NDP MP Olivia Chow welcomes guests to her large Victorian home looking calm, cool, and stylish in a canary yellow blazer and slim black pants.

The image belies the fact she has just come out of a stressful few weeks in her portfolio as transport critic — dealing with a train derailment, the fallout from the Ontario-Quebec ice storm and Canada Post delivery delays — and that she’s been frantically rushing to prepare for this interview. But she is about to out herself.

First she confesses, as she introduces a friend who is just leaving, that he was there to help her take down her Christmas tree, and clean up. Then, as a photographer moves to the far corner of her comfortable but utilitarian living room to set up, Chow warns with an impish grin that he’s about to uncover the holiday decorations hidden in the corner.

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Review: My Journey by Olivia Chow

My Journey: an excerpt from Olivia Chow's new memoir











More revelations come to light when a reporter suggests setting up in the dining room. “I didn’t clean up in there,” she protests as she herds her three indignant cats.

Chow doesn’t pretend to be entertaining queen Martha Stewart, and her home, which doubles as an office for organizing volunteers and staff working on political policies and election campaigns, reflects that.

Her focus, instead, as she details in her new book My Journey, out Jan. 21, is on social justice issues and creating communities that work.

“This book is about immigration, adversity, public service — and about love,” she says. “And if there’s one thing the book hopefully can do is say to folks: ‘Hey, you can overcome difficult situations, and by the way there is goodness inside us and if we can touch it, connect it with what other people have inside them that is good, then perhaps when we come together we can make our city and country a better place to be.’”

The youthful-looking Chow, 56, sounds like the politician she is: an activist who has always championed the rights of the marginalized — from Vietnamese boat refugees to gay youth. Hired in 1980 as a staffer for MP Dan Heap, she went on to become a school board trustee, a Toronto city councillor and finally a federal MP.

And so there comes an obvious suspicion that the release of this memoir is timed to coincide with the Toronto mayoralty race. Official registration began Jan. 2 for the Oct. 27 election. Chow’s name has been floated for months as a possible contender to run against Rob Ford.

But she insists the book didn’t come about to push her political agenda, rather it was all because of “Jack.”

Her partner in love and politics, federal NDP leader Jack Layton, died on Aug. 22, 2011.

“After Jack died, quite a few people came up to me and said, ‘I watched you, how do you do it? I’m experiencing the same thing,’” she explains with compassion. “Some said: ‘I find strength in how you have managed your grief.’”

Chow says she was invited to speak to palliative care and bereavement groups, and she wondered if she could help people through their grief in the same way books by other widows and widowers had helped her.

“At first I thought it might be a magazine article. Then someone asked me to write a bucket list [of what helped her through her grief]. I realized part of my strength came from my faith,” said Chow, whose spiritual roots grew at the nearby Toronto Chinese Baptist Church. “Part my connection with nature from when I was a junior forest ranger and discovering stars and the boreal forest and beautiful sunrises and sunsets. And that [writing it down] was incredibly helpful for me.”

Still, she says, “The most difficult passage in the book was reliving Jack’s death and the grief that was so overwhelming in the earlier days.

In her chapter dealing with Layton’s election victory, followed so quickly by his death, Chow opens with: “When I look back at the spring and summer of 2011 and the extremes of emotion I felt then, I think of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . . it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” ”

“In some ways,” she says, with conviction, “I’m glad I was able to capture it and put it down in writing. I hope other people can find strength in what I’ve written.”

The book begins with her personal journey from a privileged life upper middle class life in Hong Kong — which her family fled during the upheaval from the Cultural Revolution — to her arrival in Toronto at age 13 and later working in a sweat shop with her mother.

“From carefree to adversity,” she says, summing up the fall from prosperity. The move to Canada, and the stresses that ensued when her father couldn’t find work despite his education and English language skills, also marked a change from “playing to trying to protect my mum so my dad didn’t end up beating her too much.”

Chow also details how she was beaten by two former boyfriends, including one who came close to killing her on two occasions. “It took me more than a year of black eyes and bruises to leave that relationship. And I never sought help or called the police.”

She faced other adversity as it became clear her purpose in life was to embrace activism: She waged political battles fighting for measures to stop violence against women, lobbying for more immigrant services, standing up for citizens she believed were being cowed by the Toronto police union (men she describes as bullies), and even fighting for young people who wanted to attend raves that were under threat of a ban.

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However, there are joys in her memoir, too: finding solace and escape from her family stresses in nature with summer jobs as a junior park ranger, studying at the Ontario College of Art — in her book she writes “In a way I am always sculpting, as both an artist and a politician.” — and meeting Layton, marrying him in 1988, and forming a bond that would carry them through his death from cancer.

How she’ll fare going forward, without her political partner and mentor, is another story. No one has replaced Layton as her political touchstone. “I don’t have that, but thank god I have a staff team and friends,” she says.

And she remains close to Layton’s children, Mike, a city councillor, and Sarah, as well as Sarah’s two children, Beatrice and Solace.

About the past she is open, about the future she is less so.

Will she run for mayor? She’s ambiguous: “It’s no secret I’m considering it,” she says. “I love this city. It’s my home.”

But there is no ambiguity in her feelings about the current mayor.

“Our city deserves a lot better than Ford,” she says. “I don’t want my children and our grandchildren to have him as a role model.”

She says she doesn’t know how she — or anyone — can appeal to Ford’s staunch defenders, constituents who are focused on tax cuts.

“I’m focused on how to appeal to people to buy my book,” she jokes, her smile just a tad uneven from the palsy left her face partially paralyzed last year.

But it’s clear from her ongoing meetings with the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and Canada’s top mayors and her continued fight for more federal cash for cities that civic issues are top of mind.

As she walks her guest to the door, Chow points out its boarded-over stained glass windows, damaged after someone broke into her home. Chow does an imitation of the burglars looking around her down-to-earth belongings, shaking their heads, and saying “nothing here,” and leaving. She’s at once funny and fearless, like one of the heroes in Ghost Busters: ‘I ain’t afraid of no burglars.’

Then she changes the subject to talk about her next commitment: she’s just about to go swimming.

Her dedication to fitness is reminiscent of the opening of her book: Chow running to start her day, to stay fit, be ready and jog the sorrow and pain of bereavement out of her body. One can’t help but wonder what she’ll run for next.

For a review of My Journey see Sunday’s Book section or visit thestar.com/books .

Video

Olivia Chow talks about why she wrote My Journey online at thestar.com/life .

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