Author Adrian De Leon, whose father is central to his book Notes from a Wayward Son – but in a complicated and messy way: “All I’ll say is that he told me he trusts me with our story.”Wynton Wong/Supplied
The boys in Scarborough are always teaching each other what not to become. In places like these, any harmless thing can become suspect.
“Piano? That’s pretty gay, man. Are you gay?” asks Curtis, one of the older Black boys in Adrian De Leon’s Ontario neighbourhood where he grew up. He just wants piano lessons, and, when that three-letter-word first enters his orbit, he isn’t yet the poet, historian, New York University professor and memoirist he’d eventually become. He just moved from Manila to Canada at age five in 1998, and he was still learning the country’s codes of shame and belonging.
When De Leon’s Tatay, the Filipino word for father, hears the word exit the mouth of his son during dinner, he turns it into an emergency. “Don’t you ever – EVER – let anyone call you gay,” he yells, his voice trembling under his authority. In that moment, De Leon begins learning one of masculinity’s oldest rules: that it’s less of an identity than it is a defence.
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De Leon’s new memoir, Notes from a Wayward Son, often returns to a question a lot of sons eventually ask themselves: What happens when love and fear start sounding too much alike? Moving between the Philippines, Scarborough, Los Angeles and New York, he frames his coming-of-age story as a letter to his father, a man whose care could sound far more like correction.
“The thing that mitigated Black and Filipino relationships in Scarborough was maintained by a strict commitment to heterosexuality,” De Leon says. In the book, masculinity is atmosphere: a joke between boys, a dojo lesson, a father’s violence mistaken for protection.
De Leon, now a professor of U.S. history, often punctuates these thoughts like a Scarborough native of the early 2000s. He’s prone to offering knowledge fused with cultural slang-dropping: James Baldwin and Dragon Ball Z, empire and anime, “yo,” “cats,” “the ends.” Over Zoom, he speaks in layered, fast-moving spirals and presents as the kind of intellectual who distrusts intellectual performance itself. “I love being a writer,” he says. “I hate being an author.”
De Leon treats writing less like authority and more like emotional digestion. The point isn’t to stand above family, colonial history or Scarborough long enough to explain them neatly. It’s to process them while they’re still rearranging him in real time.
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In Wayward Son, these places, from Scarborough to the Philippines, functioned like the church, teaching De Leon what to worship, fear and edit in himself. His father, a lay religious leader, viewed correction as devotion, turning a family home into a kind of domestic pulpit, where obedience had spiritual weight. Love was there, but it usually arrived with the expectation of self-correction.
Boys in Scarborough monitored each other through jokes that didn’t really feel like jokes. To De Leon, Curtis, the neighbourhood boy from his youth, represented Scarborough fluency: Game Boys, Pokémon and cultural references, the things a new kid studied like a second language.
“How do I do that?” De Leon remembers thinking as he watched Curtis move through the neighbourhood with social ease. What drew him in was “the cultural expressive freedom of Black boyhood in Scarborough.” Pop culture became his tether to the city, a freedom that came with repeated terms: athleticism and heterosexual performance. Pianos sat outside the code, along with desire.
At home, that code had Tatay’s voice. He was a former Philippine military captain, martial arts master and archbishop who believed movement could save people. In Scarborough, that belief became dojo floors, church work, community organizing, Filipino boys learning how to move through the world like the world hadn’t already decided what they were worth.
“My father loved three things: my mother, Filipino culture and freedom,” De Leon says. But Wayward Son rotates around the instability underneath the care. Tatay’s love confused itself with discipline, part of what De Leon calls an “economy of violence,” where punishment and protection could blur. Father and son, he says, inherited “different forms of violence through multiple generations of empire.”
The book only found its shape once De Leon stopped writing around his father and started addressing it to him. Tatay is alive. The family is, as De Leon puts it, “actually good” now and his father has since read the book. When asked later how he responded to it, De Leon kept things guarded: “All I’ll say is that he told me he trusts me with our story.” In that way, Wayward Son resists the clean mechanics of Disney endings. What readers get instead is a meditative slice of the relationship.
“The biggest thing I worried about was becoming him,” he says before correcting himself. “What scared me wasn’t becoming him exactly, but becoming a spectre of him across generations. One thing I inherited, unfortunately, is the tendency toward self-sabotage and self-punishment.”
In Wayward Son, that habit never settles into redemption. It instead returns as music. Years after the piano became a source of shame, De Leon’s father found professional use for music as a hospital chaplain in a palliative care unit. “He started a program where he would bring a guitar, go into patients’ rooms, hang out with them, and sing their favourite songs before they passed,” De Leon says.
The book’s ache lives in the tension between the father who wounded him, and the father who still left behind “an unwavering devotion to making things softer for others,” even if that tenderness wasn’t always directed at him.