Asia Literary Review No.32, Winter 2016 Sampler

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The Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea) runs a wide range of programs to help Korean literature reach more readers across the globe.

We provide grants to translators and publishers, support international literary exchanges and provide training programs for literary translators. Our doors are wide open to everyone interested in Korean literature.

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DŽƌĞ ŝŶĨŽƌŵĂƟŽŶ ĂǀĂŝůĂďůĞ Ăƚ ůƟŬŽƌĞĂ͘ŽƌŐ ; ŶŐůŝƐŚͿ͕ ůƟŬŽƌĞĂ͘Žƌ͘Ŭƌ ;<ŽƌĞĂŶͿ Yeongdong-daero 112-gil 32(Samseong-dong), Gangnam-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea (06083) Tel: +82-2-6919-7714 / Fax: +82-2-3448-4247

No. 32, Winter 2016

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No. 32, Winter 2016

Publisher Greater Talent Limited Managing Editor Phillip Kim Editor in Chief Martin Alexander Senior Editors Kavita A. Jindal, Michael Vatikiotis, Zheng Danyi Special Acknowledgement Ilyas Khan, co-founder of the Asia Literary Review Production Alan Sargent Front cover image with kind permission of Maganbhai ‘Masterji’ Patel, whose 2016 exhibition in Coventry is curated by Photo Miners and supported by Coventry 2021 Back cover image ‘Masterji’ Patel at Master’s Art Studio, 2016, with kind permission of Ravindra Patel The Asia Literary Review is published by Greater Talent Limited 2504 Universal Trade Centre, 3 Arbuthnot Road, Central, Hong Kong asialiteraryreview.com Managing.Editor@AsiaLiteraryReview.Com Editor@AsiaLiteraryReview.Com Submissions@AsiaLiteraryReview.Com Subscriptions and Advertising: Admin@AsiaLiteraryReview.Com Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro Printed by Charlesworth Press ISBN: 978-988-14782-7-6 (print) ISBN: 978-988-14782-8-3 (e-book) ISSN: 1999-8511 ‘A World History of Second Sons’ and ‘Death of Hong’ were provided to the ALR through the generous support of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, ltikorea.org ‘Stitches’, ‘Next of Kin’ and ‘In Water My Dreams’ are published with kind permission of AfterParty Press. The anthology Afterness was published in 2016 with the support of City University of Hong Kong as a legacy project of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing programme at the Department of English, facebook.com/AfternessAnthology Individual contents © 2016 the contributors/Greater Talent Limited This compilation © 2016 Greater Talent Limited

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Contents Editorial

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Fiction Esmeralda

8

John Thieme

from A World History of Second Sons

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Lee Kiho translated by Jae Won Edward Chung

The Memsahib and the Panther: Being a Humble Beaterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Notes on a Shikar

61

Deepa Anappara

The Last Men

88

O Thiam Chin

Death of Hong

129

Cho Haejin translated by Yoonna Cho

Notes from the Ward

160

Shagufta Sharmeen Tania

Early June

180

Flora Qian

In Water My Dreams

195

Kamana Srikanth

Photo Essay Masterji

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Maganbhai Patel introduction by Ben Kyneswood

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Non-fiction Interview: Madeleine Thien

32

Asia Literary Review

Next of Kin

77

Sarah Vallance

Arrival: Notes from a Migrant Goan

151

Jessica Faleiro

Stitches: Excerpt from a Memoir

172

Ember Swift

Poetry Radio Rokujo Jesus in the Jing

27 29 31

Judith Huang

Koan In This Deserted Part of Your Heart Mandala

58 59 60

Chiang Yomei

Tempo Rubato Luminoso Con Moto or: Notes from The Field Guide of Post-Lapsarian Instruction

84

Lisa Russ Spaar and Ravi Shankar

All Tomorrowâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Ancestors

86

Alvin Pang and Ravi Shankar

The Path Between Parakeet

125 127

Kavita A. Jindal

Whitechapel Dreaming Bethnal Green . . .

148 149

Amlanjyoti Goswami

Southall Blues

158

Reshma Ruia

Lata Sings a Love Song

170

Anuradha Gupta

Contributors

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Editorial Edit orial

Edit orial

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his issue’s theme is ‘Diaspora and Migration’. We at the Asia Literary Review chose it before immigration became one of the most explosive socio-political topics of the year. We set out simply to explore how the combining of cultures and ethnicities can shape or rattle personal identities, and to consider how the mingling of East and West have led to captivating and often disconcerting story lines. However, Brexit, Trump and heartwrenching pictures of displaced refugees have raised the volume of debate about human migration to a fever pitch that reverberates from Tibet to Tijuana. Empathy has clashed against self-interest, idealism against subconscious bias, tradition against modernity. As much as we at the ALR and many others in the international writing community believe that human commonality can prevail over division, the world is clearly in no kumbaya mood of racial harmony.

Faced in the past with similar challenges, humanity has never tended to move backwards – at least, not for long. As much as global migration has led to thorny implications, reversing it (dare the ‘D’ word, ‘deportation’, be uttered?) is both impractical and deplorable. And actually building walls?

Be serious. Periods in history blighted by the segregation of populations have been among the darkest. Looking ahead, races, religions and cultures are destined to continue to commingle as borders remain porous. But how peacefully or confrontationally that trend will progress is an unsettling question that lacks a clear answer.

Much of this issue of the ALR is devoted to examining the impact of migration on individuals’ emotions and psyches. ALR32 employs a broad definition of ‘immigrant’ to include diasporas, refugees and Western expatriates. The last group is too often excluded in the definition of the term. In reality, for Westerners seeking wealth, adventure and social freedoms, the

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Editorial

exploitation of faraway lands and exotic colonies has long been irresistible.

A similar traffic from the West to fast-growing Asian countries over the past few decades represents a relentless migratory force.

A number of the pieces in this issue deal with South Asians in Britain, by far the UK’s largest ethnic minority, constituting almost five per cent of the country’s population. It’s difficult to imagine British society without citizens ethnically linked to the subcontinent. Without them, the stew that is modern Britain would be insipid – porridge rather than rogan josh. South Asian contributions to British society are far too numerous to detail here.

Yet, many South Asians continue to feel shackled by Otherness. The arresting portrait of the young girl on our cover (by ninety-four-year-old Coventrian photographer Maganbhai Patel) perfectly captures an individual bewildered by a world with so many unanswered questions. South Asians in Britain face a similar predicament – that of a people endowed with a rich cultural heritage who nonetheless still strive for identity and acceptance in their chosen home.

