SKY Lee is a native of Port Alberni, B.C. She earned a B.A. in Fine Arts from the University of British Columbia and a Diploma in nursing from Douglas College. Her short stories, poetry and feminist writings have appeared in many journals and anthologies. She illustrated Paul Yee’s juvenile novel Teach Me How to Fly, Skyfighter. Lee lived in Vancouver, B.C. for many years but now resides in Montreal, Quebec.
Fiction (Short stories)
Bellydancer: Stories
Vancouver: Press Gang Publishers, 1994.
PS8573 .E44 B4 1994
Publisher’s Synopsis
Sky Lee’s protagonists in this brilliantly quirky collection include bellydancers, bag ladies, lesbians, and sojourners from distant times. … Interweaving whimsical stories of enchantment with macabre plots, Lee flaunts the illicit and mocks the market demand for the exotic. With her distinctive blend of humour and melodrama, she spins allegorical tales and stories for sheer entertainment.
Fiction
Disappearing Moon Cafe
Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1991, c1990.
PS8573 .E44 D57 1991
Publisher’s Synopsis
Sometimes funny, sometimes scandalous, always riveting, this extraordinary first novel traces the lives and passionate loves of the women of the Wong family through four generations. As past sins and inborn strengths are passed on from mother to daughter to granddaughter, each generation confronts, in its own way, the same problems — isolation, racism, the clash of cultures — and each evolves a little bit more.
Awards and Honours
1990 Governor General’s Literary Awards–English Fiction (Nominated)
1991 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize (Nominated)
2005 re: Douglas & McIntyre reprint ed. Alcuin Society Award for Excellence in Book Design in Canada–Prose Fiction category (2nd Prize); Designer: Peter Cocking.
Anthology (Fiction)
AlliterAsian
Lee, SKY. “No Sleeping on Bench (excerpt from novel Progress in Process).” In AlliterAsian: Twenty Years of Ricepaper Magazine, edited by Julia Lin, Allan Cho, and Jim Wong-Chu. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2015, 219-228.
First published in Ricepaper 19, no. 2 (2014)
Selected Criticism and Interpretation
Adams, Bella. “Sky Lee, Disappearing Moon Café (1990).” In her Asian American Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008.
PS508 .A8 A33 2008
Beauregard, Guy Pierre. “Asian Canadian Literature: Diasporic Interventions in the Work of SKY Lee, Joy Kogawa, Hiromi Goto, and Fred Wah.” Ph.D. diss., University of Alberta, 2000.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Beneventi, Domenic. “Salt-Water City: The Representation of Vancouver in Sky Lee’s Disappearing Moon Cafe and Wayson Choy’s The Jade Peony.” Ch. in Claiming Space: Racialization in Canadian Cities, ed. Cheryl Teelucksingh. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006.
HT127 .C53 2006
Beneventi, Domenic A. “Spatial Exclusion and the Abject Other in Canadian Urban Literature.” Ph.D. diss., Université de Montréal, 2005.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Busse, Shannon Grace. “Inscribed in the Story: Meta-fiction, Magical Realism, and Textualization in Contemporary Fiction.” M.A. diss., University of Alaska Anchorage, 1999.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Chao, Lien. “The Collective Self: A Narrative Paradigm and Self-expression in Three Prose Works.” Chap. in her Beyond Silence: Chinese Canadian Literature in English. Toronto: TSAR, 1997, 88-121.
PS8089.5 .C47 C52 1997
Darias-Beautell, Eva. Graphies and Graphs: (Con)texts and (Inter)texts in the Fiction of Four Contemporary Canadian Women. Bruxelles: P.I.E.-Peter Lang, 2001.
PS8089.5 .W6 D37 2001
Denomy, Jennifer Marie. “Secrets, Silence and Family Narrative: Joy Kogawa’s “Obasan” and Sky Lee’s “Disappearing Moon Cafe”.” M.A. diss., McGill University, 1997.
Fu, Bennett Yu-Hsiang. “Differing Bodies, Defying Subjects, Deferring Texts: Gender, Sexuality, and Transgression in Chinese Canadian Women’s Writing.” Ph.D. diss., Université de Montréal, 2004.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Gordon, Neta. “Chartered Territory: Women Writing Genealogy in Recent Canadian Fiction.” Ph.D. diss., Queen’s University at Kingston, 2002.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Harting, Heike Helene. “Performative Metaphors in Caribbean and Ethnic Canadian Writing” Ph.D. diss., University of Victoria, 2000.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Kich, Martin. “SKY Lee.” In Asian American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson, [197]-203. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000.
PS153 .A84 A825 2000
Lee, Sharon. “Sharon Lee.” In Jin Guo: Voices of Chinese Canadian Women, ed. Momoye Sugiman for the Women’s Book Committee, Chinese Canadian National Council. Toronto: Women’s Press, 1992, 91-98.
Lee, Tara. “The Decline of the Chinese Matriarch: The Struggle to Reconcile “Old” with “New”.” M.A. diss., University of British Columbia, 2002.
Lim, Huai-Yang. “Representations of Class Identity in Chinese Canadian Literature.” Ph.D. diss., University of Alberta, 2005.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Lu, Shujiang. “Rereading the Past and Reshaping the Future: Narrative Texts by Asian American Women Authors.” Ph.D. diss., University of Western Ontario, 2001.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Morfetas, Elpida. “Transgressing Boundaries and Cultural Haunting in Chinese American and Chinese Canadian ‘Talk Stories’.” M.A. diss., Carleton University, 2002.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Mullen, Amanda. “Mythic Migrations: Recreating Migrant Histories in Canadian Fiction.” Ph.D. diss., University of Ottawa, 2005.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Sauer, Lara Mark. “Writing ‘Kinography’: Narrating the Self Through Family and Kin in “The Woman Warrior” and “Disappearing Moon Cafe”.” M.A. diss., University of Toronto, 1998.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Wilson, Kim. “Postmodernism and the English-Canadian Meta-narrative.” M.A. diss., University of Alaska Anchorage, 1998.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Zhao, Qingqing. “A Context(s)-intertext(s) Model for Studying Resistant Voice(s) in Sky Lee’s “Disappearing Moon Cafe”.” M.A. diss., University of Alberta, 2003.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses