Reading Canada Reads: Dandelion

Welcome back to Reading Canada Reads: my attempt to read as many books from the 2025 Canada Reads longlist as possible. This week, we’re talking about another of the shortlisted books to be featured in the on-air debates: Dandelion by Jamie Chai Yun Liew.

“When Lily was eleven years old, her mother, Swee Hua, walked away from the family, never to be seen or heard from again. Now, as a new mother herself, Lily becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to Swee Hua. She recalls the spring of 1987, growing up in a small British Columbia mining town where there were only a handful of Asian families; Lily's previously stateless father wanted them to blend seamlessly into Canadian life, while her mother, alienated and isolated, longed to return to Asia. Years later, still affected by Swee Hua's disappearance, Lily's family is nonetheless stubbornly silent to her questioning. But eventually, an old family friend provides a clue that sends Lily to Southeast Asia to find out the truth.

Winner of the Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award from the Asian Canadian Writers' Workshop, Dandelion is a beautifully written and affecting novel about motherhood, family secrets, migration, isolation, and mental illness. With clarity and care, it delves into the many ways we define home, identity, and above all, belonging.”

This was not my first time reading this book. I read it for a university English class in 2018 and while I remembered really enjoying it, I didn’t really remember a ton of details until I picked it up again for my 2025 Canada Reads run. The details did start to come back pretty quickly, but I think they were more impactful this time around. Seven years can make quite a bit of difference in perspective.

Stories involving Mother-Daughter relationships - and, particularly, the loss thereof - have been a bit fraught for me these past several months. They hit closer to home than they used to, and this book was no exception. While there’s no mystery to how I lost my mother, I still couldn’t help but relate to the feelings that Lily was grappling with, especially as she started facing major milestones like marriage and motherhood without her own mother. It’s hard to face that reality, and I’ve found it hard to imagine my life going forward without my mom in it. I think this book captured that kind of grief and all the related feelings that come with it very well.

It also captures another form of grief very well: the grief that comes with leaving your home behind. Despite the understandable anger directed at Swee-Hua by the other characters, I found I still felt a lot of sympathy for her. Moving is a hard thing to do, and I can’t imagine moving to the other side of the world and having to leave everything you know and so much of your culture behind. I think it’s important that we see Swee-Hua as a sympathetic and somewhat tragic character, rather than just taking a simple explanation of her being a horrible mother who left her children behind.

There are two ways in which I’d consider this novel changes the narrative: the conversation it presents about immigration and the conversation it presents about mental health and depression, especially postpartum depression.

In terms of immigration, Dandelion shows multiple different perspectives on the experience. From Lily’s father, we see someone proud to have immigrated to Canada and trying very hard to assimilate. He doesn’t seem to miss his home country and encourages his family to embrace being Canadian. Swee-Hua, Lily’s mother, seems to feel quite the opposite. She tries to fit in with their new community but struggles to be so far away from her family, country, and culture in southeast Asia. Unlike her husband, she doesn’t want to abandon her heritage to become Canadian. Caught in the middle of that are Lily and her sister, Bee, who struggle to balance these two sides of their identities as they grow up Canadian. Dandelion offers a nuanced and multifaceted view of the immigrant experience that is neither entirely optimistic nor overly pessimistic.

While we’ve made a lot of progress in how we talk about mental health, there is still a lot of stigma and misunderstanding around it. Dandelion shows how depression affects not only the person suffering from it (in one instance here, Swee-Ha), but also everyone around them (Lily and her family). Even after Swee-Ha leaves, she’s like a ghost in her family’s life, and Lily struggles with the trauma that stems from that. We also see Lily struggling with her own postpartum depression after the birth of her daughter and how that prompts her to search for her mother again. Postpartum depression still tends to be overlooked or dismissed even more so than a lot of other mental health problems, but it’s something that so many women experience and should be talked about more.

Dandelion was shortlisted for this year’s Canada Reads debates and was represented by Albertan pastry chef, Saïd M'Dahoma. It finished in second place.

Rating: 4.75/5