Category / Global Reading Challenge

by Sharlene

Please Look After Mom

“Before you lost sight of your wife on the Seoul Station subway platform, she was merely your children’s mother to you. She was like a steadfast tree, until you found yourself in a situation where you might not ever see her again – a tree that wouldn’t go away unless it was chopped down or pulled out. After your children’s mother went missing, you realized that it was your wife who was missing. Your wife, whom you’d forgotten about for fifty years, was present in your heart. Only after she disappeared did she come to you tangibly, as if you could reach out and touch her.”

I’m in a reviewing sort of mood. Perhaps because of the holiday season, my work has slowed and I find myself with time on my hands for a change. That is, when wee reader is napping and the chores are somewhat done (chores are never really ever done, are they?). And I’m reading but I’m sometimes also thinking about the books I’ve just finished. Like this one.

Please Look After Mom is one book that had stuck in my head. Maybe it’s because I’ve read very few books set in Korea, much less by a Korean author. Maybe it’s because of the very disorientating second-person narrative, and the different points of view the author takes on, switching from character to character with each chapter. It really is very jarring, this use of ‘you’. I glanced through a review that mentioned those choose-your-adventure books I loved as a kid. And it is a little like that. You. You. And you. Your mom (mother? – ‘mom seems too American, and rather out of place in this very Korean book). It is very strange and quite hard to get used to.

So Mom (your mom) disappears in Seoul. She and Father are at the subway station, Father steps into the train. The doors close. Mom is still on the platform. Father gets off at the next stop and backtracks but she’s gone.

This much you know from the publicity, the book description, when the story opens with the family is desperate and determined to find Mom. Their idea? Flyers. And that job falls on ‘you’, or Chi-hon, the writer and daughter, for words that are apt, for words that will bring Mom back home.

“Hyong-chol designates you to write up the flyer, since you write for a living. You blush, as if you were caught doing something you shouldn’t. You aren’t sure how helpful your words will be in finding Mom.”

And as Chi-hon goes about her search, she can’t help but think of Mom, remember Mom, wonder what she was doing when Mom disappeared.

The first chapter has a rather instructive, perhaps even chiding tone. One of the sections begins with: “either a mother and daughter know each other very well, or they are strangers”. Another informs that: “Most things in the world are not unexpected if one thinks carefully about them.” And that put me off. I felt like I was in some kind of moral education class. But I wondered if that was a cultural thing. If that was something more Korean, more Asian (ok so I am Asian myself, but a more ‘westernised’ Asian, speaking, reading, writing English far better than my ‘mother tongue’ of Chinese. I have never – and am incapable of – reading literature in Chinese, other than what the texts that I was forced to read in school). So I stuck it out. And things do get a little better.

The next chapter swings us around to Chi-hon’s brother Hyong-chol, who looks for Mom in all his old neighborhoods, after receiving tips about her location. Like his sister, he thinks of Mom, wonders what he had been up to when she went missing.

Then their father. A man who hasn’t seen his wife for who she really is, not for many years, perhaps not ever.

I’ve been wondering if my new-ish status as a mother (nearly nine months now, where did the time go?) – and a stay-at-home one at that – has affected the way I perceive things. And in this book, the way I’ve been reading the children’s perception of their mother. The way she has been taken for granted by her family. So there is all this sadness. Of the consciousness of love only after a loss.

The sentiment is there. The translation is a little wanting and the initial tone off-putting. So I am hesitant to recommend this book.

by Sharlene

Memory of Love

I finished this with just a day to spare.
I’ve learnt my lesson that when reading Overdrive e-books, I have to keep an eye on the number of days left on my loan. Sounds obvious, no? After all, I know when my library books are due and I return them on time. But when I was reading The Beekeeper’s Apprentice on Overdrive, somehow I completely neglected that and was 2/3 through the book when I opened the app and the book disappeared! (I did return to the catalogue and try to borrow it again only to find there were 8 others on the waiting list – where there had been none before!). Argh.

So with Memory of Love, I made sure I finished it in good time. But it was a bit of a struggle at first.

It opens slowly, it opens a little uninterestingly, with an old man, Elias Cole, wasting away in his old age. I’d read about feisty old women anyday, but this guy, he was just dragging me down. The first bits of the book passed in a bit of a blur… perhaps because I was reading this ebook in the wee hours of Singapore time, trying to get over my jetlag. The ceiling fan spun above me, the old airconditioner wheezing away, trying to rid the room of the heat and humidity. And there I was, reading about hot humid Sierra Leone.

