...at the study...
...and the studio.
My projects as a writer in the last few years have primarily been short stories about the interiority of Chinese women as they come to terms with life’s hardships, both ordinary and extraordinary. My hope is for there to be a ghostly quality to these pieces. And although my stories often feature women’s suffering, I consider myself a feminist writer. My (possibly controversial) belief is that what makes for feminist storytelling is not robust depictions of female agency or flourishing, but rather, the serious narrative treatment of the inner worlds of female characters – where their perspectives serve as the load-bearing pillar of interpretation. My female characters generally adopt the Chinese phrase rènmìng (认命), to accept one’s fate (a sober and quieter variation on Nietzschean amor fati), which I see as the act of bowing one’s head at loneliness and enduring misfortune with dignity. This attitude, I think, is somewhat paradoxically both definitive of a mature human being and what unifies us with predominant spirit of the animal world, from which I draw many literary themes (to quote D. H. Lawrence’s arresting poem, “I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself”). This thematically unified series of short stories is planned for a collection tentatively titled Humble Creatures.
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Select Literary Publications
Prose
“Eel Broth for Growing Children” CBC Literary Awards Finalist 2023, online print
"The Stone Man’s Harem” The Plentitudes Journal, Second Place in Fiction 2024, online print
Poetry
“Consider the Peony” PRISM International, Issue 59.4, reprinted in Best of Canadian Poetry 2023 (featured on Ms. Lyric's Poetry Outlaws Podcast)
“Newton of the Blade of Grass, the Weary Wing” and “Moondrops and Sudden Splashes of Cerulean” Sam-Fifty-Four, Issue 3
“Volumes of Sentience, Part I and II” Cloud Lake Literary, Issue 3
Stylistically, I love dense fiction writing, which to me means prose consisting of sentences in quick succession that have interesting and independent meaning beyond the text; phrases which relentlessly capture freestanding worlds of feeling. Though my own work is often unambitious in structure, my literary idols are openly and inventively flirtatious with metafictional forms, including figures such as (in no particular order) Vladimir Nabokov, Jennifer Egan, Denis Johnson, Jorge Luis Borges, Toni Morrison, Ted Chiang, Percival Everett, Joy Williams, and Italo Calvino. Other writers I look to with aspiration and envy – Susanna Clarke, Franz Kafka, Jumphra Lahiri, Ha Seong-Nan, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Ha Jin. In addition to a short story collection, I’m also writing a young adult novel titled Elegy for Daji, a radically feminist retelling of early Chinese mythology centered around a fox demon’s search for vengeance. Like almost every writer, there was a time I considered myself a poet as well - but nowadays I confess to being an unrefined foreigner where it comes to charting those waters.
As for the visual arts, my formative training included a variety of mediums such as watercolor, pencil, and ink, though in the last years I work almost exclusively in acrylics. I am inspired by the imaginative and narratively rich interplay between traditional still life and wildlife realism, which is explored in my collection ‘A Feast for Kingfishers’. Many of my landscapes, while expressed through traditional mediums, take on a graphic approach and incorporate Asiatic symbolic imagery such as bamboo, cranes, and peonies as homage to my cultural heritage. You might someday see me exhibit my work under the studio name “Brushes for Hummingbirds” – though I paint mostly because the pursuit of artistic skillfulness delights me.
'Life Amongst Apricots' - Acrylic, 14x20''
'Nothing gold can stay' - Acrylic, 12'' in diameter