BOOK REVIEW : Chinese in Canada: Chronicle of Anguish : DISAPPEARING MOON CAFE <i> by Sky Lee</i> ; The Seal Press; 18.95; 237 pages

Sky Lee’s novel of the Chinese experience in Canada is a collage of vignettes assembled from family history and enlarged by the author’s determined search for personal identity.

Beginning in 1892, when young Wong Gwei Chang is sent to Canada to retrieve the bones of men from his native village who died building the transcontinental railroad, the story becomes a remarkable chronicle of acculturation, similar in essential respects to other immigrant sagas but uniquely flavored by the voluntary and involuntary isolation of the Chinese community and by the rigid constraints imposed upon its members from within and without.

The bleak theatrical tone set in these stark opening pages is maintained throughout the book, distinguishing “Disappearing Moon Cafe” from the explosion of recent fiction by second- and third-generation Chinese in North America.

The narrator is Kae Ying Woo, the great-great-granddaughter of the bone-collector. When she becomes the mother of a fifth-generation Chinese Canadian, she begins her investigation into the family’s past, gleaning bits and pieces from the repressed and fading recollections of her relatives, creating a tenuous cohesion from her own impressions.

Although at first the design seems abstract, a pattern eventually emerges as the various characters succeed in dominating their particular eras and shaping the destiny of the family during their ascendancy. The inclusion of a family tree helps considerably.

A self-declared feminist, the author is intensely concerned with the women and the various ways in which they accepted and rejected traditional roles. Writing about these relations, she discovers “a simple truth beneath their survival stories. . . . They were ungrounded women, living with displaced Chinamen, and everyone trapped by circumstances.”

The 1920s belong to Lee Mui Lan, then in her 40s and the proprietor of the leading restaurant in Vancouver’s flourishing Chinatown. Willful, selfish; envied and feared, she becomes the villain of the novel, setting in motion the chain of betrayals that provides the novel with inherent momentum. In the eyes of the narrator, this woman is “the tip of the funneling storm, the pinnacle that anchored chaos and destruction close to earth.”

Imported from China to be the wife of the first Canadian-born Chang, Lee Mui prospers in Canada but remains the prisoner of her past, a baleful influence blighting the lives of succeeding generations. Easily manipulating her passive husband and malleable son, she foments an atmosphere of emotional misery that not only warps the lives of her son and hapless daughter-in-law but affects the entire extended family.

As the decades pass, the clashes between generations escalate: the Canadian children and grandchildren yielding to the temptations of the larger world beyond Chinatown, the elders desperately fighting to retain power over their families. Unable to forget their anomalous position in their adopted country, they remain mistrustful of the larger world even as the boundaries of Vancouver’s hermetic Chinatown dissolve and their English-speaking descendants make their way into the mainstream.

The history of the family is not only intricate but also complicated by dark secrets closely held for an entire century. Although at first the choice of witnesses seems almost random, with sketchily identified characters speaking across vast gaps of time and space, the links among them are soon established and the chronology is clarified.

The language further emphasizes the distinctions separating the generations--stilted formal English for the original immigrants, crude translations of Chinese expressions for the newly acclimatized, breezy colloquialisms for the author’s own Canadian-born contemporaries. (More careful editing could have eliminated jarring errors like “diplomatic impunity” and a distracting mention of “lying prone” while “staring at the ceiling.” Mixed metaphors abound. Can a pinnacle ever function as an anchor? A fate be “hoisted” upon someone?)

Faced by the daunting challenge of creating a work of fiction from long-buried conflicting fragments, inventing plausible connections between isolated and barely recalled events, Lee has managed to create a valid account of the anguish involved in the invention of a new identity, a chronicle that may become the principal literary theme of our time. Previously published in Canada, the book was nominated for the 1990 Governor-General’s Literary Award.