Glowing Review for JOHNNY DELIVERS in ORB

Wayne Ng’s fourth novel, Johnny Delivers, hits it out of the park. This hilarious and enthralling account of a teenager’s quest to save his family restaurant and keep his parents together by becoming a purveyor of marijuana is a must-read. That’s right: Ng’s hero is, in fact, a drug dealer—albeit a very soft one. Shocking, eh? Here’s the plot.

Johnny Wong lives with his parents and younger half-sister Jane in a small apartment above the family restaurant, the Red Pagoda, in Toronto’s Chinatown. His hero is the late actor Bruce Lee, to whom Johnny speaks daily, seeking guidance on the challenges he faces. What would Bruce do? What would he say?

Now in his final year at Central Technical High School, Johnny is confronted with his biggest problem yet: his mother, Mama, has racked up a substantial debt to his aunt, who runs serious mahjong gambling sessions at the local Chinese benevolent society. Eight thousand dollars! His mother doesn’t tell anyone, especially not her husband, Baba, who had left her a few years earlier to live with another woman, and then returned with a daughter. Baba would go into a frenzy upon learning that she has put up the family restaurant, his idea, as collateral. She has a plan. She’s going to erase the debt with one big win at mahjong. Johnny learns of the debt from his aunt, who is not one to show leniency to those who owe her money. Alarmed at the prospect of his parents breaking up again if his aunt approaches his father about the debt, Johnny promises her he will repay his mother’s debt. But how? That’s where Johnny’s long-lost childhood friend, Barry Able, steps in.

Fresh from reform school and just out of a series of foster homes, Barry has scored an appreciable stash of marijuana and proposes to Johnny that they go into business to sell it, under the cover of deliveries from the Red Pagoda. All customers have to do is call in an order for one egg roll with mustard, the code word for a bag of weed. Johnny is suddenly delivering huge quantities of egg rolls and small plastic baggies, and he’s raking in the cash. His customers even order full meals from the restaurant after trying the egg rolls. Being a badass teenage dope dealer has its perks. Angie de Haut (the Hottie), Johnny’s romantic interest, has finally noticed him. The in-crowd around Angie also take him under their wing, much to the despair of his erstwhile nerdy best friends, Andrew and Baahir. Johnny, whose ego has been run on gas fumes during high school, suddenly starts to gain confidence. His high school English teacher also gets involved, encouraging Johnny’s writing and urging him to apply for a US college. It’s around this point that things start to fall apart. What, you ask? Sorry, no spoilers. Buy the book!

Johnny Delivers is Ng’s fourth novel and the sequel to his second novel, Letters from Johnny, winner of the Crime Writers of Canada’s Best Crime Novella Award. Ng’s growth as a writer is evident from his early work. The strong voice of a young Chinese-Canadian kid finding his way in life is still there, but the writing in the sequel is considerably more refined. Ng has honed his craft, developing his characters more deeply and showing how their pasts affect them in the present, particularly his mother and mahjong auntie. Like many stories written by the Baby Boomer generation, Ng’s novels are steeped in nostalgia for the decades that preceded the advent of the internet age, dating apps, and legalized drugs. Yes, it was a time when you couldn’t just Google the answers to life’s problems or use ChatGPT to get ahead. A little native intelligence was needed to dodge the shit that life threw at you, and to come out on top by the seat of your pants. His novels also unflinchingly reflect the blatant racism of an earlier era when teenage jabs were laced with ethnic slurs and stereotyping. Toronto was still a city where “white was right,” or perhaps “white was might.” And where in the city’s Chinese community, underground gambling and aging men with fading dreams of “home” were very much part of the landscape. Ng’s cutting social critique is perfectly complemented by a sense of nostalgia and the aspiration for acceptance by one’s peers.

With four novels already published and a fifth one on the way, Ng is fast becoming one of Canada’s most prolific fiction writers. Ng draws on decades of experience as a social worker for the Ottawa Catholic School Board, giving him a wealth of insights and contacts with young people that inform his characters and plots. I eagerly await his next work, and I encourage readers to do the same.

Johnny Delivers is published by Guernica Editions, Nov 1, 2024.

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