At the age of seventeen I was convinced of the righteousness of my behaviour, which showed what a person could do when not intimidated. I ate lobster, I drove a Camaro. I wasn't a victim. We smiled from the curb at the men who drove around the block, waved, beckoned with our index fingers, manufacturing a sweetness for even the circle jerks who ogled our flesh through their car windows but never stopped to take us out. This was part of the job, smiling while covering up our fear.
Mistakes to Run With is not just a gritty tell-all memoir about a former teenage sex worker's travels through the eighteen levels of Buddhist Hell (for which the chapters are named), but since Yasuko Thanh is a celebrated author of fiction, she brings a novelist's sensibility to shaping her story with insight and wisdom. I think back now to when I read her prize-winning Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains and I feel rather small for having come on here to report whether or not I “liked” it; it's so very easy to forget that these authors we casually evaluate are real people who sweat and labour over their efforts. Nonetheless, I'll follow through with the expected form and report that this was an incredible read – for its art as much as for its narrative.
Many children grow up unloved, but they don't go to the extremes I did. Maybe this is a story about how borderline personality disorder – a diagnosis I received two years ago – develops in a child. Or maybe it's about a good girl who makes bad choices. Or maybe it's about the power we have to rationalize our worst behaviours. I'm still trying to understand whether it was something as inborn as the colour of my eyes that made me trade a life at home for the streets. Or an obsessive need for approval generated by an inability to impress my parents. Whatever it was, I ran away from home at the age of fifteen armed with misguided convictions that allowed me to justify my recklessness, impulsivity, and promiscuity to myself. I was motivated to stay on the streets as long as I did by the firm belief that love involved self-sacrifice, that it constituted a form of noble suffering. But no one story can paint the whole picture. Love had to be earned, and you had to pay dearly to get it. That's what my life so far had taught me.Born to a Vietnamese father and a German mother, Thanh was raised in a low income neighbourhood of Victoria, B.C. When her brother came along five years later, Thanh lost not only her room to him (she was now relegated to a fold out chair in the living room), but also lost whatever attention and affection she might have had before. Despite being a top student and winner of academic competitions, Thanh received no praise from parents who took her accomplishments as merely expected, and when she eventually ran away at fifteen, her parents informed Social Services that they didn't want her back in the home in case she negatively impacted her brother. On her own, Thanh eventually made her way to Vancouver and was delighted to join a stable of prostitutes under the care of a suave pimp named Avery, and she spend the next several years trying to prove her worth to him by degrading and debasing herself, all while believing that she was in control of everything and no kind of victim. She turned her nose up at the “crack hos” around her (while thinking of herself as merely a sex worker who enjoyed smoking crack), when she eventually had children, Thanh wanted men to think that she was something more than just another one of the sad stay-at-home Moms she hung out with, and when she was later diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, Thanh resisted being put on antidepressants because she had always thought of herself as a step above those “on meds”. It was this kind of awareness of Thanh's self-protection measures – the low self-esteem urging her to feel even slightly superior to those around her – that crafts her disturbing story into one it doesn't feel voyeuristic to witness.
On my office wall was what I called my memory box. Wooden with a glass front, it held things from my childhood. Among them was a bookmark I once drew of Alice in Wonderland where she cried so hard that everyone floated away on her tears. Carried off by her sadness, washed away by her pain. My writing would do this. Wash away my pain. Vindication. I write to be free. The words will free me. Then it would all have been worth it. All? What all? The streets, Avery? Yes, I'd show them. A child's threat: “Then they'll be sorry.” For years in my secret heart I'd been waiting for discovery. It felt like reaching in the dark – for an outstretched hand that would touch me, know me.And through it all, Thanh wrote as though it would save her life. In the later part of the book – as Thanh describes what she was going through domestically and psychologically as she studied creative writing and began to experience professional success – it was astonishing to learn how her ghosts and demons both urged her on and held her back. Not everyone needs to write a memoir, and not everyone who does can do it well, but Thanh succeeds here on every level and I wish her much success going forward.
