INTRODUCTION

I was born in 1976, into a noisy house in East Vancouver where there were never enough bathrooms, privacy, or salt and vinegar chips to go around. By the time I arrived, my four older sisters were between the ages of seven and seventeen, and I would, for many years, remain the smallest and most observant member of the household. I would often hide in corners and behind doors, where I could listen to the conversations swirling around me, and watch the teens and adults rush through their lives, slamming doors as they ran out to waiting cars or to catch the bus downtown. I patched together bits and pieces of gossip, old memories, and confessions, and wrote and rewrote the story of my family in my head, a circular reimagining that became a comfort as I grew older. During the years when it seemed our family was falling apart, picturing my grandfather stepping off a boat in Victoria in 1913 with his one bag and one Western-style suit was a balm, a reminder that he had launched himself into the great unknown for the children and grandchildren who had not yet been born. That kind of love felt supernatural, like a genetic prescience.
In our family, immigration from China was recent memory. My grandparents and parents spent much of their time outside the home using whatever tools they could to prove that they belonged in the country where they now lived. Popular culture—the soap operas, the fashion magazines, the celebrity gossip, and the hockey fandom— was how they found a way in, studying, learning, and parroting what the white people around them were consuming. For my grandfather, who paid the five-hundred-dollar head tax upon his arrival in Canada at age seventeen, it meant listening to CBC Radio all day long. For my father, who joined my grandfather in Vancouver after the Chinese Exclusion Act was lifted in 1947, it meant listening to Chuck Berry and dropping his accent as soon as he could. For my mother, who married a man she had only met in letters and photographs for the opportunity to leave Hong Kong, it meant learning to bake the perfect sponge cake. For my older sisters, it meant perming their hair and never missing an episode of Dallas. And for me, it meant taping New Kids on the Block songs off the radio and, later, sending love letters to Beck. These were all ways that we engaged with popular culture. These were the things we talked about at school and at the office, and whenever we walked into new situations where we were visibly different. Maybe we were missing privilege and whiteness, but we could watch what everyone else was watching and try to close the distance between us and them.
Pop culture also became the measure by which we judged ourselves, which was a relationship that was equal parts motivating and demoralizing. We might have worked hard to be as successful as Diane Keaton in Baby Boom, but we also had to contend with the growing realization that, while no one in the world was going to be as beautiful as Connie Sellecca on Hotel or Diane Lane in The Outsiders, my sisters and I were also never going to be as rich or as white. It didn’t matter if my hair was permed in spiral curls, or if my sisters got their makeup done at the Lancôme counter, or if my father watched every single B.C. Lions football game; there was no way we could erase our faces—those smooth, olive-skinned, southern Chinese faces that betrayed our identities even if we would have rather stayed hidden.

***

Beginning in my childhood, I started losing people. My mother, who was constantly fighting off anxiety and depression, would sometimes entirely disengage from our lives, retreating to her bedroom or sitting on the living room sofa, her silence suffocating the entire house. My father would get cancer and die, followed shortly by his own father. My sisters moved out one by one until, by the time I was nineteen, I was living in our old Vancouver Special alone with my mother. It’s a special kind of torture to be the youngest child left behind, wandering through a house of empty bedrooms, picking through the eighties blouses and cheap drugstore perfumes your sisters didn’t want to take with them.
Still, I couldn’t help but be reminded every single day of the life my family once had when we were all together, when my father was alive, when my mother used to host mah-jong parties and laugh at naughty jokes with her friends. But as I grew older, the memories faded, receding into a murky dreamscape that I was pretty sure wasn’t accurate. As I had done when I was younger, I began to stitch together what I knew to be real with connective tissue, small transitional fictions and a little magic realism to make my family whole again. or at least to make our stories whole again.
I used pop culture in the same way, as a kind of glue to hold me together when I was hurtling through disaster. If I was lonely, I could listen to a Barenaked Ladies cd and imagine they were singing those lyrics of longing and disappointment to me, for me. If I was angry with my mother, I could reread The Secret Garden, where Mary’s mother exists only in flashes of memory of her walking away from her only child, a beautiful lacy dress swirling around her ankles. In those moments, it didn’t matter that I had never met singer-songwriter Steven Page, or that I wasn’t a Victorian-era child exploring the English moors; it mattered only that one fragment of their stories fit into mine. I was so used to not fitting in at all, to being the extra daughter who was often forgotten, that jamming a piece of pop culture into an absence in my life, no matter how poorly matched, seemed fine. It seemed like the only, no, the best thing to do.
This is how I became a writer.

***

I am not discriminating. All culture, high or low, is of equal importance to me, whether I am sitting in a room at the Tate Modern lined with Mark Rothko paintings, or I’m intently watching an episode of 90 Day Fiancé. There are always homilies to be borrowed, a conclusion to be made about the zeitgeist, a crush to be formed.
You remember the first time you fell in love with a celebrity, don’t you? The first time you saw David Cassidy smile widely at the camera. The first time you heard a Florence + the Machine song soar through the speakers in your car. The first time you watched Sarah Jessica Parker walk down that Manhattan sidewalk in a white tutu.
Did your heart beat so strongly you feared it would burst through your chest? Did your vision narrow until all you saw was that person, tiny but seemingly real, on your screen? Did you cry when the lyrics became clear to you, a breaking open of meaning like storm clouds parting to reveal a blue sky you had forgotten? These revelations, these moments of parasocial love, can occur once in a lifetime or many times over. I am culturally polyamorous, a person who can maintain several celebrity relationships at once. The variety is essential; I take what I need from each to fill every gap in my real life.
This book is like a mixtape, a compilation of my most loved— and a couple of my most hated—cultural moments and the people who inspired them. Sometimes they comforted me. Sometimes they enraged me. Sometimes they threw my own failings, longings, and aspirations into stark relief. Sometimes they showed me solutions, potential problems, other ways of being. But they were my constant companions—there on lonely nights or quiet mornings, when I was so anxious I couldn’t focus on anything but TMZ and the outlandish outfits at the Met Gala, after my marriage died and the bed I slept in felt impossibly vast.
Once upon a time, I might have thought that my love of pop culture was a passing phase, the sort of thing many sad teens use to distract themselves from the realities of their lives. But now, in my forties, I know that this is a forever relationship, one that has outlasted partners, friends, even dogs. It’s fitting, isn’t it, to write a tribute to the longest commitment of my life, one that has carried me from childhood to this very moment? Tonight, I will watch a music awards show and be mesmerized by Mary J. Blige’s crystal-encrusted gown; the panning shots of the chaotic crowd and bright stage lights will feel like coming home to a family who both sees you and enrages you, who cares for you while borrowing your belt without asking, who intuitively knows what you need and sometimes withholds it. A messy, performative, gossipy family whose peripatetic heartbeat is comprised of scandals and product placements, relentless choruses and binge-watches. A family that carries you along with its irresistible momentum even when you are the one thing that is not like the others, even when you know, deep down, you don’t belong. It doesn’t matter anyway. I have cobbled together my own identities and memberships from the cultural storm for as long as I can remember. It’s the only perfection I know.