But that Elias Cole. He is selfish, he is quite miserable, and very obsessed with his colleague’s wife Saffia. He befriends his colleague Julius just so that he can be close to Saffia. Talk about creepy!

Cole is in the hospital and that is where we get introduced to more characters such as Adrian, a British psychologist, who visits with Cole and learns of his story. And Kai, a surgeon, who is plagued by his past and making plans to leave Sierra Leone.

And somehow everything begins to fall into place. Forna  gradually reveals the connections among these three men. It’s probably not a spoiler to say that it’s their love for one woman. The title already suggests that this is a love story, or rather, love stories. And while I enjoyed reading the book, the truth is that I never quite fell in love with these tales. I liked the character of Kai and found his story interesting, especially his relationship with his nephew. Instead I found the story of Agnes, a patient of Adrian’s who regularly turns up at the mental hospital, more interesting, and wished she were a more central character…

This sounds all quite vague, perhaps because I read this book over 20 days (it’s a 21-day lending period), and in two countries (and two extremely different time zones). And in the end, it was the wandering Agnes whose story I still remember, whereas the others are a bit fuzzy around the edges. But I hope this sorta-review doesn’t stop you from reading this book. I know that many others have loved reading it, and it’s got great credentials as it was shortlisted for the 2011 Orange Prize and won the 2011 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.

Did you have a better opinion of this book than I did? Does reading on vacation make you read better or worse?

by Sharlene

Everything Beautiful Began After

“For those who are lost, there will always be cities that feel like home.

Paces where lonely people can live in exile of their own lives – far from anything that was ever imagined for them.”

I was going to start off by saying that I would pretty much read anything that Simon van Booy writes. And then I stopped and thought, this book is actually only the second book of his that I’ve read (the first being his collection of short stories, Love Begins in Winter – even announcing it to be one of my favourite reads of that year). So does that qualify? Perhaps. This is after all his first novel. And it is a beautiful one indeed.

So I opened this book – or rather opened the app that opened this Net Galley e-book* – with a bias. I hoped, no, expected this to be a wonderful read that I would recommend to everyone. And it is.

I was worried about writing this review-ish post. After reading writing like that, I despair at my own inane-ness (is that such a word? And, see what I mean?). Of course this book is a product of plenty of time slogging away at it, but I like to think that Simon Van Booy is like this in real life too. He gazes out at the shimmering Aegean, sighs, dips his feathered pen into the inkwell and writes rainbows.

For there are many passages that I bookmarked or wrote down, many times when I stopped and sighed, other times when I stopped myself from reading too fast, but there were also moments where I had hit the Home button on the iPad and went and looked at something else. Some moments were a little too much for me. Perhaps I just felt too invested in these characters, especially Henry and his love for Rebecca. They had such a meet-cute moment that the reader can’t help falling for them.

Before I go any further, I probably should talk a bit about the plot. It’s been talked about in the book blogosphere for quite a while already, but in case you haven’t heard about it, Everything Beautiful Began After is the story of George, and of Henry, and of Rebecca, and it is perhaps also a story of Athens and Europe. It is about head-over-heels, heart-bursting, all-consuming love.

On George:

“He looked the sort of man who had read all of Marcel Proust in bed. The sort who wanted to get up early but chronically overslept. And he walked slowly, hunched into a cigarette.”

Here’s Rebecca:

“She would live in exile with her desires. She would live as she imagined them on canvas, like faint patches of starlight: hopeful but so far away; compelling, yet dispossessed of change.”

And Henry:

Ok I hadn’t actually written a good quote about Henry, at least not one that would not result in a spoiler. So how about these lovelies instead:

“Sometimes children not long exiled from that silent world of softness and gesture, can feel in their tiny hearts the nuances of what we say; and though powerless to act, they sense fully those means that creep like figures in a shadow play behind a screen of language.”

“The beauty of artifacts is in how they reassure us we’re not the first to die.

But those who seek only reassurance from life will never be more than tourists – seeing everything and trying to possess what can only be felt. Beauty is the shadow of imperfection.”

“You will love her immediately. She will giggle at bright colors and movement, random things too – like bread falling off the counter. Later, she will run from you naked – refusing to get dressed. She will cry when you drop her off at school, then cry when you pick her up. She will scream for you in the night and not know why.”

