Scarborough Essay Questions

What do the emails between Hina and Jane suggest about the differences between management and the on-the-ground workers?

Jane does not live or work in Scarborough, and she has the typical perspective of someone who does not know exactly what the needs of the people who visit the Ontario Reads Literacy Centre at Rouge Hill Public School are. She is focused on the goals of attendance rather than the goals of actually helping people, claiming that they can find food "elsewhere." She does not seem to have much compassion for the attendees nor for Hina, and she sees it as necessary to create strict boundaries between the two. She is all about bureaucracy and utilitarian responses to humanitarian issues.

Why does Hernandez include other voices from the community beyond the "main characters"?

Hernandez's novel is strong enough with the narratives of Laura, Bing, and Sylvie, but she also adds second- and third-tier narrators. On the second tier are people like Cory, but in that third tier, there are short narratives from characters which we meet only once or twice and whose stories are seemingly outside those of the main narrative—Winsum, Clive, Cindy, and Lady, for example. Yet their stories are not actually as far away as they seem, for they provide more context and community to this story. They are the neighbors and local business owners, the people who tread the same ground and take the same buses and eat the same food and deal with the same troubles and traumas. They help show who surrounds the three children and who they might become or not become, whom they might buy from or learn from, who might be cruel to them or who might love them. These voices make the novel much richer and help root the children in their physical and psychical places.

How are Bing and Clive's stories similar and different?

Both Bing and Clive are queer, and both, at least at the beginning of the story, are keeping their sexual orientation under wraps. Bing dresses up in the privacy of his own home and does not even let his mother know what he is doing. He craves, desires, and wonders, but he keeps mum about it all. Similarly, Clive keeps his private dalliances quiet, ever the picture of a perfect heterosexual husband who would never trespass any social boundaries. The difference between these two characters is the hopeful future Hernandez paints for Bing. He is not content to keep his identity under wraps by the end of the novel. He is a queer, femme person and he wants to present this to the world. He will not endure, nor will he have to endure (we do not know anything else about Clive, but his older age suggests he grew up in a time and/or place that was hostile to homosexuality), obfuscation of his true self. Things have changed enough that Bing does not have to grow up in a world where he cannot be open about his identity.

What is the role of community in the novel?

Life is admittedly difficult for the residents of Scarborough, who have to contend with low-wage jobs, a lack of affordable housing, difficulty procuring food and clothing, expensive transportation and medical care, shoddy schools, and more. Yet there is still hope and love and support within the neighborhood because there is value placed on the idea of community. As exemplified by the literacy center and Hina, the powwow, the concert, and the coming together to mourn Laura, people help each other out, provide shoulders to cry on, and generally make life worth living.

Why does Hina stress that the center needs to provide food?

This is a point of contention between Jane and Hina (see Essay #1 for more), and it isn't hard to see where Hina is coming from: if children do not have their basic needs, such as a full stomach, met, then how can they possibly feel relaxed and comfortable enough to begin to partake in the resources that the center has to offer? If parents are too stressed figuring out how they are going to feed their children, how can they take advantage of the center's resources? Hina sees this clearly and pushes back against Jane's assumptions that these resources are freely and easily available elsewhere. It shows Hina's compassion and clear-headedness, as well as how close she is to the community she serves.