55 Bamboo Lettering

Kevin Chong

British Columbia

Jen Sookfong Lee

British Columbia

Ling Zhang

Ontario

Kevin Chong, British Columbia

Kevin Chong was born in Hong Kong in 1975 and raised in Vancouver. He is the author of one previous novel, Baroque-a-Nova, a music memoir entitled Neil Young Nation and a forthcoming memoir on horse-racing. His writing has appeared in the Globe and Mail, The Walrus, Chatelaine and the cbc Arts website. His new novel, a tragicomic modern immigrant tale, is Beauty Plus Pity. Read more

Jen Sookfong Lee, British Columbia

Jen Sookfong Lee was born and raised in Vancouver’s Eastside, where she now lives with her husband and son. Her books include The End of East and Shelter, a novel for young adults. A popular radio personality, Jen can be heard on “Westcoast Words,” a weekly writing column featured on cbc Radio One’s On the Coast and All Points West, on The Next Chapter with Shelagh Rogers and on the Studio One Book Club, where she is a frequent co-host. The Better Mother is her most recent novel. Read more

Ling Zhang, Ontario

Ling Zhang is a senior audiologist and fiction writer. She was born in Hangzhou of Zhejiang Province in China and came to Canada in 1986 to pursue an M.A. in English at the University of Calgary. She obtained her second degree—an M.A. in communication disorders at the University of Cincinnati. She has published three novels and two collections of short stories and was recognized in 2006 with the People’s Literature Award in China. Her most recent book is Gold Mountain Blues. Read more

Saturday, October 22, 2011 - 2:00pm
Revue Stage
$17

Three authors, who could be labelled “Chinese Canadian” if you were keen to apply labels, talk about the tension between avoiding your heritage and embracing your heritage. Ling Zhang, who has lived in Canada for 25 years, has just published a saga chronicling five generations of a Chinese family lured to Canada by the promise of a better life. Jen Sookfong Lee’s new novel is set in Vancouver’s Chinatown, with a protagonist named Danny Lim, whose challenges are not restricted by his bloodlines. And Kevin Chong, who has asserted that he doesn’t want to write “books with bamboo lettering on the cover,” has written a novel about a Vancouver Asian-Canadian struggling with a hyphenated cultural identity. How big a shadow does your family tree cast on your fictional subjects?

Tickets are still available and can be purchased at the door 45 minutes before the event begins.

55 Bamboo Lettering

2011 Festival