I always had a penchant for doing things I wasn’t supposed to, especially as a child. One hazy summer, I was poking around on my mother’s silver MacBook, feeling quite clever for having cracked her not-so-difficult password: my full name. … more »
A definition:
Liu [留]: to stay; to stay behind; or, to be detained as in JuLiu [拘留]; Xue [学]: to study
Liu Xue [留学]: to study abroad; or, more literally, to stay in a foreign country in order to … more »
Ichi.
It’s 6:30 a.m. The whole family is sitting around the dining table for breakfast. Gohan, tamagoyaki, tofu, sake, misoshiru. My sister and I eat one, two, three bowls of rice, each time with a different topping—nori, furikake, … more »
Obachan is a force to be reckoned with. She guides me through Tokyo Station with the speed and efficiency of someone less than half her age. Her body, eighty-three years in the making, carries its own weight, its own burdens, … more »
Rowena’s day used to start very early, long before the sky could conceive first light. She would see her husband off as he set out to sea, staying by the shoreline until the flickering lamp in his little bangka was … more »
1942 draws to a close with the Watada family still interned in the abandoned town of Minto, BC, during the beginning of the Japanese Canadian ‘evacuation’. Terry Watada reimagines his father’s experiences based on a diary written during the war … more »
My father was a handsome, rugged man; tough, fairly tall (five–foot-ten in his youth) and quiet. He was a lumberjack before WWII. In 1920, he was abandoned in Vancouver at the age of fourteen by his father. Since the inheritance … more »
The Asian Canadian Writers Workshop can trace its origins to the late sixties during the time of the Vietnam War, the Afro-American movement and other Third World minority movements. In Vancouver, the Cultural Revolution in China influenced local politics and … more »
I picture Jen Lam living a dual existence. By day she’s trapped in a cluttered office cubicle or a windowless law library perusing some obscure statute as a researcher for the Vancouver Association of Chinese Canadians (VACC). She’ll be wearing
Thuong Vuong-Riddick was born in Hanoi, Vietnam. She studied in Paris, France before emigrating to Canada in 1969. She has had a poetry manuscript accepted for publication by Ronsdale Press (formerly CACANANADADA Press). She returned to Vietnam recently in order