Year of the Dragon 2012

This year's Chinese New Year has passed me by without my even being aware of it - how did it happen?  Last year, I did eight posts on books with a Chinese theme leading up to the auspicious occasion but this year, I am oblivious to this annual spring festival celebrated by Chinese people all over the world.  No matter, I am still on time as today is the third day of the Chinese New Year and the celebrations are still underway.  Thus, I deem it not too late to introduce a couple of books from my bookshelf which carry a Chinese theme and which will now occupy my time for the rest of the month of January.  I thought it apt to choose a fiction (first book) and a non-fiction (second book).  Gong Xi Fa Cai.

1)  Midnight at the Dragon Cafe by Judy Fong Bates

Paperback blurb:  This is Judy Fong Bates's eagerly awaited debut novel.  Set in a small Ontario town in the 1960s, Midnight at the Dragon Cafe (2003) is the story of a young girl whose life is changed over the course of one summer when she learns the burden of secrets and, ultimately, the grace of forgiveness.

Su-Jen and her parents settle uneasily into their new life in a town where they are the only Chinese family, isolated by language and long hours at the diner they own.  Things change when Lee-Kung, Su-Jen's half-brother, arrives.  He works in the kitchen and smoulders under the responsibilities he must carry as the dutiful son, forming an alliance with his mother, a beautiful, a bitter step-mother.  Su-Jen's father, one of the lo wa kew, the "old timers" generation, works continually for a better future and strives to save face at all costs.

In simple, intimate prose, Judy Fong Bates vividly captures a time and place and the complexity of a childhood divided by two cultures and touched by unspoken secrets and unfulfilled longings.

Midnight at the Dragon Cafe is an original, haunting novel that reveals universal truths about loss and discovery.

About the author:  Judy Fong Bates came to Canada as a young girl and grew up in several small Ontario towns.  She is the author of the short-story collection China Dog:  And Other Tales from a Chinese Laundry (1997) and The Year of Finding Memory (2010).  She lives in Toronto.

Videos on Midnight at the Dragon Cafe and Judy Fong Bates at the Toronto Reference Library in 2011:









2)  The Corpse Walker:  Real-Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up by Liao Yiwu

Paperback blurb:  The Corpse Walker (2008) introduces us to regular men and women at the bottom of Chinese society, most of whom have been battered by life but have managed to retain their dignity:  a professional mourner, a human trafficker, a public toilet manager, a leper, a grave robber, and a Falun Gong practitioner, among others.

By asking challenging questions with respect and empathy, Liao Yiwu managed to get his subjects to talk openly and sometimes hilariously about their lives, desires, and vulnerabilities, creating a book that is an instance par excellence of what was once upon a time called "the New Journalism."

The Corpse Walker reveals a fascinating aspect of modern China, describing the lives of normal Chinese citizens in ways that constantly provoke and surprise.  It is translated from the Chinese with an introduction by Wen Huang.

About the author:  Liao Yiwu is a poet, novelist, and screenwriter.  In 1989, he published an epic poem, "Massacre," that condemned the killings in Tiananmen Square and for which he spent four years in prison.  His works include Testimonials and Report on China's Victims of Injustice.  In 2003, he received a Human Rights Watch Hellman-Hammett Grant, and in 2007, he received a Freedom to Write Award from the Independent Chinese PEN Center (authorities prevented him from attending the award ceremony in Beijing).  In 2011, he was awarded the German Geschwister-Scholl-Preis and now lives in Germany.

Video - An Evening with Liao Yiwu at the PEN American Center, New York City: