What We All Long For

Oku continually tries to find ways to run into Jackie—all except actually going to her store—but when she doesn’t turn up, he begins to feel as if she is deliberately avoiding him.

While he’s at home one day, Kwesi, “one of his ‘boys’ from Eglinton” (161), calls him to see if he’s around. Oku hangs out with Kwesi from time to time, mostly to smoke but sometimes to make a few extra dollars. Kwesi, however, persistently tries to get Oku to come further into his illicit businesses. Oku resists these attempts, but lately his resistance is becoming weaker and weaker: “Kwesi was driving around in a Lincoln Navigator, had a leather coat for every season, a nice apartment. Oku couldn’t help but be envious sometimes. Envious not only of the money but of the balls, the certainty” (163).

Oku feels torn between these two worlds, and part of his continued friendship with Carla and Tuyen is precisely to reject the more stereotypical street life. He thinks back to a time he was stopped by the police on his way home from a “blind pig” (164). The police had searched him, found nothing, then arrested him anyway, holding him until six in the morning. Oku’s method of dealing with situations like these is to “give up his will and [surrender] to the stigmata. Some of his friends didn’t. They resisted, they talked, they asserted their rights […] They ended up in the system fighting to get out. They ended up hating everyone around them” (165). Oku is particularly against this mentality because he feels that his father carries it, and he wants to avoid the bitterness toward the world that he sees in his father.

After his father leaves each morning, rather than going to university, Oku goes to Kensington Market, except on Wednesdays, which is when his mother goes for her weekly shopping. He sits at coffee shops and reads the books he wants to read—“Amiri Baraka or Jayne Cortez,” for example—books that he found “while trying to put some life into a class in American poetry […] So what if he knew the classics, if he understood figures of thought? He himself was a figure of thought in those classrooms—an image and not a being, not a solid presence” (168).

In the market, he meets an old Rasta and a musician, both beggars. The Rasta initially made Oku wary, but “[t]here was something genuine and plain about [him], something vigorous. The man had definition. He was living on the street, but he had definition” (169). The Rasta always greets Oku warmly. The musician, on the other hand, first tried to attack Oku for calling him “brother” (173), only stopping to frantically collect the sheet music he dropped. After that day, the musician was kinder to Oku. The musician spends his days composing a symphony on an invisible piano. One day, the Rasta points to him and calls him “mad” (173). Oku finds this funny, questioning which of the two is madder.

Sitting at the café one day, pondering the Rasta, the musician, and his father, Jackie and Reiner run into him. Oku accuses her of disappearing, but Jackie points out that she’s at her store, and Oku is able to find her whenever he wants. They depart, and Oku returns to wondering what Jackie sees in Reiner: “Reiner was safe. Reiner was white. Musician, bullshitter, and Reiner did not, could not possibly see the city as a prison. More, Reiner must see it as his place—look at how he took possession of it” (177). 

Jackie’s parents had arrived in Toronto just before the closing of the Paramount, and after it closed, they “were lost” (178). One by one, the good clubs all closed down, and the people who frequented them “had to fly solo, go places where nobody knew them” (179). The club that meant you hit rock bottom was the Duke—it “wasn’t dangerous, it was just sad. Full of might-have-beens and should-haves” (180). Jackie, despite her youth, was determined to prevent them from going there, so when she overheard them talking about going to the Duke she refused to go to the babysitter in a ploy to stop them.

Back in Halifax, Jackie’s father had been unable to earn a high school diploma because he and his siblings had to work: “When Jackie’s father was ready, it still wasn’t worth it for a black person to have an education. Where would you put it? What would you do with it, what good was it?” (182). He and Jackie’s mother had street sense, and they were determined for Jackie to get an education.

By the time Jackie was grown, all the old clubs had turned into other things: “All their good times, dancing and fighting and styling, gone […] all this, their lovely life, they would not be able to convince anyone it had existed” (183). 

Oku begins leaving recordings of jazz and R&B music on Jackie’s answering machine, saying “nothing in case he put his foot in his mouth again” (184). Having decided that he loves Jackie, he has also decided that he is “beyond Fitz; if he [loves] Jackie, he [can] do anything” (185). One morning in June, while Fitz is again going on about seeing Oku’s “report card,” Oku decides to tell Fitz off, telling him that he’s a grown man and doesn’t owe Fitz a report card of any kind. Fitz tries to get the upper hand, but unable to do so, leaves the house “with a wounded look” (186). Oku finally admits to his mother that he’s dropped out, but promises he’ll return the following year. He says he knows he has to move out, but Claire tells him not to leave until he’s ready, that Fitz doesn’t mean most of what he says: “He’s not a bad man,. […] Striving makes you bitter” (187).

When Oku leaves after lunch, he realizes that he no longer needs to pretend to fill his day with classwork. As he is additionally no longer concerned about Fitz, he takes his Buick and drives over to Eglinton to the barbershop to listen to the debates at the informal university. After his haircut and lecture, he drives toward Ab and Zu, parks a block away, and arrives just in time to see Reiner leaving from across the street. Jackie sees him; they meet in the store, then have sex in Reiner’s bed. Afterwards they talk about it—“fucking’s easy” (193), she says, but sex is all she has to give him, which he tentatively accepts.

“Quy” Summary

In Pulau Bidong, the monk taught Quy to read, telling him that “it’s on paper you get cheated” (197). When a battle breaks out between the various illicit factions, including the monk, at 12, Quy and two others decided to go with the monk, named Loc Tuc. However, the three were not free. They traveled with Loc Tuc and served him in his ventures, and Quy even skimmed off the top, but they belonged to Loc Tuc. The monk was gifted with words and used to get them out of their frequent trouble with the authorities. He also fixated on Quy as a frequent audience for his stories, which often contradicted themselves. Quy believes he was the monk’s only audience but says that he “was the wrong person to impress” (202).