This volume also includes accounts of lives transplanted to and from China, bringing to light the complexities of a society that has been precariously juggling change and constraint. The ALR is especially pleased to present an interview with Madeleine Thien, the Canadian author whose acclaim has gone global in 2016 due to her novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing being shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and winning Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Award and Scotiabank Giller Award. Her novel, which weaves intricate portraits of Shanghainese families navigating the upheavals of modern China, is particularly noteworthy given that Madeleine is a writer in the Chinese diaspora with few personal ties to mainland China.

Her work is an admirable testimony to the power of combining committed passion with meticulous research.

Stories of migration and diaspora are compelling because they provide the opportunity for each of us to peer both outwards and in. We are drawn to the inherent adventure of facing new challenges and experiences. As the stories unfold, none of us can help but ask fundamental questions of ourselves – what would I do, how would I cope? We cheer fulfilled hopes and mourn crushed dreams. These stories resonate at our core because there are bits of the Immigrant in every individual. None of us is wholly native

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Editorial

to any one place; we are collected pieces from both here and there. Just because we choose to gather in groups based on perceived commonalities does not negate this universality. As a socially turbulent 2016 draws to a close, we at the ALR hope that people will strive occasionally to look out beyond the prevailing melĂŠe and keep sight of this enduring truth.

Phillip Kim Martin Alexander

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Interview: Madeleine Thien Interview: Madeleine Interview: Thien Madeleine Thien

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his year, Madeleine Thien has been honoured with Canada’s Governor General’s Award and the Scotiabank Giller prize, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

She took time out recently to speak to the ALR about her novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, and about the role of a writer in a changing world.

Madeleine Thien

Photo: Rawi Hage

To paraphrase Luke: ‘No writer is accepted in her own country.’ What does the recognition you’ve received through the Governor General’s Award and the Scotiabank

Giller Prize mean to you and for your work?

To be honest, nothing has quite settled in yet. It’s been a difficult year for me, unrelated to the book (which has brought extraordinary joy), and so I think, emotionally, I haven’t accepted all the honours that have come.

I think, too, because I’ve been writing for twenty years and have never had this kind of response to one of my books, it’s an adjustment. The strange

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Interview: Madeleine Thien

thing is, I still feel exactly like myself, still grappling with another novel in the back of my mind, still wondering how to find the structure and language and world that will allow the new book to come into existence.

You’ve lived most of your life in Canada, but have also spent time in the Netherlands, in Hong Kong and in Singapore; and you’ve travelled widely, notably in China. If you were to move to another country, which do you think might feel comfortably like home or at least intriguing enough to settle in – and write?

I think I would like to live in Hong Kong. The situation is unique, unprecedented and unpredictable. People are facing so many questions – what kind of society do they want, what does it mean for citizens to have fair political representation, how to reach the desired consensus in the current system, what are the obligations of a government to its people, and the people to a government. The transformation of its civic and national politics, its future, has been weighing on my mind.

I would also like to spend time in the north, in the Arctic, another place where change, in this case environmental change, is happening astonishingly quickly.

You’ve talked about the obsession with power and victimhood in North America, and with dignity and shame in Asia: what are your thoughts about these qualities in a shrinking world?

I think there’s a conceptual framework that’s still quite different in North America and Asia, and each place has different codes that describe the world in very particular ways. Power, for instance. Here in North America, there’s a pervasive belief that power and fortune are connected to work ethic, spiritual fortitude, character, etc. This is the rags-to-riches, pull-oneself-upby-the-bootstraps ethos. Powerlessness and poverty become, consciously or subconsciously, equated to spiritual weakness and failure of the individual, as opposed to, for example, systems, histories and policies. In other words, powerlessness is made to seem ahistorical. Before long, politics becomes ahistorical as well.

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Interview: Madeleine Thien

In Asia, fate is still seen as a force in people’s lives. History is cyclical and time is not a straight line. In some ways, history and fate become part the same thing, like a circle being drawn in two directions, enclosing individuals.

You’ve spoken about the ‘deep bonds’ that hold families together but can also tear them apart, and the idea of parents as exemplars – how much more difficult are these factors in families uprooted by immigration?

I think I’ve thought a lot about what it means to be a daughter. Families are a world within a world, almost a planet unto themselves. Immigrant parents sometimes rely heavily on their children (for translation or cultural decoding), and the children learn to protect their parents, and even to speak on their behalf. I think I became adept at moving between worlds, translating all sorts of things, and trying to hear both the spoken and unspoken.

I suspect that every child of immigrants has seen their parents humiliated at least once. It’s something you can never forget.

In my twenties, I lived in a small Frisian village in the Netherlands where the families had a deep sense of rootedness and belonging. It was such a different experience from my own childhood. There are many ways to live.

There’s fragmentation of identity in displacement, and that increases the importance of memory and the stories a family tells itself – often unreliable ones. How much is your narrator in Do Not Say We Have Nothing a reflection of your younger self?

It’s such an interesting question. I had never thought of Marie (Li-ling) as a reflection of my younger self. She has a very particular way of experiencing things, she loves numbers and patterns, she has a prodigious memory (unlike me). I think a lot of Do Not Say is about the act of storytelling and use of fiction, music and different forms of art to hold unofficial history and unofficial memory, terms that have resonance when thinking about China’s relationship with the political events of the twentieth century. I think one of the repeating ideas in my novels has been the use of the imagination, or invention, or art, to hide oneself, to survive, to attempt to live in ways that are not predetermined by history.

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Interview: Madeleine Thien

Do Not Say We Have Nothing is a transliteration from the Chinese and is a first indication of how your book deals with attempts to translate and interpret, to record and preserve, and to resist erasure. The elusive Book of Records is a compelling feature in the novel: copied, hidden, lost and destroyed, it shows the fragility of narrative as well as its power and magic.

Tell us how you came to choose The Book of Records as a vehicle for all this.

The title is a translation of a line of the Chinese version of the Internationale.

The Book of Records is first and foremost a novel that falls into the hands of two of the characters, Wen the Dreamer and Swirl, and is eventually passed from hand to hand. It’s a concrete thing, a story, an escape, a distraction, which takes on a life of its own. The reader and the characters project ideas onto it, and that, I think, is where the resonances come from – how we project into the books we love, how we catch a glimpse of parts of ourselves that were heretofore unknown to us, and what we do with that.