Right. A certain someone is chewing on my arm, telling me that computer time is up soon. So while I have your attention – and he is contented with my elbow – please read this book. I must also add that shortly after finishing this one, I read David Nicholls’ One Day, and found quite a few similarities, but it seemed so much more clunky and argh**!

Title: Everything Beautiful Began After (Amazon link; Indiebound link)
Author: Simon Van Booy
Published: 2011
Pages: 416
Source: Netgalley

* a mistake, I realized, as there are some letters and drawings that would come across far better in an actual physical book. I pretty much gave up trying to figure out some of these letters after a while, after a very futile attempt to figure out what those words were. I suppose I missed out on quite a bit! So I’d suggest you go get yourself a physical copy of this one.

 

** SPOILER AHEAD: I mean, did he ever want to give Emma a break? I plodded my way through this book, heartened sometimes by some interesting passages, despising Dexter most of the time, being irritated at Ian, just feeling sorry for Emma – and then somewhat happy? I don’t know… I wasn’t sure if I was happy although it was inevitable that they got together. And then THAT happens, that throw-the-book-across-the-room moment, when she finally seemed to be somewhat happy? Ok rant over, wee reader is very fidgety.

by Sharlene

bios ‘life’ + -graphia ‘writing’

I’ve been thinking about the last two books I finished. Usually I would hardly consider a fiction and a non-fiction book together but they had something in common – aside from being featured in Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust To Go that is. The fiction: Peter Cameron’s The City of Your Final Destination and the non-fiction: Georgina Howell’s Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations.

The City of Your Final Destination is set in Uruguay, although it won’t satisfy the armchair traveler as it is mostly takes place within a big house in Uruguay

“Here I am in Uruguay, but I could be anywhere. I could be in Kansas. Although the air smelled different: there was some sort of warm, dusty scent that seemed vaguely exotic.”

That’s Omar thinking out loud. He’s a scholar trying to get authorisation to write a biography about the writer Jules Gund. Omar’s kind of a strange one, or at least his girlfriend Deirdre makes him out to be a strange one. He doesn’t seem to really push himself to do things, instead she does the pushing – she tells him to go to Uruguay to get the authorisation. And he does.

The story didn’t quite jell with me for a while, until Omar meets Caroline, Jules’ wife (who lives in the same estate as Jules’ mistress and brother – yeah it is complicated):

“She turned away from the window. ‘Of who I would seem to be if a biography were written of Jules. If, let us say, you were to write a biography of Jules. Who would I be? A mad Frenchwoman, who had been married to Jules Gund, painting in an attic.'”

And then I realised what this book was about. This biography of a man who is no longer alive would change them all, perhaps especially Omar:

“Suddenly it seemed exhausting, impossible: How do you write a biography? he wondered, when there is so much, when there is everything, an infinity, to know. It seemed impossible. It was like compiling a telephone book from scratch.”

And that then is my reason for connecting this review with that of Gertrude Bell’s biography. For indeed, how do you begin a biography? Especially with a woman who has lived such a life? A woman who once used to be more famous than T.E. Lawrence (who was a good friend actually), who travelled the Middle East, at a time when women rode side saddle (she had an apron sort of garment made to cover her pants), who climbed mountains (taking off her skirt to do so!), who was daring and brave and adventurous – at a time when women tended to keep to the home.

“Constrained and compartmentalised at home, in the East Gertrude became her own person.”

Howell does a great job piecing together her life, from letters, from other accounts of her, from the many works Bell wrote, essentially to figure out:

“By what evolution did a female descendent of Cumbrian sheep farmers become, in her time, the most influential figure in the Middle East?”

A gung-ho spirit, a fierce determination, wit and charm helps. As does knowing the right people! If you’re in the mood for a biography, may I suggest this one. Gertrude Bell, she astounds me.

Alright, to finish off this post, here’s a little music to think of biographies by (or to listen to with your favourite biography?). Richard Julian‘s A Short Biography

by Sharlene

Wanting

“‘She is exasperation,’ said Lady Jane.
‘It is beyond explanation,’ replied Sir John.”

