New Book by Anna Wang - Inconvenient Memories A Personal Account of the Tiananmen Square Incident and the China Before and After

Immigrant and survivor Anna Wang offers a unique glimpse into the Tiananmen Square Incident and the China surrounding it in her powerful new book Inconvenient Memories: A Personal Account of the Tiananmen Square Incident and the China Before and After.  From her childhood account of living in an oppressed government system, to the activities during her college-age years that led to the protests in the Square and beyond, Wang’s revealing personal account is both gripping and terrifying. It’s a story that will never be allowed to be told in her home country.

“When the protests started, I was sent to the square on a daily basis to take photos for my Japanese boss to analyze for evidence of turning tides in the economy,” says Wang, who worked for Canon. “That’s why after almost thirty years I can still recall the details graphically.”  

Having experienced students’ protests while studying at Peking University, Wang naturally felt for the cause of the students. However, as an employee of a foreign enterprise, she observed the protests with mixed feelings.

“I felt sympathy for the students’ fight for democracy and freedom, but when I crossed the Tiananmen Square, hearing them sing “The Internationale will be the human race,” I became wary of them. What if the students succeeded and they took everything I owned and would own in the future? As the very few who worked for foreign enterprises at the time, I cared about the market economy, private property, and anything like that.”

Then the massacre occurred and Wang lived through the terrifying time when tanks were in the streets and people were dying. Every relationship around her was challenged.

LiterASIAN Festival Coordinator Job Opportunity

The LiterASIAN Writers Festival is hiring for two positions.  Since its beginning in 2013, the festival's mandate is to increase the public’s appreciation of Asian Canadian literary writing; advancing education in the literary arts; and to promote the literary industry by acknowledging literary publications of new writers.

This is a part-time term position May 1 – October 30, 2019. Wage: $500 /month -- contract.  Hours flexible & negotiable.

Duties/Responsibilities

Duties/Responsibilities: The Festival Coordinator is responsible and accountable for duties related to the day-to-day administration and marketing of the LiterASIAN Festival.  Duties may include:

• Office and administration procedures of the festival on a day to day basis including: word processing, flow of correspondences, telephone communications, emailing, filing, mailing and other services, as well as involvement in all aspects of festival coordination (see below for further detail)
• Responsible for keeping records and a spreadsheet of all performer information pertaining to flight scheduling, distribution of complimentary passes, while maintaining the festival budget

Application Deadline April 16, 2019.  Please email resume to: info@literasian.com

Sampaguita Perspectives: A Celebration of Filipino-Canadian Writers at the Vancouver Public Library

Join the Vancouver Filipino-Canadian Writers Collective for a lively and intimate literary evening with some of the city’s best emerging Canadian writers of the Filipino diaspora.   From short stories to spoken word, Sampaguita Perspectives promises to be an engaging, cross-cultural and introspective event for all ages.

Readings by Moses CC, Nathalie De Los Santos, Raphael Diangkinay, Carlo Javier, IJssel Jacob Ruiz and Tiffany Tarampi.  This event takes place in the new Montalbano Family Theatre.

Jamie Chai Yun Liew the winner of the 2018 Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award for fiction

The Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop is pleased to announce Jamie Chai Yun Liew the winner of the 2018 Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award for fiction. Her manuscript DANDELION ROOTS revolves around one Chinese family in a small mining town in British Columbia struggling to fit in the Canadian Chinese community, revealing class struggles, discrimination, and questions of belonging for Chinese people that don’t speak or resemble the majority Chinese. Telling the untold story about conflict and diversity within Canadian Chinese communities, Liew's elegant prose and storytelling evoke a "literary reflection of Canadian migration, identity, and statelessness."

The Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award is a community building initiative of the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop named in recognition of Jim Wong-Chu, a pioneer of Asian Canadian writing and mentor to many writers. The award continues his lifelong passion to encourage and develop quality manuscripts and finished works by new writers in the community. Originally established in 1999, the JWC Emerging Writer Award encourages and promotes authors of Pacific Rim Asian heritage to be published with an established publishing house. Previous award winners include Rita Wong's Monkeypuzzle, published by Press Gang; Madeleine Thien’s Simple Recipes (McClelland & Stewart), Catherine Hernandez, Scarborough (Arsenal Pulp Press), and Philip Huynh’s The Purple Forbidden City (Goose Lane Editions).

Jamie Chai Yun Liew is a Chinese Canadian writer who has Hakka, Hainanese, and Nyonya roots in Southeast Asia and is a student of Hokkien and Mandarin Chinese. She is also a lawyer and a law professor who teaches immigration, refugee and citizenship law in Ottawa.

Chop Suey Nation Book Launch: Hua Foundation celebrates Ann Hui

February 24, 2019
2:00 – 4:00 PM
Chinatown House, 188 East Pender Street

How is it that chop suey can be found in virtually every small town in Canada? Is chop suey "authentic?" What does it mean to tie one's livelihood to ancestral food, which forms the heart and soul of life in so many immigrant households?

Join Toronto author and Globe and Mail journalist Ann Hui in conversation about family secrets, the surprising history of ginger beef, and the brave ingenuity with which people across the country get by in a celebration to launch her new book, Chop Suey Nation: The Legion Cafe and Other Stories from Canada's Chinese Restaurants.

In a reported memoir that uncovers the author's own family history alongside the stories of families across Canada, Chop Suey Nation tells the sweet and sour story of immigration through the kitchens of small-town Chinese Canadian restaurants.  Learn more and register here

GUNG HAGGIS FAT CHOY | Robbie Burns Chinese New Year

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Join us for an evening of cultural festivities at Floata Seafood Restaurant!

This year's schedule of events include:

A Chinese banquet dinner & Scottish haggis

• Reading by John MacLachlan's White Angel
• Presentation of the Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award
• Wine and . . . Scotch! 
• More readings, music, and fun!

Purchase an individual ticket for $75 or a table of ten for $700.  Please purchase tickets online.

About Gung Haggis:

Gung Haggis Fat Choy started out as a small fundraiser of 16 people in 1998 in a crowded living room. Twenty years later it serves dinner at the biggest Chinese Restaurant in North America, and has spun off a CBC television performance special, and the SFU Gung Haggis Fat Choy Canadian Games.   The idea for this intercultural celebration originated in 1993 when a Simon Fraser University student was asked to help out with the University’s annual Robbie Burns celebrations. Todd, a fifth-generation Canadian, quickly learned about Scottish-Canadian culture with its traditions of men wearing kilts, carrying swords, playing bagpipes and eating exotic foods.

As 1993 was the year that the Chinese Lunar New Year fell on January 27, only two days away from Robbie Burns Day, which is always January 25, Todd decided to celebrate the Scottish Bard’s birthday along with the Lunar New Year.

“Gung Haggis Fat Choy!” said Wong, “I can celebrate two cultures at the same time.” And thus was born the persona of “Toddish McWong” with his growing appreciation of Scottish Canadian history and culture.  This is the “Little Dinner that Could” which is now growing into a Vancouver premiere! Creator Todd Wong has been interviewed by BBC Radio Scotland, plus local and national media.

Today, it is a major fundraiser event for Asian Canadian Writers' Workshop and LiterASIAN Festival – helping to create positive examples of interculturalism in our community!

For more information, visit https://www.gunghaggis.com/.