In Carrie Changs winning fifth novel, The Quack, set in the beloved postcard city of Chinatown, San Francisco, the red planetary mists converge with hexagonal bagua wonder as old Chinese families convene with ghostly vexation, debating everything under the sun with sluggish pride and keen neo-religiosity. As the young protagonist, Isabelle Wu forsakes her dual-end journalism career to become a lollygagger in qui dunnit plaid. She finds that the Bohemian life has its innate possibilities and rewards, and she soon meets a quack who pleads with her in the mighty language of the occult, offering to cure her of the Chinatown blues with an off-color foot rub. This book is a must-read for anyone who has heard a frenzied ghost in the wall or experienced a Peking duck fascination. A Chinese fortune-cookie literary special that will make your eyes pop out and your hair turn righteous colors in the dark.
Raycious Life is a tale of two cities, a lumbago breeder of Chinese women and glorious hairdos, and a breathtaking novel of ennobling beauty and upheaval. Set in both Hong Kong and bustling New York City, this bustling story tells the riveting tale of six Asian American bratlings on the trail of action, hot sex, and gossip in a cosmopolitan sphere of everlasting change. Going with the Tao, they find their nose rings shining in the dark, their tattoos dyed in sweet henna, and their Chinglish lingo separated by lost syllabi of the most perverse kind, beating them down under the Asian American sun. Told in the voice of Trudie Wu, Raycious Life borders on hilarity and morphic laughter, descrying the hot days and nights of a group of young Chinese wayfarers in the midst of ra-ta-ta yuppies who must decide for themselves what makes sense in this fast-moving world of cynicism, happiness, and everlasting passion.
Carrie Chang was born in 1970, in Syracuse, New York. She attended Stanford University, UC-Berkeley and New York University, obtaining her B.A., and M.J. and M.F.A. in English and journalism and creative writing, respectively. She worked as an Asian American journalist in the arts/political field for almost a decade, creating her own magazine, “Monolid,” and lives as a writer/poet in the Bay Area. Her favorite pastimes include swimming and painting.
Two Shades of Regret is a sine qua non of Sino-thrill poems which border on the evanescent and the tripnotic hem of the roseate lyric, lovely paeans of blooming immortality as seen on the paintings of a Ming vase. These new eclectic poems, lush and ghostly, of hyacinth and radical etiology, draw from the ecosphere of flora and fauna, are pictos of the efflorescent flamage and its celestial Chinese ethos. Rich with tingling sensate of zen splurge, and chimeric value, they blend the soul force of rampant color with the self-styled mimicry of the blurred past.
This is a novel about family expectations, a story about Chinese struggles with so many pretty et ceteras, about beating da sa jieh on the head with heightened morals and a squeaky bandinet spoon; about a girl who is too spoiled and proud to admit that life is too difficult for her, and there are devilish expectations by macabre parents who long to bind her life into a quietus sorrow, in which there are no outs save the fickle whims of a society in which one yearns to paint with minu-tiae in a tiny, disturbed room, to see civility in this or that man’s eyes. About rushing into it—your destiny. There was some fake tenderness that was terrible to witness. It’s about a girl who does not want to be a quintessential butterfly queen—-whose parents force her to wear the slipper, a fairytale unfit for the muses. What she loves is her ineffable charm, and her freedom; it is a book against excess filial piety and religion (life is so short, so stop washing the dishes); Why so good? It is the personae of the picture of a woman who is quirky, complex, and quasi-essential whatever that means in this laudable day.
This imaginary repast of words, cut across a terra incognito of porcelain and useless dragonoid fever, is a feast of dynastic worth, love, and joy ra-ta-ta felt across the shimmering alphabetim of self-hood in a desperate world of unicorn inkwells and blue-tattoo monkeys. An heirloom of hoo-ha refundance straight from the moonshine factory will move like the caterpillar feet of Canton with twixel and twixel.
