Lemai never forgets the humiliation of her teachers and the burning of books during the Cultural Revolution. She uses her position as a student Red Guard leader in 1960s Shanghai to find books, has one friend she can trust, and is tormented by her older brother. After being involved in the violence of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, she loses hope in China and raises Lin, her daughter, to pursue a life in the West. Both Lemai and Lin suffer from unnamed mental anguish at various points in their life and are both haunted by the past. In Shanghai, Los Angeles, and Toronto, they grapple with people from their former lives, and Lin’s attempts at erasing her Chinese identity nearly make her go mad. This is a passionate debut novel about the mother-daughter bond, Chinese cultural identity, and the struggles of being a foreigner in America.
SU CHANG is a Chinese Canadian writer, born and raised in Shanghai. Her fiction has been recognized in Prairie Fire’s Short Fiction Contest, the Canadian Authors Association National Writing Contest, the ILS/Fence Fiction Contest, and the Masters Review’s Novel Excerpt Contest. Her plays have been performed in various festivals and theatres across Canada. More essays and fiction are forthcoming in the Toronto Star, Electric Literature, Hamilton Review of Books, Ex-Puritan, Open-Book, 49th Shelf, etc. Su is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers and a member of the Writers’ Union of Canada and the Canadian Authors Association. She devotes her interstices of time between writing and a full-time job to reading, playing the piano, nature walks, and wrestling with her children. Connect with her at https://www.instagram.com/suchangwrites/.
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Su Chang, "The Immortal Woman" (House of Anansi Press, 2025) | New Books Network podcast - Listen or read transcript on Metacast
