About this Event
In conversation with Téa Mutonji and Natasha Ramoutar
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 assimilate into this new-world neighbourhood
made up of Asian, African, and Caribbean immigrant families. Eventually, Adrian’s father opens a dojo, which becomes a community hub and the place where Tatay teaches and trains his son. The dojo becomes a community hub, and the place where Tatay teaches and trains his son. But as Adrian grows, becoming a rebellious teenager and young adult, so too do the intergenerational conflict and tension.
Acclaimed poet and historian Adrian De Leon has crafted a vivid and visceral journey into the fraught relationship between immigrant fathers and sons. But, above all, Notes from a Wayward Son is a homage to the fierce love of family and the search for forgiveness.
ADRIAN DE LEON is an award-winning writer, poet, critic, and public historian. He has written and edited five books, including most recently, barangay: an offshore poem, which was named one of 2021’s best Canadian poetry collections by CBC Books, and two academic works, Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America and Balikbayan: A Revenant History of the Filipino Homeland. With Emmy Award–winning documentary filmmaker Dolly Li, he has partnered with PBS Digital Studies and the Center for Asian American Media to create and co-host two programs, A People’s History of Asian America and Historian’s Take, which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award and a Daytime Emmy. He was the 2023–2024 Jack and Nancy Farley Distinguished Visiting Scholar in History at Simon Fraser University, and is currently a professor of American and Philippine histories at New York University. He now resides in New York City.
Téa Mutonji is a poet and fiction writer. Her debut collection of short stories, Shut Up You’re Pretty was a finalist for the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize (2019) and Canada Reads (2024). It won the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award (2020) and the Trillium Book Award (2020). Mutonji was a recipient of the Writer’s Trust Rising Star’s award (2022) and received the Jill Davis Fellowship (2021) at New York University where she completed her MFA in fiction. Her new book, My Person, will be published in August 2026.
Natasha Ramoutar is a writer of Indo-Guyanese descent from Toronto. Her debut collection of poetry, Bittersweet, published in 2020 by Mawenzi House, was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. She was the editor of FEEL WAYS, an anthology of Scarborough literature. Her second poetry collection was published by Wolsak & Wynn in 2024. She is a senior editor with Augur Magazine and serves on the editorial board at Wolsak & Wynn.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Another Story Bookshop, 315 Roncesvalles Avenue, Toronto, Canada
CAD 0.00
