HIDDEN YOUTH release and illustration!

My latest publication is Hidden Youth: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History! And the book is officially out November 21, 2016!

My story "A Name to Ashes" will be the second story you'll read in the book, and it has this marvelous illustration by Alice Meichi Li! Alice is a Chinese-American artist based in New York City, and we talked a little about representation over Twitter. I love the illustration so much! Here is the black-and-white version you'll see in the book:

© Alice Meichi Li!
My story is about a young clerk who accompanies the historical Chen Lanpin on what would be known as the Chinese Commission to Cuba of 1874. Excerpts from the results of this report have been translated. I first learned about it when taking a class on race and racism in the United States, in which the professor gave us a transnational view of how slavery and indentured servitude created rifts and alliances between various groups. Our textbook for this segment of the course was Lisa Yun's The Coolie Speaks. I came across the Denise Helly translation, from 1993, through a generous donation by a professor who happened to have it and didn't need it anymore. (It is now extremely expensive to buy.)

This is a Hungry Ghost story. I got really tired of how white Westerners portray Hungry Ghost Month (I suppose it is a day these days in most places, but in Malaysia it is, still, culturally speaking, a whole month!!!) and I really wanted to write a story about the coolie trade, which I hadn't known about. The English translation of the report was extremely exhausting to read, because it's mostly a catalog of death and dying. But it's also about naming the people who died, reclaiming them, refusing to let their lives be written over. Many of these coolies were hoping that the commission would send word back to the families of their fallen. Almost all of the names in the story were drawn from actual instances recorded in both these books. You can read more about the story in this post.

I haven't had time to read the rest of the stories yet, but I'm really excited to be in an anthology with P. Djeli Clark! I'm a huge fan of his blog and his pop culture commentary, and his latest short story, "A Dead Djinn in Cairo" is a delight!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Race in Cartoons

So I was moseying on to work this morning when I started hearing the theme song to 6teen in my head, and I was reminiscing on the time I used to have cable TV and I watched cartoons and the SciFi channel just about incessantly (okay, I also watched TLC). 6teen was an interesting show to me. The basic premise is that of six teens who hang out at a fancy lemonade stall one of them works at, and it follows their trials and travails as they figure out how to get by on their own, holding their jobs (or not) and how they work through their problems. It also happens to follow a very smart comedy formula, with multiple storyarcs within a single episode. The creators did a good job realizing that yes, a younger audience could indeed appreciate smart shows. The characters, being cartoon characters in themselves, are not exactly what one might call nuanced, but the creators certainly did try to explore different aspects of their characters. Jen, for example, works in the sporting goods store. She
Read more

My Pidgin Does Not Signify Lack Of Intellect

I recently received in my inbox an email from my father, who likes to forward me a lot of things that he thinks will interest me. Except of course, he never really realizes just how easily antsy I can get, and how willing I am to pick apart an article. (I used to hit Reply to All whenever he'd send me an email to let all and sundry know what I thought and all the problems with whatever he sent me, so now he wisely BCCs people instead.) This article was about Miss Singapore, and I can't find the original article, but hree's another one about the same issue . While at the Miss World pageant in South Africa, she inadvertently slipped into speaking Singlish, the Singaporean creole that mixes English, Malay, Chinese and god knows what else. And this was a huge fucking deal because apparently, all beauty queens must be able to speak perfect English, the standard of which is probably set by the English-speaking world that is the UK and North America, I guess. And because Miss S
Read more

May 13 Blogswarm Links Post

This is where all Malaysians and residents of Malaysia are welcome to leave links to their participation in the May 13 Blogswarm. For more information, check out LiveJournal and Facebook . Comments Policy:  Please note that moderation is turned on for comments older than 7 days. I try to check in regularly, but this may be hard as I will be traveling. Do not use this place to debate what others have said. If you do and you crash my site in due process, I'll get very irritated at you. That shit is rude. Don't do it. 
Read more