Please RSVP by emailing chk.library@utoronto.ca.
Abstract
During the COVID period, one of the most influential Chinese Canadian writers Larissa Lai published a novel about Hong Kong, entitled The Lost Century. Child to a Hong Kong family that migrated to North America in the 1960s, Lai has long anticipated bringing this novel to the world. The Lost Century blends underrepresented historical facts with speculative narrative. In it, sensible Violet Mah protects her fun-loving sister Emily from dangerous romantic choices through the Japanese Occupation and the period leading up to it. Through her storytelling, Lai conveys a sharp critique of state violence, including British colonialism, Japanese militarism, and Chinese chauvinism, while focusing on the everyday experiences of ordinary people. She achieves this by foregrounding fraught kinship ties between the diverse Chinese peoples (Punti Cantonese, Hakka, Tanka) as well as unexpected alliances among a cosmopolitan cast including characters with roots in Japan, Jamaica, Red River Manitoba and Ireland. Join Yiwen Liu for a conversation with Larissa Lai, who discusses the novel’s representation of the Hong Kong Cricket Club and the Wong Nai Chung Village, the ethics of writing Hong Kong, and the stakes of building un/settling relationships in both Hong Kong and Canada.
Speaker Bios
Larissa Lai is a professor and the Richard Charles Lee Chair in Chinese Canadian Studies in the Canadian Studies Program at University College and the Department of English. She is the author of nine books including Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s, The Tiger Flu, Salt Fish Girl, Iron Goddess of Mercy and most recently The Lost Century.
Yiwen Liu is an SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto. She is working on a book manuscript tentatively entitled Cold War Hong Kong: Genres of Postcolonial Resistance in Sinophone Literature, 1945-1989. The book retheorizes the relationship between the Cold War and postcolonialism, arguing that Hong Kong's unique "cold" experience reveals a shared symptom in contemporary Asia.