What ingredients make up a Canada Reads novel? Champion Saïd M'Dahoma and author Jamie Chai Yun Liew weigh in

CBC

17-02-2025

For Saïd M'Dahoma, his migration from France to Canada as a multilingual neuroscientist was very different to that of his father's, who first went from Comoros in East Africa to Paris for an emergency surgery. The complex emotions behind stories of migration is what ultimately led M'Dahoma to championing the novel Dandelion by Jamie Chai Yun Liew on Canada Reads 2025.
M'Dahoma is a French Comorian Canadian pastry chef based in Calgary. M'Dahoma was born in Paris, where he completed his PhD in neuroscience, and moved to Canada to work at the University of Alberta.
Living so far from home, he began to miss French pastries, so he started making his own. Through trial and error and by sharing his journey online, he decided to give up his career as a neuroscientist and become a pastry chef full-time.
Liew is a lawyer, law professor and podcaster based in Ottawa. Dandelion is her first novel, which won her the Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award from the Asian Canadian Writers' Workshop. She also wrote the nonfiction book Ghost Citizens. Liew was named one of CBC Books writers to watch in 2022.
Dandelion is a novel that tells a story of family secrets and migration. The book follows a woman named Lily, who is a young mother, as she searches for what happened to her own mother, who walked away from the family one day when she was young, never to be heard from again.
Before the Canada Reads debates, M'Dahoma and Liew met on The Next Chapter. Alongside Ali Hassan, they discussed how Dandelion connects food to family and why they wanted to change the narrative on how immigrant stories are often viewed.
Ali Hassan: Saïd, when our producer first talked to you about the kind of book you love to read you told her that you love a book with a big plot, lots of emotion, engaging characters. So tell me about Dandelion and how it fit that bill.
Saïd M'Dahoma: I really like Dandelion because it resonated with me a lot, especially because I'm an immigrant. I'm the son of immigrants and that book created so many emotions for me. I could see that, even though I'm not from the same country as the characters from the book, I really look like them. My parents really look like them. There's so much connection between different immigrants from all around the world and I felt compelled to choose that book for Canada Reads because of how much it resonated with me.
Sometimes humanity can be stripped from the issues that we're talking about in our society today.
AH: Dandelion is a migration story. It also touches on this idea of statelessness and as a migration lawyer and law professor, you drew from your own work and research in crafting this story. Can you tell us a little bit about your protagonist and how they end up in Canada?
Jamie Chai Yun Liew: Saïd, I was really moved to hear you say that because in answering your question, a lot of the research and the work I was doing was listening to clients, listening to people who have experienced migration, experienced statelessness and the hardships that they've had to endure. And I wanted to write from an emotional place and to hear that it resonates from that kind of perspective I think is important, especially in a time like this where sometimes humanity can be stripped from the issues that we're talking about in our society today.
AH: Saïd, you're no stranger to stories of migration yourself. Can you talk about how you related to the migration story in Dandelion?
SM: One thing that I really appreciated in that book is how not everybody has the same story when it comes to immigration and how some people thrive when they come to a new country, they love it, they integrate very quickly and some of [them] struggle. Some of [them] just cannot help but to think about the country they're coming from and some of it might come from the fact that sometimes you're in a new country, not because you wanted to, but because you were forced to. Sometimes even if you wanted to come to that new country, you go through struggles — it's very difficult to make a living, it's very difficult to adapt. So you feel like you don't really belong and obviously all the matters that are racism, which can definitely make it harder to integrate into a new society.
Baking is such a big part of my life and it's such a big therapy for me. - Saïd M'Dahoma
AH: When you got to Canada, you were missing something sweet from back home, the French pastries that you very much embraced in France, clearly, and you've also been known to use Comorian ingredients in your baking. How does that food serve as a tether to back home?
SM: That's interesting. For me, because I was born and raised in France, French pastry is something that is part of me. Like when I smell butter, I immediately think of croissant and I want to eat one immediately. So baking for me was a way to connect back to my French roots, but also my grandmother was a vanilla farmer and I used to see her in Comoros sorting vanilla pods when I was a kid. And vanilla obviously is something that you use a lot in baking, so baking also connected me to my Comorian roots. That's why baking is such a big part of my life and it's such a big therapy for me.
AH: Reading in Dandelion the important role of food as something that connects Lily and Swee Hua, her mother, to their roots was so interesting. Why did you want to bring food into the story that way?
JCYL: Food is such a big part of life and ignites memories, right? It really is a sensual and important aspect of our life. We depend on food for sustenance to live but it's also a pleasurable experience if done right. I'm a food lover. I love cooking, I love eating and food is a big part of my culture. When I was growing up, I realized that the food my mother and my aunties and my family cooked was slightly different from, not only my classmates, but also other Chinese people because of the area of the world that my particular family came from. There's a fusion of different cultural and environmental influences and I really wanted to highlight that in the book because I want everyone to know about it and to enjoy it as much as I do.
They just want to fit into Canadian society while being accepted for who they are. - Saïd M'Dahoma
AH: How will you argue that Dandelion is Canada's one book to change the narrative?
SM: I think it's one book to change the narrative because nowadays a lot of people do not really know what it's like to be an immigrant. They tend to think at least that every immigrant story is the same, whereas there are so many different stories, so many people with different dreams and aspirations and those people just want to fit. They just want to fit into Canadian society while being accepted for who they are. And I think that we live in a world where people think that immigrants do not want to fit, but we really do want to. We just want to be accepted.