These lavender sub-rosa letters traced blithely from the lacunae of the genie’s heart are all misfits and soul crashers, illuminated by the save-the-world Bagua light and dark hexagons and circles, a supreme, jolly word-fest for the double-image sage who longs to dine on saffron alphabet and cum-linguistic punch. It’s a speckle of sylvan stars and moonshine from the basement of the Sinophilic mind—glorified poems of superpalazzo double entendres, echoes, and shouts rising from the rainy-day words of dark three-penny operas of my kind.
In a glitterati of keen effects, Fork and Spoon presents the debacle of triumph over the dark side of humanity, where doubt and suspicion leave their precious mark of evil against the brighter side of the rainbow. In San Francisco Chinatown which describes a young Chinese American girls fascination with womanhood and romance, and the forays of her neighbors and her mother, Dora, who cant seem to make up her mind about what to do with the torrid affairs in the county. Richly embroidered with extended, juicy metaphor and episodic feats of muted joy, Fork and Spoon is a flying testament to Chinese feminism, to suburban poetry, and to the secrets of the sylvan heart. In Carrie Changs second novel, Fork and Spoon, a family growing up in the suburbs of SF Chinatown is embroiled over sibling rivalry, hypocrisy, and ambition as they experience growing pains. Mona, a ten-year-old Chinese girl is independent, curious, and shy, an independent feminist at an early age searching for meaning in a wayward world of no regrets. Her brother, Ralph, chastises her for being such a loony, while he prays to saints, and their mother, Dora, brings them up in the thrill of the moment, while bemused Chinatown aunties look on.
On a quiet summer’s day, I will remember the strange mumbo jumbo I’ve muttered into paisley tea-cups and hat-boxes, into pearly, desperado rooms of anonymous paint and wallpaper, places strewn with highlander words and floral confetti of the most incarnate sort; nonsensical nursery rhymes quacking left and right in the intervals of the fulcrum night, where the silver face of the yellow moon hangs blithely on a string from my doppelgänger ceiling. Nights of peering into the cold-cream mirror stand on the shelf, and flipping through au-tomaton books of ergy; those consonants of watery ilk now rising on the duck tongue like bits of candy, and the daffodil perfume haze in the air making my alien eyes seek the truth of the matter on a Sunday in June——that instantaneous bling in my eyelids which was purple heather now leav-ing a smidgen of awkward destiny within me. Some foolish hours spent dreaming of the iridescence of a gigantic token pearl stolen from the surface of a Manchurian paper crown made me cry for the old dynasties, the chit words missing from my square pillow. Willoughby willow, and rosy wooze? Where were the beautiful, twisted women of the old days, reeling from a sunset distortion of the actual colors—-wild onyx, and adamantine ruby, the rhythms of the slow beat outside the drape of my curtain revealed the petering traffic run amok on the planet of no-return; disturbed eyes run hither and slither on the margins of blarney pages of creased, dowdy manuscripts, seeking truth and weathered light. Like the blue funk thumb-prints of paper-cuts, and grief, melting into past and present tokens of my kind; a shitzu runs out of the noire night into the next street, and I am left with absolutely nothing but my gym shoes stinging with acronyms of love. Theatrical heaven could be only taken in doses, with a hint of sassafras candy stolen from out of the snuff box on my desk; that was grim reality, the orphaned cry of grey-haired children, starved for affection in the indefatigable sun, opaline wrists bedizened with Capernaum gems of a keen variety, like betting for horse-races on a Sunday afternoon was this thing called a sylvan iden-tity, full of salacious vim, and quelque chose passions, the stiff circle of flowers hanging above my head.
