[Daryll A Goodchild, Crassin De Rivvah: The Caribbean Flavour, Georgetown: Daryll Goodchild, 2019. 74pp.]
Lunch and dinner time was whenever the people got hungry. Ever since opening his shop at the edge of the public road he’d drawn customers like honey draw flies. Everyone heard of the new Chinese restaurant round the corner and came around to test it out. And Zhey Shou Li prided himself on the fact that they still chose him over the others.
Sometimes he liked to remember those days, feeling the fatigue in his arms from stirring vegetables in the wok all day, and the burning in his eyes from the rising smoke that the sea breeze drove into his face.
Those days were rough for another reason, but times had changed, the people knew him now, and called him with an endearing tone, the name bestowed to a friend, “chiney”. That was all, but it was enough. It didn’t matter that they didn’t say his name, it was their tone that did the trick. They meant well. Well, some of them anyway.
Daryll A Goodchild
That excerpt from a local short story quite well reflects what is happening in Guyanese literature at home among the younger set of new Guyanese writers. The impact of this local writing is modest since the young artists are not particularly well known and have not yet taken a prominent place in contemporary Guyanese literature.
This narrative, from the point of view of Zhey Shou Li, a Chinese immigrant who is just finding success with a new restaurant overwhelmingly patronized by the local communities, is somewhat typical. Zhey Shou is at the centre of life in the neighbourhood, and they do not even know his name, or care to know it. They were comfort-able with typecasting him as the operator of a Chinese restaurant and he was willing to suppress the many irritants because paying customers could behave as they liked. He was all the richer for their business, and they were the ones coming to him.
