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Wayne Moriarty: Life as a parking attendant can be a real page-turner

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I first really took notice of Jane Wan maybe seven years ago.

She appeared in my life as the woman who works the parking booth at the underground lot I visit regularly in the evening.

She is Chinese-Canadian — born in Shanghai in 1962, born into a new life in Vancouver in 1990.

The relationship that Jane and I have developed over the years has been built entirely on that minute we spend one or two nights a week in the parking lot – Jane in her booth and me in my car. I drive to her window, roll down mine, then we chat — briefly, but always more deeply than mere polite conversation.

What I noticed first about Jane, beyond her relentlessly sunny disposition at a post bereft of sunlight, was that she was always reading.

Always.

“My reading is not like reading for school,” she told me last week. “I read for fun and to improve my English. When I came to Canada, I knew I had to learn the language and these books taught me …

“I read very slowly. My attention is always on the good phrase, the good English, and not just the story. I slow down a lot. I don’t care how long it takes to finish the book. I care about enjoying what I am reading and enjoying English.”

Jane’s literary interests skew toward authors of significant fame and notoriety. Dean Koontz, Tom Clancy, Stephen King. These are the authors she loves.

Chinese novels don’t interest her in the ways English novels do. Even as a student in Shanghai she would prefer reading translations of Sherlock Holmes than, say, the novels of Lu Xun.

“I stopped reading Chinese authors because I love English so much. I’ve come to prefer it to my own language,” she said.

On those nights when I leave Jane after our one-minute conversation, I delight in how this woman makes the most of an otherwise dead boring job. Her time never seems wasted. She works in a parking booth and leaves every night intellectually enriched.

I have spoken about Jane with others who park in her lot. Someone told me once that Jane reads voraciously in order to retrain her brain following a stroke many years ago. She laughed the day I asked her about this.

It was then I learned something else rather remarkable about this woman: She fearlessly lives in the moment.

While it is not true she reads to retrain her brain, it is true she has had significant medical events in her life. The first was a stroke in 2009 from which she recovered completely. The second was an operation last year to clip worrisome clots that could develop into subsequent strokes.

She doesn’t worry about her health.

“What good is that going to do?” she asks rhetorically. “Most problems come from people’s minds. I don’t like to worry. If God wants me, it will be my time.”

I asked Jane about her faith. She says she spends a lot of time at a Buddhist temple in Richmond volunteering with friends, but oddly dismisses the notion she is a Buddhist or abides by any particular religion.

“I work to enjoy life,” she says, sounding remarkably Buddhist. “I rarely argue or fight with anyone. Everybody, including me, has a good side and a bad side. We should all want to live on the good side, but sometimes we slip. If someone gets mad at me or is mean, I don’t take it personally. It happens. I understand that person has a good side and they just aren’t there right now.”

Last year I learned something else about my fascinating friend: She’s a Rubik’s Cube genius — one of those people who can spin the famous toy to its solution in a matter of minutes.

“When I was little, I always liked puzzles. When my daughter first started going to school, I would spend some time after she left working on solving the Rubik’s Cube. It was fun. My husband would then buy me new ones to solve. I think I have 12 of them, right now, that I like to play with.

“I go slowly. I don’t like to show off. Everybody has things they are good at and things they are not good at. I can’t cook, for instance.”

Jane found out recently she is losing her job in the lot where we met. Impark is automating the site, as it has so many other parking lots in the city. She can accept a transfer to another post, or switch to an on-call position. Or, well, she can leave the company all together. She hasn’t decided.

“I probably should have left Impark earlier in my life, but the job was a good fit for me in so many ways. I’ve always liked helping people — even if helping means something as little as a pleasant parking experience. I like people to be in a good mood. If I can make someone’s life happier, that makes me happy.”

Jane’s final shift in our parking lot is the last day of this month. I’m going to buy her a book. Small World by David Lodge. It’s a novel about odd but meaningful encounters.

wmoriarty@postmedia.com


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