Tsundoku #11 - July 2020

If you're out of lockdown lucky you - you can go to the park and read. If you're still in lockdown then you can stay in and read. It's all reading...and so this July here's some choices. Admittedly publishers are still defering lots of titles to later in the year in the hope of more bookshops getting back in business and the return of browsers, but still...

Debasmita Dasgupta: It’s Time to Tell the Truth to our Children

Debasmita Dasgupta is a Singapore-based, Kirkus Best Prize nominated illustrator and graphic novelist. She enjoys illustrating fiction, non-fiction, and poetic works for children and young adults. Debasmita is also passionate about art-for-change, and has created an online movement called My Father Illustrations to promote child rights for girls and better father-daughter relationships.

Debasmita’s debut independent graphic novel, Nadya, came out this year. Nadya deals with the subject of divorce from the point of view of a 13-year old adolescent girl living in the mountains. It has just been nominated for the Neev Book Award for distinguished children’s literature.

Despite the fact that divorce becoming quite a common phenomenon in many families in Asia / India, often it is still considered to be a taboo subject. Debasita hopes that her graphic novel will encourage open conversation about difficult family topics. Below, she reflects on the process of writing Nadya and her personal encounters with families going through divorce.

Nicky Harman on The Book of Shanghai: some exciting writing talent and excellent translators

As a follow-up to Rosie Milne's post on THE BOOK OF SHANGHAI, I have been thinking about what makes a good introduction to contemporary Chinese literature, and what can persuade new readers to dip a toe in unknown waters. Logically, short stories should be a good way in, because length-wise, they don’t require too much commitment. But I am someone who loves to immerse myself in a full-length novel, so I approached The Book of Shanghai with, let’s say, an open mind.

Historically, Shanghai has had a powerful grip on the western imagination. Of course, it was always much more than the exotic den of iniquity it was portrayed as. As Jin Li, one of the editors, writes in his excellent introduction, ‘The influences of a recently industrialized West mingled, interacted and cross-pollinated with the traditions of a culture that had developed over many centuries. As a contact point between East and West, with its unique location, Shanghai paved the way, acting as a testing site where various ideological and cultural ideas were welcomed, accommodated and re-imagined.’

But that was then, and now is now. In The Book of Shanghai, the picture emerges of a thoroughly modern city. These stories scarcely even hint at Shanghai’s exotic or insalubrious past. Instead, they describe the human condition as it is today. Not that all the stories are realistic. Some are quite fantastical and have beguilingly strange protagonists. But all of them are rooted in the present... or the future.

Shreya Sen-Handley Talks the Strange and Unexpected in her Short Stories with Elaine Chiew

Credit Stephen Handley

Bio: Former television journalist and producer Shreya Sen-Handley is the author of two books with HarperCollins, the recently published short story collection Strange and the award-winning Memoirs of My Body. She is also a columnist for the international media, writing for the National Geographic, CNN and The Guardian amongst others, a creative writing teacher, illustrator, and a librettist for the Welsh National Opera. She is currently writing her third book for HarperCollins, The Accidental Tourist, a travelogue, alongside her monthly column for top Indian newspapers, the Asian Age and Deccan Chronicle. The opera she has co-written, ‘Migrations’, will tour the UK in 2021. 

EC: Welcome to Asian Books Blog, Shreya. Congratulations on your short story collection, Strange (HarperCollins India, 2019). How long was it in the making, and tell us what your short story collection is about. 

SSH: Thank you Elaine. “What’s your next book?” asked my editors at HarperCollins the minute my first book ‘Memoirs of My Body’ was published in 2017. I said I was considering writing more short stories. I had written a handful in the 3 years my first book, Memoirs of My Body, had been brewing and each had gone on to be published, broadcast or shortlisted in competitions in Australia, UK and India, and thought readers might want a few more. I certainly enjoyed writing them and was eager to write more. My editors loved the idea, and noticed something I hadn’t really consciously wrought- an unexpected turn to most of my stories, and so this collection of ‘profoundly unsettling and unusual’ short stories was conceived. There were in the end, appropriately, 13 stories in all, and they covered a variety of genres – romance, comedy, science fiction, dystopia, horror, supernatural, crime, etc. There was no attempt to write on the same subject every time, or restrict myself to a genre. Instead the idea was to focus on the unexpected in every aspect of our everyday lives, and uncover, as a result, the strangeness that lies beneath the seemingly ordinary. 

Courtesy HarpeCollins India

Bookworm

Countries across the globe are currently enforcing various types of social restrictions to help reduce the infection rate of Covid-19. Under these bizarre circumstances, it is easy to feel distant and isolated from friends and family. Perhaps more than ever before, this is a time when it is important to celebrate community.

With this in mind, Asian Books Blog has decided to launch a new series entitled Bookworm. We will be interviewing different members of the Asian-books-loving community to delve deeply into their relationships with Asian literature. We hope that hearing from our Bookworms will help strengthen the sense of shared passion amongst our readers and will also provide inspiration for taking on new literary challenges. We aim to interview a diverse group of people, spanning all different sorts of identities, and living all over the world.

Shelley Herman works on data analysis in the defence industry, and currently lives on the Eastern Coast of the US, in New Jersey. She is our very first Bookworm!

Canadian Chinese Author Alice Poon Brings Tales of Courtesans Alive: Bookish Chat with Elaine Chiew

Courtesy of the Author

Bio:

Born and raised in Hong Kong, Alice Poon steeped herself in Chinese poetry and history, Jin Yong’s martial arts novels and English Literature in her school days. This early immersion has inspired her creative writing. 

Always fascinated with iconic but unsung women in Chinese history and legends, she cherishes a dream of bringing them to the page.

She is the author of The Green Phoenix and the bestselling and award-winning non-fiction title Land and the Ruling Class in Hong Kong. She now lives in Vancouver, Canada and devotes her time to writing historical Chinese fiction.

Synopsis:

From the author of The Green Phoenix comes a riveting tale of female friendship, honor, and sacrifice for love, set in 17th Century China and featuring the intertwined stories of three of the era’s most renowned courtesans – Liu Rushi, Chen Yuanyuan and Li Xiangjun. Inspired by literary works and folklore, Tales of Ming Courtesans traces the destinies of the three girls from the seamy world of human trafficking and slavery to the cultured scene of the famously decadent pleasure district of the city of Nanjing, evoking episodes in Memoirs of a Geisha.

In 1664, Jingjing is reading her mother Rushi's memoir. A wretched adolescence barely behind her, Rushi buys her way out of bondage but, being a courtesan, loses her true love to the tyranny of conventions. Social scorn never leaves her alone. The memoir inspires Jingjing to uncover the fates of Rushi's two sworn sisters, also courtesans. Yuanyuan is first trapped in brutal slavery and then forced to let go of her lover and enter an unhappy union with a brutish general. Xiangjun incurs corrupt courtiers' wrath when she warns her lover of their trap laid for him. Thrown into each other’s company, the three women forge a strong bond that becomes their lifeline. When the outbreak of war plunges them into deeper woes, they mull over a daring idea. In piecing the three sisters' stories together, Jingjing slowly unravels the secret of who she really is.

Betrayal, tenacity and hope all come together in a novel that brings to life an important era in China’s history, and particularly highlights the challenges faced by independent-minded women.

Tsundoku #10 - June 2020

A world cautiously restarting in many ways - bookshops adapting and reopening, online sales booming as people still read. We do hope so. Time to build that summer tsundoku now...this month the non-fiction seems to be outweighing the fiction in terms of new Asia-themed books, but we'll start with a couple of novels...