Maxine Hong Kingston Archive
What We Talk About When We Talk About Folk Tales
My reading list of late includes a lot of folk and fairy tales, reappropriated and retold: Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Warrior Woman, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. Call it my not-so-secret fondness for narratives that deconstruct and rewrite their source material.
Lost in Translation: A Journey on the Li River
My China-born daughter is thirteen the summer day we take a cruise down the Lijiang River from Guilin to Yangshao. This stretch is said to be the inspiration for much Chinese poetry and art: “Guilin’s unique topography. and beautiful scenery of the Karst Mountains and the unsurpassed beauty of the