Finally, the written Chinese language is political. The original, or “traditional,” script was replaced around the 1950s in mainland China by the simplified script (the same characters but with less detail, or fewer strokes) as the standardized written text—a tactic employed by the People’s Republic of China to increase literacy rates in a largely illiterate population. Hong Kong and Taiwan, however, two Chinese-speaking countries fighting to stay outside the control of the Communist regime, kept the traditional script and still do today. My use of the traditional script in this book represents my respect for the original language, as well as the democratic aspirations of Hong Kong and Taiwan.

I tried my best to find a standardized way of writing Hokkien and Hakka Chinese words using the Latin alphabet in this book. I apologize if there are inconsistencies or errors with the translations; they are mine alone. The tragedy is that although certain Chinese dialects are becoming mainstream, some are dying, and it was difficult for me to access Hokkien/Hakka language resources.

I have played it a bit loose with the timing of some historical artifacts in the story: Simon’s Quest was not released in North America until 1988, a year after Phillip plays the game on his own computer; the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada wasn’t established until 1989, the year after Alfred’s hearing; and the Marco Polo nightclub in Chinatown closed in 1982, years before Swee Hua comes to work there.

Acknowledgments

This book was written on various Indigenous lands, in particular, the lands of the Orang Asli (Peninsular Malaysia), the Orang Ulu (Sarawak, Malaysia), Algonquin (Ottawa), and Treaty 7 (southern Alberta). All these lands have been home to me and my family in different ways, and I recognize I have been a guest in all of them. I have tried my best to respect the places in which this narrative takes place, acknowledging the Iban in Brunei and Malaysia, and the Ktunaxa in Sparwood, British Columbia. I still have much to learn and apologize if I did not acknowledge peoples or lands appropriately or at all.

This story was crafted while I was researching the legal barriers for stateless persons to obtain citizenship. Many of the themes in this book arose from narratives I heard throughout my time investigating the experiences of stateless persons and how law and legal processes have failed them. I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the many people I talked to about statelessness over the course of several years, including stateless persons brave enough to share their stories with me, and especially my immediate and extended family, large swaths of whom were stateless for many years. This book makes use of the material I could not include in my academic writing. And this book would not have been written if I didn’t acknowledge my intergenerational trauma of being a child of a previously stateless person. There are millions of stateless persons in the world today, many of whom are children. I hope this book creates greater awareness about their plight.