I don’t know if it’s magical; I think all forms of art refract our lives, ideas and societies back to us.

Your stories take on setting and characters in a variety of cultures and national identities – Chinese, Canadian, Cambodian, Lebanese – a blend of insider and Other. How does your background provide you with the facility to forge stories from the outside looking in?

That’s a really difficult question. I think what I write is simply human.

I may carry multiple cultures but they are part of a single fabric. To me, that continuity and overlap, rather than a binary of inside/outside, is closer to the way I experience the world.

When you construct dialogue for local characters, particularly the Chinese ones, how much do you consider the differences in speech patterns and habits between their languages and your English? Are you ever concerned that your characters may not speak ‘authentically’ from a native speaker’s perspective?

I guess my question to your question is: in Canada, who is a ‘local character’? In Do Not Say, Marie’s mother speaks to her in English, and speaks to Ai-ming in Cantonese mixed with Mandarin. She speaks in her

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Interview: Madeleine Thien

own voice. I question the loaded word of authenticity here, and who is being considered the native speaker. And if the ‘local speaker’ being referred to is in China, I think my answer would be that in China, there are ten thousand thousand ways to be, to speak, to joke, to imagine, to love, to exist.

In the current global debate about migration, what do you think the key conversational themes need to be to properly articulate its promises and challenges?

I write fiction, I create worlds and I hope the work is attentive to the way we live now. Novelists spend a long time listening to the world, but they are not policy analysts. We’re invested not in broad generalisations but in details, in people, the jokes they make, what they hold onto for dear life, what they abandon, what they live for. To write specifically – to think about lives other than my own, and to do so for many, many years – is what I do.

You said earlier that ‘there’s a pervasive belief that power and fortune are connected to work ethic, spiritual fortitude, character, etc.’ and ‘powerlessness and poverty become, consciously or subconsciously, equated to spiritual weakness and failure of the individual’ – any thoughts on the shifting of politics to the right and the rise of populist demagoguery?

In the summer, I spent time in Israel and Palestine, and I saw something that I’ve been thinking about ever since. In Palestine, Israelis are under civilian law and Palestinians are under military law. I met Israeli activists who were doing difficult but necessary work in Palestine, and doing so by making use of the additional rights they were guaranteed – rights which their counterparts, Palestinian activists, are denied. Those of us, who by birth or privilege or class or race have been prioritised in our countries, need to use our freedom on behalf of others. It is up to the majority to stand up for the rights of the minority. I think Bertolt Brecht was right in this: All of us or none.

The soundtrack of Do Not Say We Have Nothing is Bach, a Western composer, played by a Canadian, Glenn Gould. What are you listening to now, as you write, and how important is music to you?

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Interview: Madeleine Thien

J. S. Bach’s music and the German baroque composers have a particular resonance for Sparrow, the composer in Do Not Say. Aside from Bach, the music in the novel is drawn from the composers (Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Mussorgsky, Beethoven, etc.) and works that would have been readily available to Chinese musicians at particular moments. I love music – as a language, as another form of expression, as an abstract art. Sadly I’m not listening to anything as I’m writing, as I’m not writing right now. The book tour, the travelling, and the response to the novel, have all been unexpectedly powerful and intense.

Leonard Cohen was another fellow-Canadian musician and his recent death has been a shock, if not entirely a surprise. We know how much Bach means to you – what are your thoughts and feelings about Cohen and his work?

I cried. I wanted him to still be in this world, to be making his music that has spoken to me and to so many for a long, long time. Just a couple days before, I had done a long interview with the CBC, our public radio network, in which I brought in six pieces of music that meant a lot to me.

One of those was Dance me to the end of love. The words speak volumes in these difficult days: Dance me to the children who are asking to be born Dance me through the curtains that our kisses have outworn Raise a tent of shelter now though every thread is torn Dance me to the end of love.

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Masterji Mas ter ji

Maganbhai Patel

Maganbhai Patel introduction by Ben Kyneswood

Masterji and family

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Masterji

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aganbhai Patel is better known as Masterji, a portrait photographer of the Coventry South-Asian community. In November 2016 his first solo exhibition opened to massive acclaim, with features on local, national and international television, online and in local and national newspapers. In March 2017 his black and white photographs will be a centrepiece of the Mumbai Focus International Photography Festival. This from a man celebrating his ninety-fourth year. In this article, we reflect on the art of the Master through his portrayal of the lives of South-Asian migrants to Coventry during the second half of the twentieth century.

Departure and arrival Masterji left his home and job as a schoolmaster in Surat, Gujarat soon after India gained independence from the British, meeting up in Coventry with friends in 1951. Unfulfilled by work on the factory floor at the General Electric Company (GEC), Masterji sought the company of photographic creatives, buying a new Kodak Box Brownie to replace the one heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d left in India. He spent evenings on courses at Lanchester College of Technology and weekends with the GEC Photographic Society, becoming friends with now legendary British photographer John Blakemore. He learned to hone his skills and knowledge: not just how to use an enlarger, but how to think about photography as interpretation, as his way of writing.

Coventry In the years after the Second World War, Coventry sought to maintain its place as a wealthy industrial city despite the devastation wrought by Nazi bombs. This was a city of fifty motor manufacturers, including Triumph, Jaguar and Rover; it was the home of jet engine inventor Sir Frank Whittle and to international companies Courtaulds, Alfred Herbert and GEC. Workers were attracted by the jobs and the wages: Coventrians earned at least 20 per cent more than the UK average thanks to demand for labour, strong union representation and a socialist local government. To support industry and its workers, local government invested heavily in public services and new housing, and oversaw a renewed city centre based on the

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Maganbhai Patel

modernist principles of Le Corbusier: Coventry promised a machine of a city for work and living, a blueprint for the future.

Despite the grand vision, some areas remained in need of renewal.

Because properties were cheaper to buy, migrants moved into bombdamaged areas like Spon End and Hillfields, with their tight Victorian streets and lack of amenities like indoor bathrooms. Masterji was no different. He moved to Widdrington Road, Radford, near the city centre and close to the Daimler motorcar factories that had been targeted by German bombers. These areas, previously home to the Victorian entrepreneurs that gave Coventry its industrial base, became stigmatised by ignorance of migrant cultures and by criminality thriving in the derelict houses and streets.

