About Me
1980-2000
The eighties
I met Ruby at The University of Calgary — in a Romantic Literature class! We got married in my parent's living room.
We spent the summer after the wedding at Rosen Lake (in southeastern B.C.).
Cathy at her desk at Hire-A Student, where I worked for two summers.
At Rosen Lake, where I wrote my M.A. thesis (on Walt Whitman and Daoism). Here Ruby is entertaining Cathy and her husband Frank, while I get some writing done.
Having tea with my M.A. supervisor Dr. Inder Nath Kher and his wife Sulochana in Calgary.
Ruby and I playing scrabble with my grandma in Carlyle. Here we are in her kitchen, where friends and family would drop by for a cup of coffee, day or night.
For our honeymoon, we spent most of our savings on a year-long backpacking trip around East Asia.We spent two months in Japan, 10 days in Korea, a month in Taiwan, a month in Hong Kong, two months in the Philippines, over three months in China, and almost three months in Thailand, Malaysia, & Singapore.
Here are a few shots taken at a market near Dali, which is a small town west of Kunming — see the map below.
Some of the places we stayed were pretty basic — a Chungking Mansion dorm in Hong Kong (below top left) and a Xinjiang truck-stop hotel (bottom right) — but we got to see the less glitzy side of 1985 China, at the start of its boom. We took trains, buses, planes, river boats, a ferry from Shanghai to Hong Kong (it climbed up and down the hill-sized swells at the tail end of a typhoon…), as well as a small working boat that took passengers on the Grand Canal from Hangzhou to Suzhou (top right), and a horse-drawn cart in Kashgar (bottom left).
We spent two months travelling around the Philippines. Here are some kids on a beach on Mindoro Island.
After island hopping, we stayed for three weeks in a hut on the white sand beach of Boracay, after which we went up to northern Luzon to see the rice paddy terraces around Bontoc.
For more travel photos, click here.
For fictional, slightly insane travel stories, see∙Philippines: Maria∙Road∙China: At the Pangolin Gardens∙The Bright Hills of Yunnan∙Claudine∙Yunnan Gold & the Madeleine∙All the Tea in China∙The Waitresses of Chengdu
After travelling in East Asia, we lived with my parents for about two years in Victoria. Pictured here are Clark, Brenda’s husband Michel, Mom, little Amandine, Brenda, Dad, Ruby, Clark’s wife Jacqueline, and me.
Left: Al & Sin-lin, Me & Ruby, Clark & Jacqueline, & Dad.
Grandma Young, Clark, Michel holding little Amandine, & Ruby.
With my brother Clark on the Victoria ferry.
Helping Allan build a cabin on Mudge Island.
Ruby, India. We went to India from November 1987 to February 1988, partly in preparation for my graduate work on Indian writers. I met with poets in Bangalore and Mumbai (then Bombay), where we stayed a month and spent a number of afternoons in coffee shops with the poet Nissim Ezekiel.
One day in Mumbai we wandered into Elphinstone College and met Dr. Jussawalla, the Head of the English Department. She showed us around the city — from her favourite Parsee restaurants to the Willingdon Club. Here she’s holding her volume on the 16th Century poet Edmund Spenser.
At the Pushkar Camel Fair, Rajasthan.
the Nineties
In the 90s we lived in Kitsilano while I did a Ph.D. at UBC. We had alot of parties. Eight years later I got my degree — and turned my thesis into a book, Stranger Gods: Salman Rushdie’s Other Worlds (McGill-Queen’s, 2001). Here we are in front of the house we shared with Rob and Jackie.
Rob and I — probably about to terrorize the nearby beaches and parks on our mountain bikes ...
Rob & Jackie, Ruby, Joanne, and me outside the house we shared.
Mescal-time at my parents’ place in Victoria. From left: Jackie, Ruby holding niece Jill, Rob ...
... Elizabeth, Thorsten, Clark, Michel (in yellow), me, and (top right) Clark’s wife Jacqueline.
With Thorsten at our ‘office’ — Calhoun’s Cafe in Kits.
Every year I’d visit my sister, Michel, and their kids (here, Amandine and Jill) in Calgary.
Left: on our steps in Kitsilano. Right: Jill, Ruby, & Amandine in a Calgary restaurant.
With my Ph.D supervisor, Ron Hatch, on his back porch. Our sessions would begin with a couple of his fine, home-brewed ales. My hair was scandalously long — and curly too!
With my dad on the day of my thesis defence. It helps to bring a lawyer ...
Post-defence party at a Greek restaurant in Kitsilano, with Thorsten, my dad, Ron Hatch and me (impersonating Salman Rushdie). In the next photo is Jackie, Elizabeth, Harb, Thorsten, and my dad.
For excerpts of my work on Rushdie, see The Fiction of Doubt ∙Rise of the Simurg∙All the Letters Mixed Up∙When Religions Collide∙Coming Together∙Eruptions of the Sacred∙Return of the Simurg∙Flapping Eagle∙Two Adams∙Amina: The Rock∙The Poet & the Three Weird Sisters∙The Flight of Angels.
In Beacon Hill Park, Victoria, at my brother Allan’s wedding to Sin-lin — who is from Mauritius, studied in Paris, and got to know my brother through Ruby.
I can’t decide whether to call this shot Mona Ruby or Lisa Mah…