Yes, You Can Actually Buy Sea Bass on Warden — a Toronto Guide to This Book
One of the kindest things early readers have said about this book is that the Toronto in it feels real. That’s not an accident, and it’s not texture, either. The city is doing work in this story: it decides who can afford to be seen, who has to be invisible, and which version of a person shows up at which address.
So here’s the map. Everything below is real, and you can go to almost all of it.
St. Michael’s Hospital. Chapter One ends here, and it’s real — a teaching hospital in downtown Toronto, a few minutes from the financial core. I picked it for a reason that only Torontonians will feel: it’s close enough to Bay Street that the two worlds in this book — the hospital corridor and the boardroom — are practically the same walk. Sophie does that walk in the rain, in an engagement dress, in one broken shoe.
The subway ride home — with the change at Kennedy. In Chapter Two, Sophie rides home with a copy of her marriage paperwork folded in a bag. The detail that matters is the transfer: she changes at Kennedy, the way she has every trip home since university. Kennedy is where the Line 2 subway meets the Scarborough lines — for a certain generation of kids who grew up in Scarborough and Markham and went to school downtown, that station is the border between two lives. Putting on the paperwork downtown and changing at Kennedy is the whole book in one commute.
The warehouse — Agincourt, on a stretch of Milliken Avenue. The Xu family’s warehouse is in Agincourt, in Scarborough — the heart of Toronto’s Chinese-Canadian commercial history. A restaurant supply warehouse there is about as specific as Toronto gets: thirty years of woks, steam tables, and walk-in cooler parts sold wholesale to half the restaurants between here and Markham. The plazas on that stretch have rotated the same handful of tenants — a bubble tea shop, a herbalist, a Cantonese bakery — through the same handful of units for two decades. If you’ve driven it, you know the light. If you haven’t: it’s worth the drive, and you should go hungry.
T&T on Warden. In the finale, Sophie’s mother serves a whole steamed sea bass — from the T&T on Warden, bought specially, instead of the corner No Frills. Two grocery details, both real, and the difference between them is the entire emotional vocabulary of an immigrant household that grew up on No Frills and buys sea bass when it means something. (Note: I kept “No Frills” in English on purpose. Torontonians say it in English. Nobody in the history of Scarborough has ever called it “the budget supermarket.”)
Queen West, where Sophie declines the promotion. The coffee shop isn’t named, but the street is real and the description is exact: hand-lettered menu boards, mismatched chairs, independent spots that have survived three waves of condo development by refusing to become anything else. Order a flat white, sit near the window, and imagine telling your boss no.
Front Street, thirty-one floors up. The apartment where the contract marriage lives is real estate, not real — but the view is honest: a stretch of Front Street gone quiet after nine, streetcar cables humming overhead, and the CN Tower doing its slow color-change routine over the gap between two buildings. If you’ve ever lived downtown, you know exactly which gap.
And one you can’t visit, fortunately: the cardiac ward on the fourth floor. Sophie’s father is a fictional patient, but the floor exists, and if you’ve ever sat in those plastic chairs waiting for news, you already know what Chapter One is doing and I don’t need to explain it.
Next up, maybe: the money. A post on what’s actually inside that 2004 financing agreement — the clause, the redemption right, and why a twenty-two-year-old piece of paper can still bite. That one needs its own essay, because I went down a research rabbit hole and I’m taking you with me.
— L.A. Ashford