When Lily was eleven years old, her mother, Swee Hua, walked away from the family, never to be seen or heard from again. Now, as a new mother herself, Lily becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to Swee Hua. She recalls the spring of 1987, growing up in a small British Columbia mining town where there were only a handful of Asian families; Lily’s previously stateless father wanted them to blend seamlessly into Canadian life, while her mother, alienated and isolated, longed to return to Asia. Years later, still affected by Swee Hua’s disappearance, Lily’s family is nonetheless stubbornly silent to her questioning. But eventually, an old family friend provides a clue that sends Lily to Southeast Asia to find out the truth. Winner of the Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award from the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop, Dandelion is a beautifully written and affecting novel about motherhood, family secrets, migration, isolation, and mental illness. With clarity and care, it delves into the many ways we define home, identity, and above all, belonging.
This book builds upon the first edition as an introductory guide to immigration, refugee, and citizenship law. Its aim is to provide an overview, or a starting point, both for those who want to investigate the mechanics of Canada's immigration regime and for those who want to assess, critique, or question the aims and impacts of the law.
Ghost Citizens is about in situ stateless people, persons who live in a country they consider their own but which does not recognize them as citizens. Liew develops the concept of the “ghost citizen” to understand a global experience and a double oppression: of being invisible and feared in law. The term also refers to two troubling state practices: ghosting their own citizens and conferring ghost citizenship (casting persons as foreigners without legal proof). Told through an examination of law, legal processes and interviews with stateless persons and their advocates, this deeply researched book examines international and domestic jurisprudence as well as administrative decision making to show an emerging practice where states are pointing to a mother figure, constructed in law as racialized, foreign and potentially disloyal, to depict persons as not kin and therefore the responsibility of other states. By tracing British colonial legal vestiges in the case study of Malaysia, Liew shows how contemporary post-colonial, democratic and multi-juridical states deploy law and its processes and historical ideas of racial categories to create and maintain statelessness. This book challenges established norms of state recognition and calls for a discussion of ideas borrowed from other areas of law, including Indigenous legal traditions and family law, on how we should organize our communities with more respectful relations and treatment among kin.
When Lily was eleven years old, her mother, Swee Hua, walked away from the family, never to be seen or heard from again. Now, as a new mother herself, Lily becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to Swee Hua. She recalls the spring of 1987, growing up in a small British Columbia mining town where there were only a handful of Asian families; Lily’s previously stateless father wanted them to blend seamlessly into Canadian life, while her mother, alienated and isolated, longed to return to Asia. Years later, still affected by Swee Hua’s disappearance, Lily’s family is nonetheless stubbornly silent to her questioning. But eventually, an old family friend provides a clue that sends Lily to Southeast Asia to find out the truth. Winner of the Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award from the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop, Dandelion is a beautifully written and affecting novel about motherhood, family secrets, migration, isolation, and mental illness. With clarity and care, it delves into the many ways we define home, identity, and above all, belonging.
Ghost Citizens is about in situ stateless people, persons who live in a country they consider their own but which does not recognize them as citizens. Liew develops the concept of the “ghost citizen” to understand a global experience and a double oppression: of being invisible and feared in law. The term also refers to two troubling state practices: ghosting their own citizens and conferring ghost citizenship (casting persons as foreigners without legal proof). Told through an examination of law, legal processes and interviews with stateless persons and their advocates, this deeply researched book examines international and domestic jurisprudence as well as administrative decision making to show an emerging practice where states are pointing to a mother figure, constructed in law as racialized, foreign and potentially disloyal, to depict persons as not kin and therefore the responsibility of other states. By tracing British colonial legal vestiges in the case study of Malaysia, Liew shows how contemporary post-colonial, democratic and multi-juridical states deploy law and its processes and historical ideas of racial categories to create and maintain statelessness. This book challenges established norms of state recognition and calls for a discussion of ideas borrowed from other areas of law, including Indigenous legal traditions and family law, on how we should organize our communities with more respectful relations and treatment among kin.
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