Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill is a small gem of a book. Wah refers to the book as a “biotext”; the publisher calls it both “biofiction” and “biography.” Wah denies that it contains “true stories but, rather, poses or postures,” and this echoes a line from the book’s epigraph: “When you’re not ‘pure’ you just make it up.”

Some of this seems unnecessarily fussy. All art is autobiographical; all memory involves fictionalizing. Diamond Grill, whatever its provenance, is a story, written in a series of short sketches, about Wah’s father’s restaurant in Nelson, B.C. The author’s interest in the issue of purity springs from his own mixed ancestry, “half Swede, quarter Chinese, and quarter Ontario Wasp.” One of the book’s great strengths is Wah’s exploration of this “dissonance of encounter” he finds within himself; one of its most moving aspects is his attempt at understanding his father’s life, and, from him, the part of himself that is “quarter Chinese.”

Fred Wah is a poet, and Diamond Grill is a poet’s book of prose, filled with joy in wordplay and punning. The style of these pieces varies greatly, from unpunctuated prose poems, recipes, and excerpts from research materials, to beautifully detailed descriptions of the restaurant itself, funny and warm character sketches, and philosophical musings upon anthropology and identity.

In place of a conventional beginning, middle and end, it offers a beguiling approach to its subject from as many different angles as possible. This cumulative technique, however, leads to a certain amount of repetition of detail, which, while it may be deliberate, often reads like carelessness. In addition, the absence of punctuation in the prose poem sequences, although it may be intended to replicate the emigrant’s initial encounter with a new language, is frustrating, and unnecessarily obscures the sense of these passages. Nonetheless, I learned a great deal about the shameful treatment of early Chinese emigrants to Canada, and was given much to think about on the subject of identity, particularly how we and our society collude, often destructively, in its construction.

This is an angry book in places, but it is written out of love, and that makes all the difference.