"Three weeks before his fifty-seventh birthday, novelist Wayson Choy received a mysterious phone message during his publicity tour for The Jade Peony. When he called the number, an older woman's voice answered, telling him that she had just seen his mother on the streetcar. Wayson politely informed her that his mother had died two decades earlier. "No, no, not your mother," the voice insisted; "your real mother."".

"The woman on the phone was right: He had, in fact, been adopted. So, three weeks before his fifty-seventh birthday, Wayson Choy became an orphan.".

"This astonishing revelation inspires the beautifully wrought, sensitively told Paper Shadows, the story of a Chinatown past, lost and found.

From his early experiences with the ghosts of old Chinatown to his discovery later in life of closely guarded family secrets that crossed the ocean from mainland China to Gold Mountain, this multilayered portrait of a child's world reveals uncanny similarities between the colorful secrets that enrich Wayson Choy's award-winning The Jade Peony and the subsequently discovered secrets of his own life."--BOOK JACKET.