“A small girl ran fit to burst through wallaby grass almost as high as her. How she loved the sensation of the soft threads of fine grass feathering beads of water onto her calves, and the feel of the earth beneath her bare feet, wet and mushy in winter, dry and dusty. She was seven years old, the earth was still new and extraordinary in its delights, the earth still ran up through her feet to her head into the sun, and it was as possible to be exhilarated by running as it was to be terrified by the reason she had to run and not stop running.”

Is it too obvious to say that Richard Flanagan is a writer? I mean, he can write. As in, write words, sentences, paragraphs, pages, that I want to reread. Are all his books like that? Or did I happen to chance on a good one? Because Wanting is a pretty damn good one. It has its feet in real life, in history, in Lady Jane and Sir John Franklin, polar explorer and governor of Van Diemen’s Land (aka Tasmania), in Mathinna, the aboriginal girl they adopt and attempt to raise as a sort of experiment, in Charles Dickens and his friend Wilkie Collins (they were friends? See one can learn from novels too).

Here’s the end of chapter one:

“It was 1839. The first photograph of a man was taken, Abd al-Qadir declared a jihad against the French, and Charles Dickens was rising to greater fame with a novel called Oliver Twist. It was, through the Protector, as he closed the ledger after another post mortem report and returned to preparing notes for his pneumatics lecture, inexplicable.”

And the end of chapter two:

“It was 1851. London’s Great Exhibition celebrated the triumph of reason in a glass pavilion mocked by the writer Douglas Jerrold as a crystal palace; a novel about finding a fabled white whale was published in New York to failure; while in the iron-grey port of Stomness, Orkney, Lady Jane Franklin farewelled into whiteness the second of what were to be numerous failed expeditions in search of a fable that had once been her husband.”

You know how celebrity appearances on talk shows can sometimes change your mind about them (or maybe you don’t care, I dunno, but it does sometimes for me. Like I never really minded Cameron Diaz or Lea Michele till I saw them on UK’s Top Gear and Conan O’Brien respectively, and then decidedly didn’t like them at all)? Well, in this case, I want to know more about Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens – and read more of their work (I have to admit that I have yet to finish anything by Collins. Then again, the only one I’ve attempted is The Moonstone, and I think I was attempting to read it on my iPod Touch. I know you guys would probably recommend The Woman in White, and hopefully I’ll get to it soon!). But back to my point. I want to read more from the guy who is described as such:

“Wilkie Collins had a very large head that teetered on a particularly small body, and the oddity of his looks was accentuated by a bulging left temple and a depressed right temple, so that viewed from one side he seemed a rather different man than viewed from the other.”

Heh. I quite like that one. But I think this is one of my favourite passages (and I’m going to leave you with a few more, which I copied out and typed out and pretty much exhausted my 20 minutes’ worth of baby napping time this morning, I reckon):

“We have in our lives only a few moments. A moment of joy or wonder with another. Some might say beauty or transcendence. Some might say all those things. Then you reach an age… and you realise that moment, or, if you are very lucky, a handful of those moments, was your life. That those moments are all, and that they are everything. And yet we persist in thinking that such moments will only have worth if we can make them go on forever. We should live for moments, yet we are so fraught in pursuing everything else, with the future, with the anchors that pull us down, so busy that we sometimes don’t even see the moments for what they are. We leave a sick child in order to make a speech.”

“In his final agony, Sir John’s thoughts were only of catching birds with a small dark girl who still laughed at him, and his head momentarily filled with the improbable smell of a world that he now recalled as Eden after rain.”

“She traveled the world now, her vengeance on her husband’s obstinacy applauded as noble grief, her part as loyal widow having emancipated her from mean and allowing her freedoms few other women could imagine. Her life, as a studied melancholy, she savored. To admit to happiness would have been inappropriate, but as her cursing driver sought a way around, she believed herself to be fulfilled.”

Title: Wanting
Author: Richard Flanagan (Author’s website)
Published in: 2008
Bibliography (taken from Wikipedia):
Non-Fiction

(1985) A terrible beauty: history of the Gordon River country
(1990) The Rest of the world is watching – Tasmania and the Greens
(1991) Codename Iago: the story of John Friedrich
(1991) Parish-Fed Bastards. A History of the Politics of the Unemployed in Britain, 1884-1939

Novels

Death of a River Guide (1994)
The Sound of One Hand Clapping (1997)
Gould’s Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish (2001)
The Unknown Terrorist (2006)
Wanting (2008)

by Sharlene

Reading for a change

I give up.

