2005

Blood Ties
Writing across Chinese Borders

Series Editor Frank Stewart
Guest Editors Karen Gernant
and Chen Zeping

Vārua Tupu
New Writing from French Polynesia

Series Editor Frank Stewart
Guest Editors Kareva Mateata-Allain
and Alexander Dale Mawyer 

Blood Ties presents work from rural and urban China, Tibet, Singapore, and the U.S. Through fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and artwork, this volume explores the complexities of Chinese identity created by migration, displacement, ethnic mixing, and separation from home. Individuals whose identities have been made more complex by rapid globalization will find these works especially meaningful.

Authors include Alai, Zhang Kangkang, Zhu Wenying, Zhang Er, Wang Ping, Arthur Sze, Yan Li, Catherine Lim, Colin Cheong, Rex Shelley, and Yi writer Aku Wuwu, published in English for the first time. Subjects range from the preservation of ethnic-minority cultures to the transformation of women’s roles by industrialization and urbanization.

The volume also presents Konglish, a chapbook of poems by Yuzun Kang, the winner of the first Vincent Chin Memorial Chapbook Prize; a flash portrait of Hong Kong by Ken Chen; a moving essay by Gregory Yee Mark on the Chinese immigrant experience in Hawai‘i; and more.

Guest editors: Karen Gernant has published her translations in four issues of MĀNOA as well as the publications Conjunctions, turnrow, and Black Warrior Review. Chen Zeping is a professor in the Chinese department at Fujian Teachers’ University; he has published a number of works on Chinese linguistics. Translators include Karen Gernant, Chen Zeping, Denis Mair, Bill Ransom, Mark Bender, and Jjiepa Ayi.

Interior artist: On Char was born in 1889 to immigrant plantation workers in Kohala, a town on the Big Island of Hawai‘i. From 1911 until his retirement in 1954, he operated the City Photo Studio in Honolulu, except for a two-year period during which he trained in New York and Chicago. When he retired, he donated his life’s work of over 90,000 negatives to the Bishop Museum in Honolulu; many of these document the Chinese immigrant experience.

Vārua Tupu — the first anthology of its kind — offers English-speaking readers the stories, memoirs, poetry, photography, and paintings of a French Polynesian artistic community that has been growing in strength since the 1960s. In the literature and images of Vārua Tupu, the people of this astonishing group of islands speak for themselves.

The art includes work by such artists as Michel Chansin, Bobby Holcomb, Michel Ko, Claire Leimbach, and Marie-Helene Villierme.

Writers contributing works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and memoir include Louise Peltzer, Flora Devatine, Taaria Walker, Rai a Mai, Henri Hiro, Patrick Araia Amaru, Bruno Saura, John Lind, Celestine Hitiura Vaite, Titaua Peu, and Kareva Mateata-Allain. Translators include Nola Accili, Anne-Marie Coeroli-Green, Jean Toyama, and Mateata-Allain.

Presidentʻs message

Vārua Tupu is a welcome sign that the obstacles dividing Tahiti from the rest of Pasifika are rapidly being overcome. Even the barrier of language no longer need divide us from one another. We all belong to the Pacific, as brothers, sisters, and cousins, and it is significant that we are able to travel freely across the reef, physically and through the imaginations of our artists, and get to know one another again.
     The voices of indigenous people of French Polynesia can be heard for the first time in English in this volume, and our faces and Island way of life can be seen in the wonderful art. We hope projects such as this one will strengthen the goodwill and friendship that exist among Island people, and will bring us and our posterity closer together for many years to come.

Oscar Temaru, President, French Polynesia

 

 

 

 

208 pp., summer 2005 (17:1), $20
ISBN 978-0-8248-2954-9
Project Muse
JSTOR

216 pp., winter 2005 (17:2), $29
ISBN 978-0-8248-3019-9
Project Muse
JSTOR