Asymptote‘s Weekly Roundup is back for 2021 and this week our editors bring you news of major prize events in Taiwan, an event honouring the renowned writer Xi Xi in Hong Kong, and a refreshing online poetry series in the United States. Read on to find out more!
Darren Huang, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Taiwan
On December 15, the winners of the 2021 Taipei International Book Exhibition (TiBE) Book Prizes and the 17th Golden Butterfly Awards for book design were announced by the Taipei Book Fair Foundation. Both awards are major events at the annual TiBE, which starts on January 26. The winners featured a variety of forms and themes by writers from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, whose works reflect the prize’s investment in the “freedom of expression and freedom of publication as well as the tolerance and openness of this land.” Fiction prize winners include Huang Chun-ming, whose fiction has been featured in Asymptote, Kuo Chiang-sheng, and Pam Pam Liu’s graphic novel, “A Trip to Asylum.” Kuo’s novel concerns a piano tuner who bonds with the widower of a dead pianist, while Liu’s work, the first graphic novel to win in the fiction category, describes the experiences of a man who is admitted and finally released from a psychiatric hospital. In the nonfiction category, Hong Kong writer Hon Lai-chu won for her essay collection, “Darkness Under the Sun,” in which the author reflects on Hong Kong’s 2019 democracy protests.
In late November 2019, President Tsai Ing-wen awarded a posthumous citation to the nativist poet Chao Tien-yi for his contributions to contemporary Taiwanese poetry and children’s literature. Chao was one of the founders of the Li Poetry Society, a collective of Taiwanese nativist poets. Chao worked in a realist mode, through which he lyrically portrayed Taiwan’s landscape and the everyday lives of the working-class in such poems as “Cape Eluanbi,” an ode to the Pacific Ocean, and “Song of the Light-Vented Bulbul,” a nostalgic portrait of his hometown of Taichung. In 1973, the poet suffered a disappointing setback in his career when he lost his position as acting director of National Taiwan University’s (NTU) Department of Philosophy due to false accusations of Communist sympathies. Chao transformed his despair into the poems, “Daddy Lost His Work” and “Don’t Cry, Child.” The Ministry of Culture cited Chao’s works as “both mirror and window for reflecting upon a particular era in Taiwan for generations to come.”
Charlie Ng, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong
As the fourth wave of coronavirus infection hit the city severely, social distancing rules have been tightened throughout the festive seasons. The prospect of relaxing the measures before the Lunar New Year is pretty unlikely. Literary and cultural events have to stay online for a longer time. In December of last year, the Education University of Hong Kong organised an academic conference, “Floating City: International Conference on Xi Xi” to honour the important Hong Kong writer Xi Xi, who was the first Hong Kong writer to receive the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature. Quite a number of her works have been translated into English, including My City: a Hong Kong Story, A Girl Like Me and Other Stories, Marvels of a Floating City, and Other Stories, and Flying Carpet: A Tale of Fertillia. The translation of her poetry collection, Not Written Words: Selected Poetry of Xi Xi, was awarded the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize in 2017. During the conference, scholars participated in discussions on Xi Xi’s significance in Hong Kong and World Literature, as well as issues related to the translation and adaptation of her works.
The topic of the translation of Hong Kong literature is also the subject of an online event co-organised by local literary organisations Literary Doctrine and Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. This time, poetry is in focus, as the event’s title reveals: “Poetic Power of HK in Translation.” Hong Kong literature translators Andrea Lingenfelter and Jennifer Feeley, poets Arthur Leung and Ng Mei-kwan, and scholar Tammy Ho Lai-ming will engage in a dialogue on the subject and read a few selected works.
On the last day of 2020, the oldest Campus bookstore in Hong Kong, Swindon Book, located in the University of Hong Kong, had to close down due to declining book sales because students increasingly opt for online means of buying books and sharing of PDF versions. Earlier in the year, Swindon Book had already closed its Lock Road store in Tsim Sha Tsui after doing business there for more than half a century. As one of the oldest book selling companies in Hong Kong, Swindon Book has recently turned its business focus to online book retailing in order to adapt to the changing trends in the book market.
Clémence Lucchini, Educational Arm Assistant, reporting from the United States
New year, new events? For readers looking to get a glimpse of the literary scene from their home, this article from last spring offers a list of bookstores and literary organizations that started to get creative online as the pandemic hit and the United States slammed shut. The reason why this list is still worth mentioning is because most of these places are continuing to virtually engage with their public, as often as three or more times a week. Planning my selection of online events for the upcoming month has led me to find that a selection of the Transnational Literature Series at the Brookline Booksmith had already been recorded and posted on WGBH Forum Network. It often features talks with translators, such as the one that took place in September inviting Sophie Hughes (read her translations from Spanish in Asymptote) to discuss her work on Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor.
The MIT’s “Pleasures of Poetry” is a refreshing poetry event. This popular series has been going for over two decades and between January 4-22 will host daily one-hour discussions (1:00–2:00 p.m. EST) tailored to one or two poems. Often moderated by the MIT’s own faculty, this year’s online format will discuss pieces by more than fifteen authors, including Ocean Vuong, Margaret Atwood, and Joan Naviyuk Kane.
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