Though I can’t prove Haines wrote “On the Sly” about or even in Toronto—though the timing seems to line up with her and Shaw meeting here in the late 90s—somehow everything about this city seems packed into that line about the sugar factory.
Words that do not match their peers or adhere to linguistic rules and expectations are the driving trope for the discordance of the immigrant experience in this novel.
Happiness, however temporary and intermittent, is emphasized as vitally important in the cited paragraph and throughout the novel, a rarity in a world steeped in destruction.