Migrants came to Coventry as engineers and teachers, with enough money to get them to England and start working. Yet work could be precarious, and often was, on the buses or factory floor. In the 1950s, the gleaming tiles and consumer goods of Coventry’s new houses and the smart offices of industry were as out of reach for the migrants as if they had stayed in India. Further, social attitudes didn’t adapt to change at the same pace as the planned physical landscape. Masterji sought to challenge public perceptions of the migrant community. His photography gave migrants status, a right to physical space to claim their own. In doing so, his customers were not portrayed as invisible and poor, but confident, smart and full of potential. In Masterji’s photographs, these were not migrants but Coventrians.

Settling in – black and white portraits Masterji initially took portraits in his living room in Widdrington Road.

His subjects included visitors such as Gordanbhai Bhakta who later moved to America, and Kelly, a handsome bus conductor. These men are not photographed to focus on their features but rather on the physical space they inhabit: the props, curtains, walls and flooring place them in Coventry as real people. Gordanbhai is amused, amusing and confident, the book and glasses hinting at knowledge and study. Kelly poses like he owns the stage on which he stands and one can imagine the assured stride of this

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Masterji

well-dressed man as he later walked towards the city centre. Other images present different sides to the same story: Mr Khan in his sunglasses with his white wife; Mr Samra and his beautiful Alsatian dog; three well-presented young children, the boys with books suggesting a bright future; and a young man sitting solo, wearing a leather jacket. These were not the invisible migrants of popular myth but people given a stake by Masterji, photographed not as models but as people.

‘People, they came to me,’ says Masterji. ‘I made them happy. They liked me.’

Master’s Art Studio Masterji’s local success led in 1969 to a licence to start Master’s Art Studio.

The name tells us he did not consider himself merely as a studio photographer but as one with a message. Customer demand precipitated a move to include 35mm colour, and in colour he continued to place his customers in a space they are invited to own. This is true of the defiant older lady in an expensive fur coat. The teenage pairs, however, pose a little apprehensively, uncertain, perhaps caught between their heritage and the future, between youth and adulthood. Their clothes, colourful but formal, and in the case of the young women, a mix of Eastern and Western styles, reflect the dilemmas faced by the children of migrants.

Now ninety-four, Masterji has spent more than a lifetime in one of England’s most historic cities, photographing a community as it settled and changed against a backdrop of economic and social uncertainty. Masterji presents his customers as real people in a real space, not as ciphers or labels.

His photographs serve as social documents to tell us that here was an artist working with the people to give them the confidence to stake a claim not as migrants but as Coventrians. The photographs teach a lesson that needs to resonate loudly in a divided Brexit Britain: if we are to heal the wounds in our culture, we must begin by seeing our neighbours as individuals.

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Maganbhai Patel

Boy in a leather jacket Portrait of Pradeep, son of Ratilalbhai Patel, a family friend.

Home studio, Widdrington Road, 1957.

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Masterji

Gordanbhai Bhakta Gordanbhai Bhakta was a guest of mine who stayed for two weeks, and had travelled from Preston to see me. He eventually moved to America.

Home studio, Widdrington Road, 1957â&#x20AC;&#x201C;68.

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Maganbhai Patel

Mr Samra and his Alsatian Mr Samra died in 1975. His wife came to my exhibition in Coventry this year and had her photograph taken next to this one. His whole family travelled to see the picture in the exhibition.

Home studio, Widdrington Road, late 1950s.

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Masterji

Kelly Portrait of Kelly, a bus conductor, who later went on to buy an off-licence and move to London. He lived well and loved fashion; my wife remembers him as a handsome, talkative man. The background, studio curtain and valance were made especially for the room by an African-Indian tailor. Home studio, Widdrington Road, 1957â&#x20AC;&#x201C;68.

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Maganbhai Patel

Mr Khan and his wife Mr Khan was a bus conductor. He and his wife had one daughter and left their house to her when they moved to Canada.

Home visit, late 1950s.

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Masterji

Masterjiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s son, Ravindra Patel Portrait of my son, Ravindra, in natural light from the window.

My wife would have got the toys either from Woolworths or the large department store, Owen Owen.

Masterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Art Studio, 1970.

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Maganbhai Patel

Vimlaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mother in a fur coat Vimla worked in a sewing factory. The family loved having their photographs taken and I was invited to take photographs at their house, as well as at weddings and parties.

Masterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Art Studio, 1970s.

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Masterji

Two teenage girls Sitters unknown. They would have come to the shop by themselves.

Masterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Art Studio, 1974.

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Maganbhai Patel

Two teenage boys Sitters unknown. These Bengali boys wanted to send photographs to relatives back home. A lot of customers visited the studio to do this.

They loved having their photographs taken.

Masterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Art Studio, 1974.

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Masterji

Khan from Pakistan Khan was a handsome young man who loved fashion. The hand-painted background is by a Hungarian artist I befriended in a cafĂŠ by the Coventry Registry Office, in the 1960s. He painted three large scenic screens for me, including this one.

Masterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Art Studio, 1982.

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Poetry

Amlanjyoti Goswami

Am lanjyoti Goswami

Whitechapel Dreaming I saw him clear as yesterday, my old teacher, pockmarked with time.

He was asking about rents, the old survival instinct.

His daughter-in-law, heavy with tomorrow, hushed me.

She said the old printer was gone, the living room where time flowed like easy pennies.

A maid stole what was left â&#x20AC;&#x201C; tools and trinkets, things to plough and furrow the mind.

I said I worked nearby, but there too, the rents were shooting up the stars

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Amlanjyoti Goswami

Bethnal Green . . . . . . is no longer as lively, as green as those evenings when for a solitary step, you danced.

Memory is a desert, she takes us to the dust of construction sites, a broken trail of bricks and Banksies, hiding on the corner wall.

Real estate climbs, a slow growl, the building stairs sprawling with graffiti.

The embers glow – this night our last?

Tea bars, plush flush, replace frozen samosas sitting on the pharaoh’s pyramid in the ramshackle shop with the television above.

But the Minar is like us, it stays where we are.

The fish curry is still the same – the same tangy taste of home, the lash of Ma’s tongue, and that photograph on the wall – the crowded train rushing in a blur through rice fields, waves of gold and green, is a Turner painting.

A sign promises to send money in seconds – the time it takes for you to remember me Your smartphone sings familiar though I am no longer the apple of those lovely brown eyes.

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Poetry

Things are down these days, but they will pick up.

They always do.