Inspired by Virginia Woolfs The Waves, Cloud Bristle is a cacophony of voices strung together like jetsam pearls glimmering in a set of fake teeth. Linda, Lucy, Lucinda, and Dorrie are four women on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Caught in the thrum of the moment in the paranoia-hungry monastery of Chinatown, they share their herstory of escapades and concomitant joy. Each tells her individual story in the Society of Fire of Light, designed to filter out an existential angst-ridden world filled with sexual boredom and brutality. As virtual nobodies wrapped in delicious anonymity, they seek refuge in the precepts of muted desire and the Tao sheds light on their predicament as specimens of the second sex. Lucinda lusts after another womans flower, only to find that shes gained a universal creed of self-possession, transcending jealousy for absurd aesthetics. Linda taps into the wellspring of the comical gods, tuning into Yabba dabba doo at will, chasing the evil spirits away. In this darkly woven comedy rapt with poison pen and raucous threads of scintillating beauty, the female voice is scattered like pollen throughout the text at intervals with a magnificent joy in the tradition of the talk story. Coloratura turning into brazen operatic feats of bravura leaves the reader dying for more oxygen in this illuminated text of desire. Cloud Bristle floats out the door into the square of the city, where dazzling words find their aegis under the accordion sun.
“The Anorexic Maison,” is a coup d’etat of verbal acrobatics, about the Great Habitué of Non-eating, a 21st libertarian circus of snide effects in which the glam gals confess why they take refuge in the Maison after years of being on the diet circuit. (Excerpt from the book) “There are many hypocritical women in this house but lovely women too,” says Jenny, the matron of house who wants to eat its doors and shutters. There’s a mea culpa attitude in her strange effusive voice, some willingness to concede it is the hour of compassion for all women, a place where they can eat their bingo under the roofs, and kick up their yin-yang heels. “I said Anorexic Mee-sawn, pardon my French, it’s fucked, like mice in the house,” said Jenny, who wolfs down her Guadeloupe homey Mexican bars by the dozen and shudders in her ocean blue jeans. She admitted the whole thing was about getting even, svelte and more svelte, by the way, until you continued to persist in this fashion, not eating for whatever reason that is wholly personal. “Asian girls don’t eat,” by the way, she adds, “You never know when it’s sneaking up on you.”
These poems are superannuated haiku, missives from the velveteen earth, and sketches of a divine immortality. They are purlieus of eye-bending syllabics combined in hyphenated ghost-like form. Curved out in their final destiny, they smack of mild confession from a former journalist-turned-poet. These verses sing of nocturnal vision, searing with eternal life on the map of botanical weather; sunny expatriates in the demesne of feminist struggle sing of triumph in the purple sunrise, with wild tongues of glory. Like an origami crane, these poems are carefully crafted with bewitching geometry and want to fly to the moon.
The Dieters" is a feel-good travesty of gourmand pleasure, a no-no to eating while you're in the monkey-bars of time, a piece de resistance of literary treasure that describes the hi-jinks adventures of living on the edge in the world of food recreation and diet revolution; read it with a matcha mochi donut and laugh.
This subconscious ploy into a humorous city enlivened by the diablo ghosts of another era is a soulful breather of incarnate words and post-modern identity; Emily Yew is a down-and-out Chinese American writer who is battling her Werther-like en situ in Funnyvale, where nothing is ever that funny. Propped up by her 80-year-old mother and her sister Audrey, Emily struggles with being “uncured,” with dark, creative depressions, and revisited by romantic flashbacks from her primal youth. A heart-warming novel about meta-writing, that will make you ooh and ah.
A tale of diaspora in which the small town gals found their ultimate beat. In this rag-time melody of beat-prose and surreptitious word-play, simplicity bedevils the young Chinese girls of California small-towns, leaving them upbraided by their parents, who can do no more than witness their descent into a netherworld of tattletale games and raffish jealousies. On the beat and path, a carnegie midget named Toomly spies on the children of Sun-town, watching them Zumba-dance behind a tan-bark fence. The town beauty Dora Foo howls for more devastation in the night and prays for poetry to come back to the world. Where there is warmth and familial quirkiness, nothing under the sun can harm the two families of the Lius and the Wongs, who train their spoiled daughters to be uniquely high-minded and free-spirited; gone are the Old Ways of the Old Country and resplendent are the new fairytale customs of this free-spoken America. A sumptuous read for the season of liberty and fast-paced enjoyment.
