Fiction
New Land Same Sky
Toronto: Mawenzi House, 2018.
PS8615 .S75 N49 2018
Publisher’s Synopsis (from its website)
The Sino-Indian war has recently ended. The Chinese community in Calcutta (Kolkota), feeling threatened and facing discrimination, begin to look for ways to emigrate. Wen-Lung, a young man in his twenties, goes away on a tourist visa to Toronto, where he marries a white Canadian woman called Megan in order to obtain his legal papers. Meanwhile, back home his pregnant wife, Maylei, fresh out of high school, gives birth to a son. When a few years later she manages to arrive in Toronto, the union is far from ideal, because Wen-Lung is still attached to Megan. And to complicate matters further, Maylei meets her former lover Keith, an Anglo-Indian. Maylei returns to India to give the news to her aging parents caught in the midst of a race riot.
A touching story of modern exile and immigration, of the pain of leaving and the joy of freedom, set in Tangra, the leather district of Calcutta, and in Toronto’s neighbourhoods.
Fiction
Picture Bride: A Novel
Toronto: TSAR, 2014.
PS8615 .S75 P53 2014
Publisher’s Synopsis (from its website)
Following the India-China war of 1962, the Chinese Indians (the Hakka), fearing suspicion and hostility, begin to emigrate. Twenty-year-old Jillian Wu leaves Calcutta to marry a man she has never met—Peter Chou, also a Hakka—with much anticipation, only to discover that he is gay. Forced by her husband to keep up the charade of a “normal” marriage, and pressured by her in-laws to have a child, she flees back to Calcutta, only to be disowned by her conservative family. A moving story with political overtones, set during a period of changing times and changing values.