Moving from the intimacy of a family-owned grocery store to the bicycle-laden streets of modern-day China, from the histories of early Chinese immigrants in North America to a rainy Tiananmen vigil in contemporary Vancouver, monkeypuzzle excavates the minefields of childhood and family, history and desire.Mingling the lost past and the shifting present, monkeypuzzle is a sorting and piecing together of family and ancestral histories. In North America, we are drawn into an underground world of dumplings, kitchens, dishcloths ...
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Moving from the intimacy of a family-owned grocery store to the bicycle-laden streets of modern-day China, from the histories of early Chinese immigrants in North America to a rainy Tiananmen vigil in contemporary Vancouver, monkeypuzzle excavates the minefields of childhood and family, history and desire.Mingling the lost past and the shifting present, monkeypuzzle is a sorting and piecing together of family and ancestral histories. In North America, we are drawn into an underground world of dumplings, kitchens, dishcloths and factories where journeys are recorded and prepared for in a language that is neither owned nor disowned. Crossing the Pacific Ocean, we catch glimpses of a motherland that is both longed for and foreign, of a distant Tibetan landscape and a tense Korean sidewalk. Rita Wrong's writing is joyous and evocative, a record of journeys dreamed of and undertaken, and of identity searched for and found. Evocative and urgent, monkeypuzzle is a powerful work, one that searches deeply to lay bare and cross the boundaries of race and class.
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