“The Adventures of Mimiko Cat,” is a comical romance about a waif that lives a comic book existence in a raving madcap world, a leftist saboteur journalist who keeps flying back and forth from Soho to Shanghai in search of love and the quintessential affair. As a devil-may-care feminist, she finds that the bitchy acumen within her fighting with her desire for “shallow men” and their misfit lingua franca, from the bedroom to the pillory. A spell-binding adventure about raw language, feminism, passion, and symbolic emotions in a meandering world of time, space and everything, this novel borders on hysteria, and lets you see the Asian American heart inside out.
In “Sushi Girl,” the art of sibling rivalry becomes intertwined with sushi smorgasbord, as the Su sis-ters find themselves on the verge of a nervous breakdown, living with hilarity and neurotic break-neck speed in racy Manhattan. Fueled by jealous adoration of each other, the sisters are like “scis-sor-paper-stone,” pretty sibling girls who often competed with each other and cancelled each other out, wearing their flashy Gucci belts and morphant mosquito pearls, who ate plenty of sushi in the Village from time to time in their rambling 30’s and experienced the horror of not knowing who they were; they were partying so hard, they forgot everything and anything. “We’re not even Japa-nese,” they laughed, thinking about the desperate way they ate their pickanniny share of sushi fish, and sang, “Come on, it’s the Village Hour,” and went sniggering in the daft happenstance rain to-gether, prancing a pied past Prince and Essex and all those green twinkling troubadour signs in the city that made everyone who was everyone quite giddy to be sure.
“Sonnets to a Fetishini” is a feel-good vaudeville of high-cholesterol demolition egg-on-display verbal pyrotechnics, the romance of three hysterical Asian-American women who find themselves head over heels over European sinophiles in a shock to the heart story interwoven with charms. Chesire Su is a young Stanford ingenue who cannot decide whether to eat pho or become the world’s greatest poet; the chances are slim that she’ll ever leave Ralph Gooding, her white boyfriend who serenades her in a garden over the course of days. I quote: Guilt No More Tongue-twisters, That sound like your Frazzled sisters, and Hoisin donuts, That have no holes, I kiss my white man, And say that he’s one Of the ghouls who floated To Asia on a dull magic carpet With rad elbows of lust, A leggo my l’Eggo, with Fusty face and Enigmatic Body, the three-part Principle of the soul, Seems oh so shoddy, I want to be whole, One chocolate bar, Who reaps the entire World with a yummy Gulp; fetish is like A quick snap; you Can get it on the Yelp.
“Erstwhile Bubble Tea” is 100 percent pure moonshine, a literary topis of strange beliefs and occasional bliss, a humanitarian account of how the sunshine tribe triumphed over darkness and the little cities of the Bay Area celebrated their second shadow; while drinking tea becomes an erstwhile pleasure for the taking, the cool cat Asians of suburban California put to rights their value to conquer the vicissitudes of plainspoken time and outrageous happenstance; whether they are putting on airs, or exhibiting the sur le tat neuroses of a resurrected childhood on a summer’s day, these characters lead a charmed existence, putting on a show not unlike “Juneteenth,” and making a statement for their ethnic pageantry, and cosmic FOB existence on the planet.
Li Qing Zhao’s Kitchen is a pandemonium of quick words, a hot-stop of new age versification, tender poems written by the disco ball of the 21st century dark music of revolution and upheaval, a glorious song of abc and cherry tree phonetics
Monkey-Town is a fantasy thriller that describes the joyride experience of Jenna Wu in SF Chinatown, her ups and downs, and her ultimate enlightenment.
These finely crafted ecofeminist poems cut from brown sugar and green cloth are the stuff of starfish whiz and Asian American turmoil, a yin-and-yang duo turned inside out with a glamorous hint of sassafras and old-time honey; dulcet verses written with slant rhymes in combination with shifting pictorial colors of hilarity provide a backdrop to Changs idiosyncratic alphabet, riddled with dynastic complaint and thoughtful ghetto beauty. A quick visit to the planetarium of ABC asteroids and pinyin clouds, a true soul witchs brew in the making.
