Pik-Shuen Fung was born in Hong Kong and raised in Vancouver, BC. Fung is a Canadian writer and artist who now lives in New York City. She holds an MFA in fine art from the School of Visual Arts and a BA in visual art from Brown University.
Fiction
Ghost Forest
Toronto: Strange Light, 2021.
PS8611.U54 G56 2021
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
A graceful and indelible debut about love, grief, and family welcomes you into its pages and invites you to linger, staying with you long after you’ve closed its covers.
How do you grieve, if your family doesn’t talk about feelings?
This is the question the unnamed protagonist of Ghost Forest considers after her father dies. One of the many Hong Kong “astronaut” fathers, he stayed in Hong Kong to work, while the rest of the family immigrated to Vancouver before the 1997 Handover, when the British returned sovereignty over Hong Kong to China.
As she revisits memories of her father throughout the years, she struggles with unresolved questions and misunderstandings. Turning to her mother and grandmother for answers, she discovers her own life refracted brightly in theirs.
Buoyant, heartbreaking, and unexpectedly funny, Ghost Forest is a slim novel that envelops the reader in joy and sorrow. Fung writes with a poetic and haunting voice, layering detail and abstraction, weaving memory and oral history to paint a moving portrait of a Chinese-Canadian astronaut family.
Awards and Honours
2022 Amazon First Novel Award (Winner)
Links
Pik-Shuen Fung personal website
Publisher Strange Light, a Hazlitt project of Penguin Random House Canada