In the meantime, we wait for fresh orders and crowded afternoons, we wear the dusk of sorry news â&#x20AC;&#x201C; gunfire in other streets, other cities.

We pray, in the silence of our kitchens, simmering, that nothing must take us down, nothing that greed ever blessed.

We pray, none of that will ever reach us â&#x20AC;&#x201C; this sanctuary, this shuttle of weaves, this breeze . . .

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Arrival: Notes from a Migrant Goan Arrival: N otesJessica from aFaleir Migrant o Goan

Jessica Faleiro

N

obody tells you how vulnerable you’re about to become. The plane lands and your emotions start to heighten once you pass through immigration. Even if someone is waiting for you in Arrivals, you know somewhere deep within that your whole world is about to change. You just have no idea how, or how much.

It is 1997 and I’ve landed at Heathrow airport’s Terminal 3 from Goa, India, where my parents are from. The England I anticipate meeting is the clichéd version, with tweed-clad gentlemen standing by rose bushes in front of cosy thatched cottages. In my mind, the women sit daintily at tables in the back garden, smelling of Yardley talcum powder and pouring tea from their flowery tea sets. Children have picnics of ham sandwiches and fresh apples at the seaside and on clifftops, just as they do in Enid Blyton’s books.

By now, I’ve lived in many places, including the conservative Islamic state of Kuwait (where I grew up) and cocaine-fuelled Miami (where I began studying for my bachelor’s degree). But nothing has quite prepared me for the culture shock of watching eighteen-year-old British boys and girls chugging beer and then violently throwing up in the university student bar at 5 p.m. after winning a rugby game and trying to drown themselves in their body weight of beer. The students have alcohol and sex on the brain, an obvious riposte to the controlled, conservative family environments they were raised in. I search desperately for a clique of sober nerds and find that ‘my people’ are the fifty or so international students scattered around the campus.

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My belief is that I am starting my second year at Nottingham University (having had to transfer from my university in Florida after my F1 student visa was unexpectedly cancelled) and I’m excited by the thought of a huge sprawling campus like the one I’d been attending in Miami. But the School of Biological Sciences, where my course is taught, is in the tiny village of Sutton Bonington, where there is a little sub-campus of Nottingham University. It consists of about 700 people and is about half an hour’s drive from the city. I want to rail at Fortune for abandoning me in a village.

Instead I swallow another deep disappointment so soon after being blackballed from the United States.

The professors turn out to be staid, cold and merciless. The campus is so tiny that it takes on the characteristics of a provincial village – everybody knows everyone else’s business. Students (and even some professors) keep boredom at bay with drink and sexual promiscuity. This is the first time that I’ve felt compelled to cut out a large section of myself to fit into a world that I can’t fathom. I’ve been raised with conservative, middle-class values but I’ve also lived in extreme environments. In Miami, my friends were from middle-class Haiti, Belize and Nicaragua. They had escaped difficult living conditions and were on study scholarships and financial aid. They studied full-time while they worked at extra jobs to pay off college tuition bills. In contrast, Sutton Bonington is full of over-privileged, spoiled brats who are being groomed to take over top posts in Britain’s corporate and landed hierarchy. The level of culture shock I experience tells me that I am going to stand out like a sore thumb.

The international students here become my tribe. We are individuals cast adrift in the same foreign boat. We look for and find solace in each other’s familiar sense of abandonment and individuality. Perhaps we have all cut away sections of ourselves to fit in. Instead, we fit together. Culture shock unites us. We marvel at the strange adherence to punctuality and the ultra-politeness that the British insist is characteristic of a civilised society.

It all goes over our heads. I can’t tell when someone is angry with me anymore – real emotion is contained behind a patina of politeness and civility. It becomes a game I must learn, and start to play. Eventually, it leads to a job in London, but the process of getting there involves killing off more parts of myself to fit into professional life in England.

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I’ve grown up in a Goan family that taught me that he who speaks the loudest is heard first. In professional Britain, the opposite applies. Passion in your voice gets you dismissed, not noticed, because people take it for aggression or rudeness. One doesn’t have a sense of humour unless one excels at sarcasm. Wit is revered. I become quiet around Brits. I tell myself that I’m learning by observing. I realise only much later that silence has become my coping mechanism.

I am under the impression that people here are burdened by a lack of emotion that might have been spent in the Second World War, an event that continues to colour the memories of everyone around me. Oral histories of the war are etched in their psyches and I watch their eyes brim as they recount stories of rationing and memories of grandfathers who served during the British Raj. These images unobtrusively play over and over in their hearts and minds. My interactions are inadvertently coloured by ‘Othering’. I’m not sure who’s doing the labelling, them or me.

This isn’t diverse, multi-racial London I’m in. This is the boondocks of provincial, elitist England. Unfortunately, much of it is lost on me during the two years it takes to complete my bachelor’s degree. When I graduate, I realise that I have friends who have no idea what it means to live as an Indian in Britain. They’re all Caucasian European and I’m likely the brownest friend most of them have ever had. I feel disconnected from their childhood stories of horse-riding or of holidays spent in Mallorca, Nice or Bournemouth.

I make the decision to apply only for jobs in London, where I can escape provinciality and I’m more likely to find people ‘of my ilk’. I take the first job that comes my way, without having any idea if the salary is enough to keep me in food, accommodation and savings. It isn’t. I find myself living from one salary payment to another. Transport on the tube is expensive and I didn’t even know to factor that in. I don’t want to live with strangers in London, so I rent a cheap studio flat in East London which costs over half my monthly salary. After about nine months, it is broken into one Saturday while I’m out.

I can’t let myself cry as two policemen scan the tiny space, asking me to list all the electronic and personal items that have been stolen.

‘There are no glass surfaces.’

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I look at the policeman, confused.

‘It’s difficult to lift fingerprints off any surfaces, unless they’re glass.

Everything here is made of plastic and wood.’

Here are a few of the things I will never recover because I don’t live in a greenhouse. The tiny Mac computer my brother has lent me; my prized CD collection, including the one of Rachmaninoff ’s second – played by the composer himself and recorded in 1929 – which was a gift; my radio – the only one I could afford with my first salary – even the suitcases where I’d been storing my winter clothes, personal diaries and photographs; are all stolen. Strangers have rifled through my personal belongings, including my underwear. The police tell me that there has been a rash of burglaries lately by a group in search for any valuables they can sell to buy drugs. I hold on till the locksmith comes and then try to think of someone I can call who can help, or at least someone with whom I could stay for a couple of days until I can feel safe again. One is an Anglo-Indian friend who says Yes when she means No. I am no stranger to subtext. Another is entertaining friends and gives me a clear No. A third is an elderly Indian gentleman, a closet homosexual, who blesses me with a Yes. I arrive at his flat with a toothbrush and a change of clothes, and sit on his couch, letting the shock of being burgled wash over me. The only thing I feel like doing is stroking the stray ginger cat he has recently adopted. He pushes something my way. I look down at the cup in his hand.

