I'd Like To Accept This Award On Behalf Of A Certain Mr. Bing, If That's Allowed. . .

At the National Magazine Awards Gala in Toronto this evening, I won the Silver prize in the Essays Category for Looking For Mr. Bing, which appeared last year in that great quarterly, the Vancouver Review. The Gold went to George Jonas for his Meditations on Israel (Queen's Quarterly). Good on ye, George.

Honourable Mentions went to Nicolas Langelier for De l'utilisation du mot pute par la jeune femme moderne, in L'Actualite; Mark Steyn, for The human drama the jury didn't see, in Macleans; Edward Keenan for Markham & Lawrence East, in Spacing Magazine; Jonathan Garfinkel for A House Divided, in The Walrus Magazine; Rick Salutin for The Autobiography of an Idea, also in The Walrus Magazine; and last but in no way least, my colleague Charlotte Gill, for Eating Dirt, also in the Vancouver Review.

I also see my friend Tadzio Richards (one of my students!) won the Gold in the investigative journalism category for Burning Water, in Maissoneuve.

If I'd been at the event, I'd have made a mushy acceptance speech to profusely thank Vancouver Review editor Gudrun Will and her ace photographer-artist colleague Mark Mushet; Historian Jim Wolf; Historian and heritage adviser Jennifer Iredale; My dear comrade Todd Wong; Chang Bo, consular officer with the Guangdong Foreign Office; my companions and colleagues Peng Yangyi and Guo Xu Yue in Guangdong, and all the kind people there who took me in for tea and conversation.

If I'd been sufficiently liquored up I expect I might have asked the awards-ceremony revelers to spare a thought for the millions of workers who toil in China without benefit of free trade unions or civil rights protection, and I would probably have mentioned Hu Xinyu, a 25-year-old who was worked to death in a Guangdong factory a couple of years ago, and Yang Xixiang, a Guangzhou toy-factory worker who died from brain-stem bleeding last year after working a 21-hour shift.

But as for thanks, I would have reserved my most heartfelt appreciation for our beloved Mr. Bing, a kind man in a Homburg hat and a black greatcoat who showed my family great kindness when were hillbilly immigrants without a clue about the new world we'd come to, many, many years ago.