Lion City lit: Inez Tan launches her debut short story collection

This Is Where I Won’t Be Alone: Stories launched in Singapore this weekend at Kinokuniya’s main store. Carissa Foo, who wrote If It Were Up to Mrs Dada (Epigram Books, 2018) led a discussion with the collection’s author, Inez Tan.

Inez spoke about the inspiration for the first two stories in the anthology, “Edison and Curie,” and “Oyster”. “Edison and Curie,” is about a pair of twins who differ greatly in their academic aptitude. The story is psychologically complex, exploring different aspects of identity, success, and coming of age. Inez explained that this story was born from a “collision” of different experiences and ideas. In particular, she spoke of Einstein’s famous twin paradox as an initial catalyst for the creation of “Edison and Curie”. The next story in the collection, “Oyster,” is grounded in a more personal experience. Inez began writing it after her mother gifted her some dried oysters to take back to the United States. Although “Oyster” was inspired by a real-world incident, the story itself brings us out of reality and into the imaginary realm of an oyster’s thoughts. The oyster arrives into a family fridge, and its unfamiliarity with our world gives us an interesting perspective on human relationships.

Review: Labyrinth of the Past by Zhang Yiwei

While I was in Shanghai, I stumbled across a series oftranslated Chinese fiction, headlined as Stories by Contemporary Writers from Shanghai and published jointly by Better Link Press (New York) and Shanghai Press and Publishing Development Company.  The editor of the series is Wang Jiren. His Foreword stated that the series comprises writers who are immigrants to Shanghai, but most were born in the city from a period encompassing the late 1940s to the 1980s, and includes well-known writers such as Wang Anyi, Xiao Bai and Sun Ganlu, but also features young emerging writers such as Zhang Yiwei, whose short story collection, Labyrinth of the Past (2015) is reviewed here.

From age 5 to 22, Zhang Yiwei grew up in Tianlin, a neighbourhood in Xuhui District, southwest Shanghai. The seven bittersweet nostalgic stories in this collection describe a childhood in Tianlin and the bordering town of Xiaozha that were undergoing rapid transformation and industrialisation in the '80s, from farmlands to organised apartment complexes for factory workers. This changing landscape evokes the lives of Chinese workers, tinged sometimes with desolation, anonymity, and a deep sense of loss. Zhang Yiwei’s collection is particularly noteworthy for its observation of details both past and current, and for its angle of approach – these are stories about young women of the ‘80s and ‘90s growing up raised by single mothers. The broken family connections echo the breaking up of landscape, all in the name of progress, but the stories seem to whisper: at what cost?

Student bookshelf: Review and analysis of A Pearl in the Forest

Aurelia Paul recently graduated from Boston University, where she was studying comparative literature and Chinese. In her column Student bookshelf, she shares responses to materials she has explored in her classes.

Today, Aurelia will be discussing a Mongolian film that came out in 2008, Enkhtaivan Agvaantseren’s A Pearl in the Forest.

The Buryat People and Historical Background

This work comments on the persecution of Buryat refugees in Mongolia in the 1930s. The Buryats are the dominant ethnic minority group that lives in Siberia. They speak their own language, also called Buryat. This language is similar to Mongolian and uses the Cyrillic script. Buryats, like Mongols, traditionally live nomadically in gers. However, because of close contact with Russia, some Buryat settlements have become agricultural. People living in these settlements often reside in Russian-style wooden houses, which can be seen in the film. 

In 1923 the Soviet administration created the Buryat-Mongol Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic within the Union. However, Stalin was alarmed by the possibility of Soviet resistance from the Buryat community, and so ordered a campaign against them. Thousands of people died as a result of this ethnic violence, and numerous Buddhist sites of worship were destroyed.

Buddhist Pilgrim-Monks as Agents of Cultural and Artistic Transmission. Guest post by Dorothy Wong

Dorothy C. Wong is Professor of Art and Director of the East Asian Center at the University of Virginia. She has published Chinese Steles: Pre-Buddhist and Buddhist Use of a Symbolic Form (2004; Chinese edition 2011), Hōryūji Reconsidered (editor and contributing author, 2008), and China and Beyond in the Mediaeval Period: Cultural Crossings and Inter-regional Connections (co-editor with Gustav Heldt, and contributing author, 2014). Her most recent book is Buddhist Pilgrim-Monks as Agents of Cultural and Artistic Transmission: The International Buddhist Art Style in East Asia, ca. 645-770.

In the mid-seventh century, a class of Buddhist pilgrim-monks disseminated an art style in China, Japan, and Korea that was uniform in both iconography and formal properties. Traveling between the courts and religious centers of the region, these pilgrim-monks played a powerful role in this proto-cosmopolitanism, promulgating what came to be known as the International Buddhist Art Style.    

Buddhist Pilgrim-Monks as Agents of Cultural and Artistic Transmission: The International Buddhist Art Style in East Asia, ca. 645-770 investigates the formation and circulation of an East Asian International Buddhist Art Style by focusing on the role played by Buddhist missionaries and pilgrim-monks as agents of cultural and artistic transmissions.

So, over to Dorothy...

Back from the summer!

Asian Books Blog has now reopened after the summer break.  Here's to the next season of reading...

Summer break: happy reading!

Asian Books Blog is taking a summer break. We'll be back on Friday, September 14.  In the meantime: happy summer reading!

In Celebration of Books: The Singapore Literature Prize 2018

Nominee Books on Display

The Singapore Literature Prize, which carries a cash award of S$10,000 for each winner in each language category (Chinese, English, Tamil, Malay), held tonight at the NTUC Center, 1 Marina Boulevard, is in its 12th rendition (a biennial award), celebrating the best in Singapore poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction. Organised by the Singapore Book Council (formerly National Book Development Council), it's certainly had its share of controversy (no rehashing here, you can read about it on Wikipedia).  The evening kicks off with video footage of Suchen Christine Lim (who needs no introduction really) exhorting the winners not to let winning halt them in their tracks: the sort of a "okay, what now?" moment that freezes a writer after a big win.