Today, after being spat up on several times, shat on (just that once – a first for me though, with the poop splurting out the side of the diaper. It was that massive a poop), having to clean my thighs, the chair, the floor, the changing table (not all of it was poop though, just my legs… luckily enough), and pacifiying a cranky little fella, I decided that enough was enough. I didn’t want to do any more reading for work (I’m still putting in hours for my former boss in Singapore), as academic research, while occasionally interesting, is never fun, and is usually quite intense, especially when I have to squeeze in as much reading (and comprehending) during his quiet times/naps (and he never naps more than 20-30 minutes at a go). I managed about two sessions of that today. Some reading, some writing, some comprehension, some confusion.

So I give up.

For today that is.

So I am off to go read, for a change. I am longing, desiring, wanting to finish reading Richard Flanagan’s Wanting, because it is beautiful, it is charming and funny in a quiet sort of way, it is full of passages that I’ve copied down, that I’ve reread, wanting to savour, wanting it to linger, the way a good wine does. It is a Wednesday afternoon and not exactly the right time for a glass of wine (especially my first glass of wine since… July 2010?), but I hope to sip some this weekend (no, no occasion whatsoever, just a longing I guess*).

Hopefully I will get to write about Wanting, because I think you ought to read this. It’s made me wonder why I’ve only now read anything by Flanagan. Since I don’t have any wine to sip right now, I think I will pair it with some dark dark chocolate… from Trader Joe’s**!

* Longing, wanting - this post is full of that isn't it?
** Yeah I never expected that Trader Joe's would have such 
good chocolate...
it's their Pound Plus bar - 72%, if you're interested.
by Sharlene

Cutting for Stone

I wasn’t expecting such a medical book. But I guess I should’ve, since Verghese is Professor for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at Stanford University Medical School and Senior Associate Chair of the Department of Internal Medicine (according to Wikipedia). He also has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, in case those kinds of qualifications matter to you. And having landed on his Wikipedia page, I realised how autobiographical a book this is. For Verghese was born and brought up in Ethiopia, and his medical training there was interrupted by a military coup, resulting in his – and his family’s – move to the United States.

Cutting for Stone’s main character Marion Stone has a similar background, but he also has a twin named Shiva. And they were born to Sister Mary Joseph Praise (yup, she’s a nun), who dies of complications of her pregnancy (a rather well hidden pregnancy at that). The twins are brought up by Hema and Ghosh, both doctors at Mission Hospital (which everyone knows as ‘Missing’), where Sister Mary worked.

Hema is one tough cookie. I loved her feistiness and how she grabs life by the balls (in one case, literally). How I wished there were more of a focus on her! But this unfortunately isn’t her story, it is Marion’s – and sort of Shiva’s, since the two cannot be completely separated – as he grows up in Ethiopia, goes to medical school, becomes a doctor, and ends up in America. Cutting For Stone is also very much a story of Ethiopia. I cannot imagine a more interesting setting for this tale. The food, the lifestyle, the culture, the political backdrop. That is what made the book for me.

The story worked fine (although perhaps it had too much medical knowledge invested in it – Verghese’s passion for his field is rather obvious!), until we approach the ending, which seemed too inevitable, too thought out. For me, the best part of the novel was in its earlier stages, when Marion was growing up in Ethiopia, where we are getting to know all the other characters, and not just the twins. In the end, I wasn’t as swept away by this story as I expected to be. That’s the thing about bookish expectations, isn’t it?

Title:Cutting for Stone

Author: Abraham Verghese (author’s website)
Year: 2009
Acquired from: The Library

Verghese’s other works (both non-fiction):
My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story
The Tennis Partner

by Sharlene

Eucalyptus

I opened the ‘Add New Post’ link on WordPress.com and realised that I couldn’t remember what was the last book I finished reading. I had to go check my Read list on Google Docs – aha! Eucalyptus by Murray Bail. I hope this memory lapse doesn’t reflect too badly on this book, because Eucalyptus is quite beautifully written. It is quite an unusual book – an ode to the eucalyptus tree of sorts. Holland has grown every type of eucalyptus tree on his property, and has set a challenge in order for suitors to win the hand of his beautiful bespeckled daughter Ellen – they have to name every tree he owns. Of course all of them fail, but along comes a serious contender, Mr Cave, a eucalyptus expert himself. To him, it’s not about the prize at the end but about the challenge. He gets closer and closer as each day passes, and as each tree is named, Ellen grows despondent – that is, until she meets the mysterious stranger who wanders her father’s land and tells her these seemingly random, but rather enchanting stories. So on the one hand, you have Mr Cave naming all the trees, and on the other, the stranger charming Ellen with his stories. They’re kind of waltzing away in two different directions, in the shade of the eucalyptus trees.

