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Sophronia Liu – A Shimmering Sea, 20th Century Hong Kong
It has taken me a very long time to put together this post because I wasn’t sure how I could best honour my friend Sophronia Liu. I have had this post marked as “Private” for over a year. I met Sophie in 2010 at a conference in Hong Kong. I was immediately drawn to her creative energy and openness. Until I met Sophie, I’d never met a female and Chinese artist my mother’s age, let alone someone who was part of the 1960s Asian-American/civil rights movement. At the time, Sophie was a PhD student who was working on her memoir, which was posthumously published as The Shimmering Sea, a collection…
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Famous Adopted People: a Novel – by Alice Stephens
I saw Famous Adopted People at my local library and picked it up for a friend who has an adopted child. I was in a hurry so I didn’t see the words ‘a novel’ and thought it was a non-fiction book about famous adopted people. It is not. The book is best described as a rollicking read that explores a range of salient issues around transnational adoption and one that exemplifies how some truths are best told through fiction. At the start of the novel, we meet two young women who are negotiating the complexities of their transnational and racialized identities. At the center of the story is Lisa Pearl, a Korean-America adoptee who isn’t…