‘What is it?’ I ask blankly.

‘Tea. It’s good for you.’

‘No, thank you.’ I return to stroking the cat on my lap.

‘Have it. It’s hot and sweet.’ He gentles his voice. ‘It will help soothe your nerves.’

I take it and sip gingerly from the flowery teacup he’s handed me. He’s right. It helps.

‘Have you called your parents yet?’ he asks.

‘No. But I will, later. After I know they’ll be reassured that I’m handling it and I’m OK.’

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They couldn’t do anything even if they wanted to. They are too far away to be of any help. People rarely talk about how traumatising it is to be an immigrant; how vulnerable you really are. At least, no one in my family does. My parents were immigrants in Kuwait. I can’t recall them ever using that word to define themselves, though they often use it to define other non-Goan immigrants. As I said, I cut off bits of myself to survive living in England. No one warned me that this would be a requirement.

Going on an annual holiday to Goa means spending a huge chunk of my savings. Nobody had prepared me for that, either. I can’t seem to figure out how to live in a positive, healthy environment or at least work towards building one and save up something for my future. My savings are spent on not being alone for Christmas. Not once do my parents suggest spending Christmas with me. The cold is their biggest gripe. I don’t blame them. I’m desperate to be immersed in warm weather, heat, sunshine and some sense of family for at least a couple of weeks each year. Though several years have passed, I still feel that I am a stranger in Britain and a visitor in my parent’s home in Goa, where they have retired. I don’t feel able to tell them about what life in Britain is really like for me. Nobody wants to hear the sob story of a privileged middle-class girl who has been given a chance to get out, but is flailing.

However, I do try, thinking that my father might be sympathetic. ‘Papa, England isn’t really working out for me.’

He looks up from his newspaper. ‘Is it the weather?’

‘Er . . . not really. It’s more than that.’

‘Why don’t you migrate to Australia instead? The weather is better there.’

I sit there, confused, and stare at him. This is the man who once told me and my brother how in the early sixties he travelled for a week by ship to get from Karachi to Kuwait to work as a bank clerk and make coffee for his seniors; he couldn’t afford a sweater to keep himself warm in the cold, desert winter and slept on a mat on a terrace when endless power cuts couldn’t provide any relief during the sweltering heat of summer months. He went into cinemas when he could afford it, just to enjoy the air-conditioning when nights were too hot. He got married because he was bored hanging out with bachelors who gambled and drank homemade wine because they couldn’t tolerate living in a dry country. I heard about the years of sacrifice,

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indignity and prejudice that my father put up with while he slowly ascended through the ranks to become chief accountant at the bank. All the while, this same man dreamed of a Utopian Goa where he would one day retire, a Utopia where he now lives and that frustrates him on a daily basis.

Bribery, rife corruption, endless bureaucracy and worse inefficiency keep him in a cycle of rage and bitterness. He had dreamed of living a better life by the time he retired and returned to the land of his birth. Does he realise that the same dreams he’d had, he is pushing onto me? To get away from the corruption and inefficiency at any cost. As a mother who’s gone through hours of labour pains soon forgets and wants another baby, my father wants the same that he’s had, for me. It’s the bittersweet dream of every middleclass parent to have a child who studies abroad (meaning USA, UK, Canada or Australia) and if they’re lucky and work hard, gets to ‘settle’ there too.

Never mind the price.

I am at lunch with a colleague in a café in Soho, London, when a middle-aged Indian man with a faded suitcase walks past the café’s glass front, sees me through the window and with a beaming smile walks through the door and straight up to me. In clear Hindi, a language I’m hardly fluent in, he says something, then shows me an address scribbled on a piece of paper. Looking at the address, my heart plummets. There is no house number or street name, just the name of a place I’ve never heard of, a comma and ‘Soho, London’. I know that he’s been had. Someone has made him promises, taken his money, given him a fake address, promised him help on the other side and left him to the wolves. I shake my head and, when he doesn’t budge, I stand up and lead him to the door. I look up and down the street and see a policeman at the end near Soho Market. I point to the policemen and in the best Hindi I can muster say, ‘Isko pucho’ (Ask him), in the hope that the policeman has encountered something similar before and will know how to handle it better than I do.

I live in England for fourteen years, in London for eleven of those. I stay put, always hoping it will get easier somehow, that I’ll be able to build something for myself. But, I don’t see signs of this happening. With every passing year, things only get harder. It gets harder to build, maintain and then save relationships of any kind, friendships too. The corporate life is too cold and calculating – it cuts away at bits of me until I move into

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working with charities and start again from the beginning. It is a much better fit than corporate Britain. But, when long term contracts shift into contract extensions that dwindle from nine months to six to three and I find myself being expected to work on different projects for three months at a time, I decide to throw in the towel. I realise that job security is a myth in today’s world. The recession is hitting charities hard.

By then, I have an MA in Creative Writing and have carved a collection of stories into publishable form. I cash in my redundancy cheque, move to a beach in Goa and live off my savings while I search for a literary agent and a publisher. The sound of crashing waves, the sunshine and the heat are like balm to my cut-up self. I begin to put myself back together again.

Four years and a published novel later, I’m still living on a Goan beach in India. I miss friends back in London, the museums and theatres, the dining-out and the easier living; but then I remember how difficult it is to fit in, to find warmth, to earn a living as a creative without a strong support system to rely on. I’ve been privileged in many ways, lucky in others. All said and done, I can still recall the difference in my emotions when I was a fresh arrival on England’s shores and when I arrived in Goa to live there for the first time in my life. The feelings are miles apart. The first arrival made me want to throw up in anxiety. The other felt like a welcoming womb I could snuggle into.

Perhaps your sense of arrival and emotional response to it varies depending on the phase of life you’re in or what experience you’re going through.