I never realised that there are so many different types of eucalypti (didn’t realise that that was the plural form either!). This book is kind of like a love song to this species of tree.

Eucalyptus deserves a good solid read though, and I sadly wasn’t able to provide it with that at this point of time. It definitely deserves a second go, perhaps some years down the road, a comfy chair, a glass of wine and a view of the Margaret River in Western Australia. Under the shade of a eucalyptus tree of course.

by Sharlene

Monkey Hunting

You know how I had mentioned in my post on Wayson Choy’s Jade Peony that I am apprehensive about reading Chinese immigrant stories? So why was it that immediately after reading Jade Peony, I picked up Cristina Garcia’s Monkey Hunting? I’m not sure myself. But from Vancouver’s Chinatown, I found myself in Cuba, following Chen Pan who in 1857 travels from China to be enslaved (unsuspectingly so) on a sugarcane plantation. He somehow makes it out of the plantation, becomes his own boss (he sells secondhand goods) and buys a mulatto woman out of slavery.

Of course, immigrant stories are never told just by that one generation alone, so Garcia throws us over to New York in 1968 where we meet Domingo, Chen Pan’s great-grandson, and also to Shanghai in the 1920s where Chen Fang, Chen Pan’s granddaughter beats the odds and finds work as an educator. These sudden shifts in location, time and character can be a bit jarring, especially when I was more interested in the goings-on in Cuba (I never thought I’d read a story about Chinese immigrants in Cuba, for one thing) and the way these other sections felt more like anecdotes and left many questions, and just felt somewhat incomplete. Perhaps a more sweeping story, allowing for a greater focus on the lives on Chen Pan’s descendants would have been better?

Today, writing this, a week after reading this book (and having gone on to several others since), Chen Pan’s story still sticks in my mind but those of his descendants, not so much. Garcia’s book offers up a unique setting for the immigrant story, and a rather engaging start, but in the end, it was a little forgettable and a bit confusing.

 

I read this book for the Global Reading Challenge

by Sharlene

The Jade Peony

This book took a while to get going. Perhaps it was because I started off with a little wariness – I’m not all that fond of reading Chinese immigrant stories, partly because they’ve always seemed…  perhaps a little too similar to each other. Perhaps because they also hit close to home, but in a different sort of way (my great grandparents moved from China to Singapore – essentially moving from one Chinese-dominated country to another). It’s hard to explain, but it’s always made me hesitant.

Wayson Choy’s The Jade Peony is set in Vancouver’s Chinatown in the 1930s and 40s and opens with a story of  Jook-Liang, the ‘useless girl’ who dreams of being Shirley Temple and befriends old Wong Suk (Monkey). This story tripped me up a little, it was kind of sweet but I don’t think I was in the right frame of mind to read it (still wary, still hesitant – the grumpy grandmother stuck in her old ways especially called for a big fat ‘aiyah‘*). I have to admit that I almost put this book away at this point. But I’m glad I stuck with it, as in the end, the book was quite worthwhile.

The second section was second brother Jung-Sum’s story. He was adopted by the family at age four and struggles with his new life and the spectres of his past. The third story is told through the eyes of Sekky, the youngest, during the Second World War and the tensions between the Japanese and Chinese immigrants in Vancouver. This third story has the most action – the other parts seem more like reminiscences, rather episodic. But despite the lack of action, the reader feels drawn into the lives of these three children, perhaps on the strength of their characters. However, the three stories seem quite separate from each other, and the three main characters seldom feature in each others’ stories, which is quite curious.

* Which can be translated into somewhat of a sigh or an ‘argh’.


Title: The Jade Peony
Author: Wayson Choy
Year: 1995
Acquired from: The Library

Wayson Choy’s works
Novels

* The Jade Peony — 1995
* All That Matters — 2004

Memoirs

* Paper Shadows: A Chinatown Childhood — 1999
* Not Yet: A Memoir of Living and Almost Dying — 2009

 

I read this book for the Global Reading Challenge