Zoë S. Roy was born in China and was an eyewitness to the Red Terror during the Cultural Revolution. In Canada, she earned an M.Ed. in adult education and an M.A. in Atlantic Canada Studies from the University of New Brunswick and Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, N.S. She currently resides in Toronto where she worked as an adult educator.
Fiction (Short stories)
Butterfly Tears: Stories
Toronto: Inanna Publications and Education, 2009.
PS8635 .O94 B88 2009
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Butterfly Tears is a collection of short fiction that depicts the experiences of Chinese immigrant women facing the challenges of life in a new country. The stories are set in different parts of China, Canada, and the United States and examine Chinese women’s cross-cultural experiences in North America as well as women’s issues and political discrimination in China. The stories, or parts of stories, set in China give the reader interesting glimpses into events such as the Cultural Revolution and Mao’s death.
Fiction
Calls Across the Pacific
Toronto: Inanna Publications, 2015.
PS8635 .O94 C34 2015
Publisher’s Synopsis (from its website)
Fleeing the Cultural Revolution, a young Nina Huang says goodbye to her family and friends, and steals across the bay to Hong Kong, afterward immigrating to the U.S. and later to Canada. Twice she returns to China to reunite with her mother as well as friends, and to see how Chinese society and politics are evolving. However, as an escaped citizen who has returned with an American passport, Nina puts herself in dangerous situations and finds herself needing to flee from the red terror once again.
Fiction
The Long March Home
Toronto: Inanna Publications, 2011.
PS8635 .O94 L66 2011
Publisher’s Synopsis (from its website)
The Long March Home tells the story of three generations of women. Agnes, a young Canadian goes to China as a missionary, and falls in love with a Chinese medical student. Growing anti-western sentence forces her to return home to Nova Scotia, where she discovers she is pregnant. Meihua, their American-born daughter, travels to China in search of the father she never met and winds up marrying a Chinese man, but the Cultural Revolution tears their lives apart. With both parents imprisoned, it falls to the family’s illiterate servant, Yao, to shield their daughter, Yezi, and her brother, from family tragedy, poverty and political discrimination, negotiating their survival during the revolution that she barely understands. Only after her mother is released, does Yezi, learn about her foreign grandmother, Agnes. Curious about her ancestry, Yezi travels to the U.S. to meet Agnes and learn about her life in China with the man her mother still longs to find.
Fiction
Spinster Kang
Toronto: Inanna Publications, 2019.
PS8635.O94 S65 2019
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Thirty-two-year-old Kang is a new immigrant in Toronto. Having an older sister who was raped and suffers from the ensuing stigma in China, Kang is determined to remain a spinster, which has its own stigma in China, and she struggles with her fear and distrust of men. But Kang’s story is not a hard luck story. She is an intelligent woman and a successful immigrant. Kang deals with the perplexities of a different culture by maintaining a sense of curiosity, an enjoyment of learning about the new culture, and by finding humour rather than the humiliation that so often characterizes descriptions of immigrant experience.
Kang rooms with Tania, a Russian immigrant, and learns that many years earlier, Tanya was in love with a Chinese medical student at Moscow University who was abruptly returned to China for having had a relationship with her. Kang’s own father once studied at that university but has never talked about it since he was forced to leave Moscow and then was labelled as a rightist during the Chinese Anti-Rightist Campaign. Since then her father has been dispatched to work and live in Kunming, a city far away from Beijing. Could the paths of her father and Tania have ever crossed?
Curious about her father’s past, Kang decides to pay a visit to Moscow, accompanied by Brian, Tania’s nephew, a charming engineer who wants to explore his Russian Jewish roots. Spending time with Brian helps Kang to see how much her sister’s tragedy has shadowed her life. When Brian suddenly shows symptoms of schizophrenia, Kang must decide whether to throw her spinster’s hat away or end her relationship with Brian.