Phoenix Eyes and Other Stories (The Scott and Laurie Oki Series in Asian American Studies)
A short-story collection that traces Asian American lives through migration, desire, family rupture, faith, and AIDS. Moving between California and Taiwan, it quietly reconsiders identity and intimacy.
Work Information
It follows the shadow of migration and the intimacy that lives between body and spirit, in writing that is sharp yet restrained.
Published by University of Washington Press in the Scott and Laurie Oki series, this short-story collection follows characters moving between California, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other places. Through them, Leong explores migration, desire, religion, family rupture, and the tensions surrounding AIDS. Across fourteen stories, the book traces the space between body and spirit, community and solitude, belonging and estrangement.
Review Summaries
-
It is praised as a short-story collection that explores the darker side of immigrant experience while vividly rendering Asian American lives through sex, violence, AIDS, and alienation.
-
Its Buddhist reflection, sense of place, and sexual identity are seen as resonating with one another, making the book feel like a set of stories that sustains an Asian American spiritual sensibility.
-
It is read as a collection about diasporic desire and loss, with several later stories leaving a strong impression even as the book as a whole is seen as uneven.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Univ of Washington Pr
- Published
- 2000-09-01
- Pages
- 172 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 15.88 x 1.91 x 22.86 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780295979441
- ISBN-10
- 0295979445
- Price
- 28012 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Genre Fiction/Historical
Russell Charles Leong shows an astonishing range in this new collection of stories. From struggling war refugees to monks, intellectuals to sex workers, his characters are both linked and separated by their experiences as modern Asians and Asian Americans. In styles ranging from naturalism to high-camp parody, Leong goes beneath stereotypes of immigrant and American-born Chinese, hustlers and academics, Buddhist priests and street people. Displacement and marginalization — and the search for love and liberation — are persistent themes. Leong’s people are set apart, by sexuality, by war, by AIDS, by family dislocations. From this vantage point on the outskirts of conventional life, they often see clearly the accommodations we make with identity and with desire. A young teen-ager, sold into prostitution to finance her brothers’ education, saves her hair trimmings to burn once a year in a temple ritual, the one part of her body that is under her own control. A documentary film producer, raised in a noisy Hong Kong family, marvels at the popular image of Asian Americans as a silenced minority. Traditional Chinese families struggle to come to terms with gay children and AIDS.
Russell Charles Leong , longtime editor of Amerasia Journal and managing editor of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center Publications, is also an award-winning poet and documentary filmmaker.
Related Literary Awards
- American Book Awards Edition 22 (2001) ・Winner・Winner