Book Box: Heartfelt tales of Hong Kong
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In this week’s Book Box, The Straits Times looks at four books about Hong Kong. Buy the books at Amazon. These articles include affiliate links. When you buy through them, we may earn a small commission.
Book review: Sex dolls and a surreal, shadowy Hong Kong in Dorothy Tse’s Owlish
Owlish By Dorothy Tse, translated by Natascha Bruce.
PHOTOS: ASIA LITERARY AGENCY, FITZCARRALDO EDITIONS
A map is projected onto a screen. It appears at first to depict a city. Yet, beneath the lines of this map are other duplicate lines; concealed beneath the city is a cluster of ghostly cities.
It is in this shadow zone that Hong Kong writer Dorothy Tse’s dark fable Owlish unfolds.
‘We are a floating island’: 102 Hong Kong poets, across continents, write the city’s new chapter in Where Else
Hong Kong-born, Singapore-based Laura Jane Lee is one of the contributors to Where Else: An International Hong Kong Poetry Anthology.
PHOTOS: COURTESY OF VERVE POETRY PRESS, COURTESY OF LAURA JANE LEE.
Before poet Laura Jane Lee, 25, left her native Hong Kong for Singapore in 2021, she knew of nowhere else to call home.
Lee, a newly-minted Singapore permanent resident, now finds herself in-between places. Her new poem, Rock, references a natural landform in Hong Kong said to resemble a woman awaiting the return of her dead husband.
“To some extent, I identify with the husband, never to return. But in other ways, I identify with the waiting,” says the English literature and linguistics undergraduate at the Nanyang Technological University.
Lee’s shifting sense of home is perhaps emblematic of the more than 200,000 Hong Kong residents who left the city amidst the pandemic in the wake of its largest pro-democracy protests in 2019 and Beijing’s subsequent introduction of a sweeping National Security Law.
Book review: Kit Fan’s The Ink Cloud Reader is poetry that lends lyrical heft to violence
The Ink Cloud Reader By Kit Fan.
PHOTOS: COURTESY OF CARCANET
“What I need now, to change / the half-course of my life,” writes the poet Kit Fan, “is to be struck by lightning / and survive it, like Hokusai.”
Like the celebrated artist of the Edo period, who is said to have adopted 30 pseudonyms and moved houses 93 times over his life, the Hong Kong-born and Britain-based author of The Ink Cloud Reader is also a consummate shapeshifter.
Book review: All I Ever Wanted falls short of the in-law reconciliation fantasy it wants to be
All I Ever Wanted is the debut novel of Chinese-Canadian author Jane Lo.
PHOTOS: COURTESY OF JANE LO
Hong Kong-Canadian writer Jane Lo’s debut novel derives its plot from a situation familiar to many Asian newlyweds: the tension between a mother and daughter-in-law.
Set in Hong Kong, the story follows new parents Norah and Ben struggling to raise their newborn Joey on a tight budget, while dealing with Ben’s icy mother, Ma – who lives with them – and Norah’s disapproving, erudite parents from Vancouver.
The Straits Times’ Weekly Bestsellers June 24
Days At The Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF HARPER PERENNIAL
This week’s best-selling fiction novel is Days At The Morisaki Bookshop, a Japanese translated novel with a 2010 movie of a similar name.