It certainly helps if you have a support system to catch you when you fall, and help you feel protected and safe at least through tough times. In a world where migration appears to be a way of life common to most, it is surprising how little one hears about the vulnerability migrants face. Families that have experienced this need to be able to talk openly about their migrant experiences, both the bad and the good, if only to lessen the traumatic effect that others may face. It’s taken some distance, but I now consider myself lucky to have had the experience that I did of being a migrant Goan in Britain. However, I can’t help wondering about the fate of others who end up standing in Soho Market with a suitcase in one hand, a useless piece of paper in the other and a feeling of deep despair that even a policeman cannot assuage.

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Poetry

Anuradha Gupta

Anur adha Gupta

Lata Sings a Love Song I should have kept it – the tongue I grew up with, the language of my mother and her mother before her Not so much for my own sake as for my daughter’s, and for the sake of the songs I carried with me when we left All else may be passed on in a foreign tongue; the stories, the memories, but the songs won’t stand the tampering, the tweaking, the translating

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Listen to this one, I say Isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t it beautiful?

Glancing at her sideways, one eye on the road, my voice hopeful They all sound the same she says, tossing it aside We are quiet then for the rest of the ride while in the background Lata sings a love song

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Contributors Contribut ors Contribut ors

DEEPA ANAPPARA is a freelance writer and editor from India currently studying for an MA in creative writing (prose fiction) at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. Her short stories have won or been shortlisted for several awards and appear in The Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology Vol. 6, Once Upon a Time There was a Traveller: Asham Award-winning Stories, and Five Degrees: The Asian Writer Short Story Prize 2012, among others.

CHIANG YOMEI was born in 1961 to Eurasian parents in Taipei, Taiwan, and had a traditional Chinese education before pursuing further studies in America and the UK. A bilingual writer, she is also a visual artist exhibiting regularly in the UK and Asia. Yomei is a student of philosophy and a practising Buddhist.

Her publications include In Vishnu’s Dream (INK Publishing, 2013) and Every Now and Then a Solitary Bell (INK Publishing, 2015).

O THIAM CHIN is the winner of the inaugural Epigram Books Fiction Prize, the richest literary award in Singapore, with a prize of S$20,000 and a publishing contract with Epigram Books. He is also the author of five collections of short fiction: Free-Falling Man (2006), Never Been Better (2009), Under The Sun (2010), The Rest Of Your Life and Everything That Comes With It (2011) and Love, or Something Like Love (2013, shortlisted for the 2014 Singapore Literature Prize for English Fiction).

CHO HAEJIN has published six books; ‘Death of Hong’ is from her second short-story collection and fifth book, Meet Me on Thursday. A Russian translation of one of her novels, I Met Loh Kiwan, was published in the winter of 2015, and French and English translations are under way. Cho splits her time between writing and teaching creative writing.

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Contributors

YOONNA CHO (translator of Cho Haejin) studied English literature at Yonsei University and conference interpreting at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies GSIT. Her translation of Youn Dae-Nyeong’s The Camel Pouch was shortlisted for the 2008 Korean Literature Translation Award for New Career Translators.

She has worked on numerous Korean novels and children’s books, as well as on subtitles for Korean films.

JAE WON EDWARD CHUNG (translator of Lee Kiho) was born in Seoul and lives in New York, where he is currently a doctoral student in Korean literature at Columbia University’s Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures.

His research and teaching interests include modern Korean literature, culture, film and media.

JESSICA FALEIRO is a novelist and a poet. Her debut novel Afterlife (2012) is about a family from Goa and their ’ghostly’ encounters. Her poems, fiction and non-fiction have appeared in Indian Quarterly, Rockland Lit, Mascara Literary Review, Muse India, IndiaCurrents, TimesCrest, tambdimati and in various anthologies. Jessica also hosts talks on the writing life and runs writing workshops in Goa. She has an MA in creative writing from Kingston University, UK. More information at jessicafaleiro.wordpress.com.

AMLANJYOTI GOSWAMI’s poems have appeared in publications in India, Nepal, the UK, South Africa, Kenya and the USA, including the recent Forty under Forty: An Anthology of Post-Globalisation Poetry (Poetrywala, 2016). He grew up in Guwahati, Assam and lives in Delhi.

ANURADHA GUPTA was born and grew up in India. After moving across three continents she is now settled in London, her home away from home. She was once a travel writer but now she dabbles in fiction, poetry and translation.

She loves exploring different cultures through their myths and folklore.

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Contributors

JUDITH HUANG is a Singaporean writer, translator and editor currently living in Beijing. A recipient of the Foyle Young Poet of the Year Award in 2001, 2003 and 2004, her writing has been published in Prairie Schooner, QLRS, Loreli China, Ceriph, LONTAR, and Stylus. She graduated from Harvard University in 2010, and is a member of the Signet Society of Arts and Letters. Her online portfolio is at judithhuang.com.

KAVITA A. JINDAL is an acclaimed poet and a prize-winning short-fiction writer, as well as an essayist and reviewer. She is the author of Raincheck Renewed (Chameleon Press, 2004). Her work has appeared in literary journals, anthologies and newspapers around the world and been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and European cultural radio stations. She is a senior editor at the Asia Literary Review. See kavitajindal.com and @writerkavita.

LEE KIHO was born in 1972 in Wonju, South Korea. He debuted in 1999 with the short story â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Bunnyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, which was published in Contemporary Literature. His short-story collections include Who is Doctor Park? and It was Bound to End Up Like This. His novels are At Least We Can Apologize (Dalkey Archive Press, 2013) and A World History of Second Sons. He has been awarded the Yi Hyo-seok Literary Prize, the Kim Seung-ok Literary Prize and the Hanguk Ilbo Literary Prize. He currently teaches creative writing at Gwangju University.

BENJAMIN KYNESWOOD is a director of Photo Miners and lectures in Sociology at Coventry University. His recent work includes the Masterji exhibition in Coventry, (UK) and Mumbai (India) and an exhibition on the historic photographers of Hillfields in Coventry. Placing the public in the position of curator, the Photo Miners co-produce exhibitions to present a communitydeveloped narrative that often challenges stereotypical perceptions of people and place.

ALVIN PANG is a poet, writer and editor who has featured in festivals and publications worldwide. A Fellow of the Iowa International Writing Program, he is an advisor to the International Poetry Studies Institute and a founding director of the Literary Centre, Singapore. His recent books include Tumasik: Contemporary Writing from Singapore (Autumn Hill, USA, 2009), Other Things and Other Poems (Brutal, Croatia, 2012) and When the Barbarians Arrive (Arc Publications, UK, 2012). His work has been translated into over twenty languages.

