MPH Breakfast Club with ... Wena POON & CHUAH Guat Eng

The 12th MPH Breakfast Club on Saturday, March 22, 2008, at 11.00a.m. to 12.30p.m., will be featuring Singaporean writer Wena Poon, whose début collection of stories, Lions in Winter: Stories (MPH Group Publishing, 2008), was published by MPH Group Publishing in December 2007. Poon left Singapore as a teenager and has lived in Hong Kong and the U.S. Her fiction, poetry and nonfiction have been widely anthologised and published in the U.S., Europe and Asia. She read literature and law at Harvard University and currently lives in San Francisco, California.

In this collection of eleven insightful stories, Poon examines the quiet lives of displaced Singaporeans living abroad and in Singapore who are often torn between two worlds in their search for an imaginary homeland.

Poon’s portraits of various lives share a common, constant yearning to belong in a place made foreign whether by time or space. Occasionally humorous, but always with compassion, she captures the rich inner lives of individuals who form part of the kaleidoscopic modern history of Asian migration in their quest for modern lives.

Wena Poon will also be doing a reading at readings@seksan’s at 3.30p.m. the same day

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We will also be featuring Chuah Guat Eng, the author of Echoes of Silence (Holograms, 1994), who has just come out with her first collection of short stories, The Old House and Other Stories (Holograms, 2008).

“There is much to admire in the quiet craftsmanship of Guat’s stories, and I do hope there is more of them to come.” Sharon Bakar

Eric Forbes and Tan May Lee will be introducing Wena Poon and Chuah Guat Eng respectively while Janet Tay will be moderating the session.

Date March 22, 2008 (Saturday)
Time 11.00a.m.-12.30p.m.
Venue MPH Bangsar Village II Lot 2F-1 (2nd Floor), Bangsar Village II, No. 2 Jalan Telawi 1, Bangsar Baru, 59100 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Phone (603) 2287 3600

Food and refreshments will be served
All lovers of literature are most welcome

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REVIEWS

“Travel broadens the mind, but emigration often carries with it the dilemmas of dislocation. It is often a question of knowing when to leave and when to return. Wena Poon’s stories dissect this question delicately, ironically, wickedly. Hers is a voice that should be heard: its wry mirth bubbles beneath culture clashes, runs between the hidden agenda of generations and genders, washes over the quotidian clangour of transculturation. These stories are a classic mixture of city and jungle. Poon rattles the familial cage with wit and vigour.” Brian Castro, author of Shanghai Dancing (2003) and The Garden Book (2005)

“A commendable début, refreshingly unpretentious and heartfelt. Wena Poon’s writing is confident and deft, and she doesn’t resort to fashionable and intrusive postmodern gimmicks. As a result, her stories are so much more effective and powerful.” Tan Twan Eng, Man Booker Prize-longlisted author of The Gift of Rain (2007)

“Wena Poon’s stories are both delicate and explosive. In Lions in Winter she writes about people at the margins of our lives, people who are so because we fail to invite them closer. Here they insist on the invitation and each new encounter is a revelation.” Brian Leung, author of Lost Men (2007) and World Famous Love Acts (2004)

“Wena Poon’s frank, refreshing stories bravely reject the pat stereotypes of Asia so common in the West. Asia desperately needs more narratives like hers to cancel out all the foolish, precious exoticism, pagodas and bound feet and concubines everywhere. Instead, she gives us complex characters negotiating urban realities. Her characters wrestle with dislocation, hybrid identities, tradition and modernity, and ultimately demonstrate, as the best literature always does, that so much of the human experience is universal, whatever its geographic and cultural particularities.” Preeta Samarasan, author of Evening Is the Whole Day (2008)

“Evocative.” Tinling Choong, author of FireWife (2007)

“Reading this book was like attending a family reunion at which each of my warped, wacky, flawed relatives took turns to drag skeletons out of closets and regale me with anecdotes that were by turns funny, dramatic, thought-provoking or tragic.” Alexandra Wong, in The Sunday Star

“Refreshingly direct, absorbing from each opening paragraph. I thoroughly enjoyed Wena Poon’s storytelling.” Lansell Taudevin

“Although several of the stories in Wena Poon’s Lions in Winter have been published in different places and at different times, the collection as a whole is unified by the common thread of displacement. Like the Chinese lions in the snowy New York landscape in the title story, many of her characters are Asians transplanted to the west. Sometimes they also make the journey back to Singapore, giving us the chance to see the country through their eyes. Poon’s great gift, though, is to keep that freshness of vision and to bring out the extraordinariness of the ordinary lives she describes, looking not only at immigration and the sometimes painful path to assimilation, but also questioning just what it means to be Singaporean. She writes beautifully in a style that is both informal and conversational, and there are clever little asides thrown into the narrative that really tickle the funny bone.” Sharon Bakar

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NEXT ON THE BREAKFAST CLUB
MENU IN APRIL 2008

April 19, 2008 (Saturday): Kunal Basu, the author of such novels as The Opium Clerk (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001/Phoenix, 2002), The Miniaturist (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003/Phoenix, 2004) and Racists (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006/Phoenix, 2007) as well as the short-story collection, The Japanese Wife (HarperCollins India, 2008)

Kunal Basu will also be doing a reading at readings@seksan’s at 3.30p.m. the same day