1. What do each of the main characters – Tuyen, Carla, Jackie, Oku and Quy – long for? Do their longings overlap in any respect? Do they evolve over the course of the novel?

2. If Tuyen approached you in the street and asked, “What do you long for?,” how would you answer? Can you narrow your longings down to just one for her lubaio?

3. Carla observes that the immigrants she sees passing in the streets are “trying to step across the borders of who they were. But they were not merely trying. They were, in fact, borderless.” Are the identities of the second-generation characters borderless as well?

4. The novel explores the tensions between immigrants and their second-generation progeny. In what way are these tensions typical of any child-parent relationship? In what ways are they complicated by the immigrant experience?

5. Tuyen, Jackie, Oku and Carla are essentially unilingual. And yet Tuyen acted as a translator for her parents throughout childhood. Jackie is fluent in “valley girl, baller, hip-hopper, Brit mod …” Discuss the role that language plays in terms of how the four friends navigate the city.

6. In the first chapter, Brand writes: “Anonymity is the big lie of a city. You aren’t anonymous at all. You’re common, really, common like so many pebbles, so many specks of dirt, so many atoms of materiality.” How does the novel address our commonality as opposed to our anonymity?

7. The novel is written in an omniscient voice with the exception of the chapters in which Quy tells his first-person narrative. What qualities does the omniscient voice bring to Brand’s story telling? Likewise, how does the first person voice enhance Quy’s story? How would you compare the writing styles of the omniscient and first person narrators?

8. “What floats in the air on a subway train like this is chance. People stand or sit with the thin magnetic film of their life wrapped around them. They think they’re safe, but they know they’re not. Any minute you can crash into someone else’s life, and if you’re lucky, it’s good, it’s like walking on light.” The novel examines a range of different people living in the city, some of whom meet and connect, some of whom pass one another by. What role does chance play in the story?

9. In what ways is the novel built around the notion of absence – whether of people, objects, hopes, dreams?

10. Tuyen’s parents torture themselves in arguments about whether they had tempted fate by calling their first born Quy, which means “precious” in Vietnamese. What role does fate play in the novel?

11. In an interview in READ Magazine, Dionne Brand says, “Toronto has never happened before, and that’s something incredible … [I]t hasn’t ever happened before because all of these different types of people, sharing different kinds of experiences, or what we call identities, have just not been in the same place together before.” How does this observation apply to Toronto as it is depicted in What We All Long For?

12. “Talking is always a miscalculation,” asserts Tuyen’s father. Is this true for any of the characters in terms of how they communicate with friends or family?

13. The concept of innocence recurs throughout the novel. For example, Oku observes that Jackie’s face has “no innocence whatsoever.” Jackie, in turn, criticizes Oku’s poems for the innocence they portray. She says. “I don’t trust innocence … I know what’s going to happen to me.” How do each of the characters perceive innocence?

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