A beautifully crafted, achingly honest memoir about the fraught relationship between Adrian De Leon and his father—a former captain in the Philippines military, a martial arts master and an archbishop—set in 1990s and early 2000s Scarborough.
The first memory Adrian De Leon has of his father is when he is four years old. He is sitting in front of his family home in Manila, Philippines, when he sees a man with a military haircut and a collared shirt ascend the stairs before him. In the aftermath of the Marcos dictatorship in the early 1990s, Tatay—Father—had moved halfway across the world to live in a compound in the Arabian Desert. Despite his pedigree as a military officer and a religious scholarship to study in Manila, the best possible place of employment for a Filipino man who needed sufficient wages to support a family was abroad.
A year later, Tatay uproots his family to Canada, where they start a new life in Scarborough. While Tatay struggles to find steady full-time work, Adrian endeavours to learn English, make friends at his local Catholic school, and assimilate into this new-world neighbourhood made up of Asian, African, and Caribbean immigrant families. Eventually, Adrian’s father opens a dojo, where he teaches a little-known Filipino martial art called kuntaw. The dojo becomes a community hub, and the place where Tatay teaches and trains his son. As the family grows with the arrival of his grandmother from the Philippines and a new baby brother, and Adrian becomes a rebellious teenager and young adult, so too does the conflict and tension between father and son.
Acclaimed poet and historian Adrian De Leon has crafted a vivid and visceral journey into the fraught relationship between immigrant fathers and sons set against the backdrop of imperialism and revolution. But, above all, Notes from a Wayward Son is a homage to the fierce love of family and the search for forgiveness.