Carrie Chang

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

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

In Carrie Chang's award-winning fifth novel, The Quack, set in the beloved postcard city of Chinatown, San Francisco, red planetary mists converge with hexagonal bagua wonder as old Chinese families gather with ghostly vexation, debating everything under the sun with sluggish pride and keen neo-religiosity. The young protagonist, Isabelle Wu, abandons her dual-track journalism career to become a lollygagger in whodunit plaid. She discovers that the Bohemian life has its own possibilities and rewards, soon encountering a quack who pleads with her in the mighty language of the occult-offering to cure her Chinatown blues with an off-color foot rub. This book is a must-read for anyone who has ever heard a frenzied ghost in the wall or felt a Peking duck fascination. A Chinese fortune-cookie literary special, it will make your eyes pop, and your hair turn righteous colors in the dark.

In Carrie Chang's award-winning fifth novel, The Quack, set in the beloved postcard city of Chinatown, San Francisco, red planetary mists converge with hexagonal bagua wonder as old Chinese families gather with ghostly vexation, debating everything under the sun with sluggish pride and keen neo-religiosity. The young protagonist, Isabelle Wu, abandons her dual-track journalism career to become a lollygagger in whodunit plaid. She discovers that the Bohemian life has its own possibilities and rewards, soon encountering a quack who pleads with her in the mighty language of the occult-offering to cure her Chinatown blues with an off-color foot rub. This book is a must-read for anyone who has ever heard a frenzied ghost in the wall or felt a Peking duck fascination. A Chinese fortune-cookie literary special, it will make your eyes pop, and your hair turn righteous colors in the dark.

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.

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

"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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.