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Contributors

MAGANBHAI PATEL, also known as Masterji, is a Coventry photographer originally from Surat, in India. He trained as a school teacher but, arriving in Coventry in 1951, only found work in factories. He moved between a succession of houses before settling into Widdrington Road, Radford, Coventry where his skill as a photographer became known. His success enabled him to work professionally, and he opened Master’s Art Studio in 1969. He has remained there ever since. His son Ravindra now runs the business.

FLORA QIAN is a writer and translator. She holds an MFA from the University of Maryland and an MA in translation from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her short stories can be found in Eastlit and in the Hong Kong Writers’ Circle anthologies.

RESHMA RUIA is an Indian writer based in Manchester, England. She is the author of Something Black in the Lentil Soup. Her second novel, A Mouthful of Silence was shortlisted for the 2014 SI Leeds Literary Prize. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in anthologies and on BBC Radio 4.

RAVI SHANKAR founded the international online journal of the arts Drunken Boat and is author/editor/translator of twelve books of poetry, including W. W. Norton’s Language for a New Century, the National Poetry Review Prize winner, Deepening Groove, and the forthcoming Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honouring Gwendolyn Brooks (University of Arkansas Press, 2017). He teaches and performs around the world.

SHAGUFTA SHARMEEN TANIA is the author of two novels and two short-story collections. She translated Susan Fletcher’s Whitbread Award-winning novel, Eve Green, into Bengali and one of her short stories was featured in Wasafiri Issue 84, Autumn 2015. Most of her work focuses on the Asian diaspora.

Currently she is working on a historical novel set during the failed Bengal Partition of 1905.

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Contributors

LISA RUSS SPAAR is the author/editor of over ten books of poetry and criticism, including the forthcoming Orexia: Poems (2017). Her honours include a Rona Jaffe Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, a 2016 Pushcart Prize, and the Library of Virginia Award for Poetry. She is professor of English and creative writing at the University of Virginia.

KAMANA SRIKANTH, a native of Chennai in South India, is a lawyer and writer currently living in San Francisco. She earned her MFA at City University of Hong Kong and is now working on a collection of short stories and a novel.

Her work has appeared in the anthology Afterness: Literature from the New Transnational Asia.

EMBER SWIFT is a Canadian artist, musician and writer living in Beijing. She currently writes for Beijing Kids, Mami, and Women in China magazines, and Canadaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Feminist Quarterly: Herizons. Her own blog Queer Girl Gets Married was the winner of the 2013 Lotus Blossom Best Love Blog award. She has recently completed a memoir. More at emberswift.com.

JOHN THIEME is a British author, of part-Canadian parentage, whose journalistic, academic and creative writing has been published in some twenty-five countries. He has held chairs in British universities and has also taught in the Caribbean and, as a visiting professor, in Hong Kong and Italy. His most recent book, Postcolonial Literary Geographies: Out of Place, was published by Palgrave Macmillan.

SARAH VALLANCE won a Pushcart prize in 2015 and received a special mention in Best American Essays 2015 and Pushcart XL. She is currently undertaking a PhD on Philip Roth at Sydney University. Sarah now lives in Sydney with her partner and their three dogs and three cats.

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Essential Reading | Subscribe to the

Register and subscribe online for access to exclusive new material, gems from the archive and regular updates: www.asialiteraryreview.com Email Subscriptions@AsiaLiteraryReview.Com Visit the ALR Bookshop to buy books by authors featured in this and other issues www.asialiteraryreview.com/alr-bookshop Keep in touch on twitter @AsiaLitReview facebook.com/AsiaLitReview

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Sun Yat-sen University Center for English-language Creative Writing The Sun Yat-sen University Center for English-language Creative Writing is the first and currently the only one of its kind in China for teaching and promoting creative writing in English as a second/foreign language. It combines the teaching of English with creative writing techniques to enable students to write about China from an insiderâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s perspective.

Under the Sun Yat-sen University Creative Writing Education Program, the Center organizes readings by international writers and a book club to promote the reading and writing of world literature. From October 2015, it will start the Sun Yat-sen University International Writersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Residency, which moves from the campuses of Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou and Zhuhai to Jiangmen in Guangdong Province and Yangshuo in Guangxi Autonomous Region, and gives between ten and fifteen writers the time and space to write as well as providing them with the opportunity to get to know Chinese people and culture. Contact: daifan@mail.sysu.edu.cn

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From the original publisher of the New York Times bestselling graphic novel THE ART OF CHARLIE CHAN HOCK CHYE

“Jaswal’s wonderful debut didn’t merely transport me to a country I knew nothing about, or introduce me to a family the likes of which I’d never meet. She made me long for her Singapore like a lost home, and miss her characters like departed friends. What an extraordinary thing for a novel to do.”

—Alexander Yates, author of Moondogs Sydney Morning Herald

BEST YOUNG AUSTRALIAN NOVELIST 2014

“Located somewhere between the shattered filmic worlds of David Lynch and Satoshi Kon’s apocalyptic anime, Yam’s narrative hypnotises us into questioning our reality in ways that are terrifying, revelatory and fundamentally profound.”

—Cyril Wong, award-winning author of Ten Things My Father Never Taught Me EPIGRAM BOOKS FICTION PRIZE LONGLIST 2015

Publishing in the UK in 2017

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Immigration has been one of the most explosive themes of 2016. Populists talk of closing borders and deporting refugees. Whether human commonality can prevail over cultural and ethnic division is a question without a clear answer. In this issue, the ALR examines the impact of migration and diaspora on individual lives and psyches and our authors confront a foundational issue – whether any of us are wholly native to any one place.

Asia Literary Review | Essential Reading Featuring: An exclusive interview with Madeleine Thien – Chinese-Canadian writer shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize and winner of the Governor General’s Award and Scotiabank Giller Prize South Asia in Britain – a selection of writings and Masterji’s arresting photo essay An extract from South Korean Li Kiho’s novel of a man falsely accused by an autocratic regime Singaporean O Thiam Chin’s nightmare of medical experimentation Lives confronted by the challenges of integrating a rapidly changing China ‘The ALR fills an important gap. We’ve grown used to reading about Asia. But through a kaleidoscope of stories, essays, poems, polemics and photographs, finally we can hear Asians talking about themselves.’ – David Pilling, former Asia Editor, Financial Times asialiteraryreview.com

674x476 pt spine 31pt

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