migration, with members split between a “home” country and another nation, often for economic reasons. The phenomenon, Ho notes, is prevalent, but the lack of empirical accounts surprises her. In Vancouver, “everybody either knows somebody, taught somebody, or neighboured with somebody who grew up this way,” she says.

Merging personal and political history in The Astronaut Children, Ho relates her trajectory from adolescence to adulthood, and the geopolitical backdrop motivating her family’s move abroad. Ho’s parents decided to leave Taiwan due to its tensions with China, and to ensure their son would avoid military service. Ho’s mother and father had worked respectively as a hospital administrator and a doctor in Taiwan, and they found professional prospects in Canada challenging, which led to their return after three years in Vancouver.

Ho spent eight years writing what would eventually develop into The Astronaut Children, and over that time the project was drafted as a mystery novel, a collection of short stories in different voices, and a survey featuring other astronaut families. Experimentation, and mentorship from both Kyo Maclear at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and Thea Lim through Diaspora Dialogues, helped Ho clarify her creative vision.

The episodic narrative begins in 2021, as Ho prepares to see her ailing parents in pandemic-restricted Taiwan, and tracks her childhood in Chutung, a northwestern township where her once close-knit clan lived in ease, and her coming of age in Vancouver, where cultural drift and a sense of outsiderness were never broached during periodic visits and monthly phone calls with her parents.

“My family didn’t want to talk about the fact that we were an astronaut family,” Ho says. “And in the ’80s, when I was growing up, there was no term for it. I actually find it interesting that when there isn’t language for something, it’s very difficult to process feeling.” 

Describing heart-rending and humorous moments, including her bout with an eating disorder and her parents’ bewilderment at the Simon Le Bon posters on her teenage bedroom walls, Ho remains sympathetic. This tone continues as Ho reflects on her own experiences of parenthood as a single mother with a career, juggling the demands of both.

Raising her son gave Ho access to new insight to her own parents’ trials. Ultimately, child rearing is rife with uncertainty. “That aspect of it, I didn’t appreciate at all. That perhaps my parents also were grasping at straws,” she says, “and they did the best they could. And they didn’t know how it was going to be.”

Beyond autobiography, The Astronaut Children also offers a portrait of late 20th-century Vancouver. Ho captures the particularities of this era, when the city was changed by immigration, lending further resonance to the primary plot. 

For a long time, Ho wanted to tell the story of her formative phase, but struggled to even discuss it – “Something as benign as someone asking, ‘Oh, how did you grow up?’ It would make me freeze,” she says. Her parents have now passed and her family have yet to read the book, but they are supportive of her endeavour.

The Astronaut Children is an important volume that looks deeply at an under-represented aspect of diasporic experience. Eschewing blame and self-indulgence, Ho reveals a life and identity shaped by love, locale, and unanticipated consequences. Family fracture and displacement are serious topics, “but I also wanted to show that there were moments of levity and fun,” she says. “That it’s not all just sadness. I wanted it to be earnest, and also not super dark.”

Photo of Wiley Wei-Chiun Ho by SJ Visuals.