2023
Spiritual Pursuits and Other Stories
Lien Chao’s new collection of stories is about Toronto as a meeting place for people of all backgrounds. Set in the decades from the 1980s to the 2020s, the stories depict the ripple effects of China’s economic success, the peak of business globalization, and its inevitable decline during the COVID-19 pandemic. The author has chosen an unhampered social and geographical setting to observe Canadians in the world and at home, including immigrants and refugees. The author has depicted in great detail friendships among neighbours and single women. As Canadians merge into mixed neighbourhoods, spiritual pursuits in individual lifestyles are shared socially as communal rituals.
These five long stories touch on a number of social groups. Newcomer portrait artists build their businesses on the streets of downtown Toronto in the 1990s; a Canadian business club tries hard to enter the retail markets in China in the 2010s; a multi-millionaire from China organizes an artists’ salon in Scarborough; a group of spiritual pursuers meet weekly in Markham Village for meditation and discussion of ancient Chinese wisdom and spirituality.
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2019
Salt in My Life
In her latest collection of poetry, Lien Chao covers a wider terrain of forms and styles to include symphonic lyrics, reflective travelogues, and multimedia-poetic stage performance. Sound and vision blend across the collection with a sense of textual fluidity, connecting her physical and emotional journeys as she strives for inner peace. Salt in My Life is a spiritual quest carried out through the creation of poetry.
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2008
The Chinese Knot and Other Stories
In this new collection, award-winning author Lien Chao weaves together these emotionally charged short stories focusing on Chinese immigrants in Toronto’s multiracial neighbourhoods. In Chinatown and mixed neighbourhoods, in condos and tenements, in public parks and in college, the protagonists of these stories find love, face loneliness, confront generational crises, and overcome racial stereotypes as they evolve and grow in this exciting, ever-changing multicultural society.
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2004
More Than Skin Deep
In these poems, created in both English and Chinese, Lien Chao evokes the lives of Asian Canadians in all their diversity and depth, as she reflects on the issues of identity, assimilation, and language.
These issues occur in the very act of confronting the two very different languages-Chinese and English-with each other, so that the confrontation itself becomes a metaphor for adaptation and conflict of cultures in Canada.
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2003
Strike the Wok – An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Canadian Fiction
This new anthology brings together some of the most exciting works of fiction by contemporary Chinese Canadian writers. Representing three generations of Chinese from a variety of backgrounds, including writers born in Canada as well as places outside, presenting a diversity of themes and styles, and set in various geographical locations and time periods, Strike the Wok is a truly kaleidoscopic look at Chinese life from modern Canadian perspectives. Internationally renowned as well as newer voices are included.
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2001
Tiger Girl (Hu Nu) – A Creative Memoir
Born in the Year of the Tiger, Hu Nü, unwanted female child, is nearly given away as a one-year-old bride in a Chinese village. She grows up during the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, when traditional values are challenged by the politicized young, and nonconformity is repressed with brutal humiliation, examples of which she witnesses daily in her neighbourhood and in her school. Hu Nü joins the Red Guard movement more out of fear than conviction, later to reject it bitterly for its senseless cruelty. Using first-person and third-person narratives, Lien Chao captures thirty-five years of recent Chinese history through the gripping stories of Hu Nü and her generation as they survive both political repression in Mao’s China and outdated attitudes to women.
1999
Maples and the Stream: A Long Narrative Poem
From unappreciated railway workers facing institutional racism and neglect in the last century to national cultural figures of the present, the Chinese, like other coloured peoples of Canada, have made great inroads into the mainstream, which in turn has adjusted its self-image to accommodate diversity.
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1997
Beyond Silence: Chinese-Canadian Literature in English
From unappreciated railway workers facing institutional racism and neglect in the last century to national cultural figures of the present, the Chinese, like other coloured peoples of Canada, have made great inroads into the mainstream, which in turn has adjusted its self-image to accommodate diversity.
Buy directly from Mawenzi House or Amazon.