These syncopated tropes of sylvan metier and the old paradise country struggle reflect the heart of a Chinese-American poet in full conscience, ring-a-ding poems of earth and light that descry the ding-hao gestures of an ethnic girlhood in full bloom, some gobbledygook of the early years.
Helen is obsessed with gods of destruction in Chinatown, and hereditary fracas in the cosmos, the genealogy of muses, who laugh and cry in the passing of time and the sublimation of her “dim sum days,” gorgeous days spent staring at the clock and painting canvases that reflect the coming of the Great Muse, the glorious idolatry of the Chinese sub-culture she loves and detests, the dark men she’s come to see as both familiar and foreign. Seeking out the planetary whiz and the mulberry pipe, she’s just a fraction of her worth, until she meets Edward Yee, the missing piece in her life story. Together they ransom the bird-cage and make the moon shine until it’s just an itty bitty splice scone on a plate amidst a bee-bop hol-iday jazz tune that’s worth the pleasure. “Dim Sum Days” is a contagious work about love and art, holiday trolling and passionate inter-locking, the cosmos at its most vainglorious struggle. Read it with your trisket har gow on a Sunday after-noon while the junk ships are floating across the Kowloon River, the fantasy never-ending.
These poems are written with a jazzy bee-bop melody, a secretive voice, a phalanx of sweet words and silky resonance. Lounge writing with a taboo slant in which poetry becomes seductive as the weaver of the word. A student from the NYU poetry cadre, Chang makes the art of dressing up a mystical rite full of charms. A real mind blower full of hi-jinks and bluesy metaphor for the sephoric savante-garde.
Mulberry Myths is a poetic rouser of sixteen melodies, a razzamatazz of sino-images that are a token of this romantic movement of magical linguistic bravura, a modern symphony of eastern melody
These Neo-nostalgic poems are mind-benders, celestial missives brought in from the stork with a starry, mandy angle, written with tick-tock deliberation and pride. With Sino-salvation and brusque dragon wings, they breathe on paper like literary holograms waiting to be devoured by time. Senti-ments of an eternal day-dreamer in plaid.
This fine book of poetic verses is a lingua franca of zoo element and libertarian circus act, filled with ABC identity clauses that will knock your socks off, designed for leisure reading by bratty creaturinas who long to simper under the scintillating sun, and preach by the silver moon
This book is about learning everything we can from our lives. Every moment, waking or sleeping, has a message for us about who we are and what we are on the earth to do. It is exciting to understand this concept and to know how connected we really are to each other and to the universal energy that runs through all of us. We can be quiet in meditation and receive this great energy and knowledge. Forgiveness can bring our purpose in life closer to being fulfilled. We are blessed with something to do in this life that will help others. This is like throwing a pebble into a still pond. The ripples of our actions in life can bring about wonderful growth and change in the entire world. Look at the influence parents have on children and multiply that by thousands. The world is ready for you. Are you ready to experience your own fulfillment?
This issue of Clinics in Chest Medicine, Guest Edited by Carrie A. Redlich, MD, MPH, Paul Blanc, MD, MSPH, Mridu Gulati, MD, and Ware Kuschner, MD, will focus on Occupational and Environmental Lung Diseases, with article topics including: asthma, hypersensitivity pneumonitis, and other immune-mediated lung disease; Work-exacerbated asthma; Occupational COPD; Indoor fuel exposure and the lung in both the developed and developing worlds; New (and newly recognized) occupational and environmental causes of selected chronic parenchymal and terminal airway diseases; Occupational rhinitis and other work-related upper respiratory tract conditions; Military service and lung disease; Ambient air pollution; Protecting the lungs from microbes, particles and other inhalational exposures; and Exhaled breath and induce sputum analysis in assessing the effects of occupational and environmental exposures.
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