Back in the ‘Couv and gearing up for another semester of teaching. Two courses: an undergrad Canadian Literature course in three parts, one on the politics of the anthology, one on recent contemporary poetry and fiction, and one on chapbooks and zines; and then a grad course called “The Subject of the Future.”

I’ve just come back from holidays (and work, sigh!) in Toronto. Caught up with many old friends, though missed many as well. I’m not the only one married to the grindstone, it seems. In cool news, Emily Cheung and Gein Wong of Little Pear Garden want to make a multi-media theatre piece out of Salt Fish Girl. I met with them briefly, and they are lovely, and come from my planet.

The Play Chthonics blog is the Blogspot doghouse as suspected spam. Hopefully it will be unlocked soon. Come to our reading with David Chariandy and Anne Stone at the Green College Coach House at 7:30 pm, January 23.

Went to a dim sum lunch for Grandma Liu Mian Huan, a “Comfort Woman” survivor from the Japanese occupation of China during WWII. There’s an extraordinary movement afoot to demand restitution from the Japanese government. Heard much testimony– from Grandma Liu herself, and on video, from both soldiers and victims. Today, thinking much about the use of testimony. Politically it makes sense. And psychically, for the individual in question? Psychoanalysis would say moves the subject out of repression, into mourning, or “working through.” In relationship to the survivors– the women– that makes sense to me. But one of the testemonials was from a former solider, recounting what he and his compatriots did. When is the articulation a reproduction of the violence, and when is it “working through”? What if it is both?

In the evening, wonderful readings and discussion from both Wayde Compton and Lee Maracle for the Play Chthonics series. Wayde read from a short story about mixed-race conjoined twins attempting to understand their father’s history. Lee read from Daughters. Lots of discussion about writing, the confluence of history, biomythography and a double-headed snake.

… the passing of Jane Rule. There’s a good obituary in the Globe.

Braved the snow to make the West Coast Line launch at 1067 Granville on Saturday, and afterwards went to Richards on Richards to see Les Savy Favs, and help my friend Sandra celebrate her birthday. Energetic art rock gets to the gut of masculinity.

Late night stroll home over the Granville Street bridge. There was a jeep, speeding and swimming all over the road. It lost control and went flying up onto the sidewalk. And then climbed back down on it’s fat, indestructible wheels. Afterwards the bridge was so quiet. Granville Island below, covered in Xmas lights and snow– still, pretty and muffled.

Come to the Coach House at Green College (UBC) tonight for Lee Maracle and Wayde Compton. 7:30.

I’ve been converted to the mac side…
I have a new website. I may change the host, but for now it’s here.

For those of you with research needs, I’ve just posted a biobliography page, as a separate blog.

Haven’t posted in ages. I’m just winding up my first semester of full-time teaching–holy rollercoaster! It’s been a lot of work. All that expectant human presence inside a highly bureaucratic structure has been intense to say the least. I feel like I’m moving things, and making people think. I suppose student evaluations will tell.

There are a lot of smart interesting people out there on the Point– writers, translators, critics, historians and scientists. And right now, a great deal of interest in and encouragement for interdisciplinarity. I’m excited by that. I’m still getting my sea legs. It feels like I’m always running, and yet the big things move very slowly.

Cool stuff I’ve participated in in the last bit: The Anniversaries of Change Project, TransCanada 2, the Play Chthonics reading series (come see Lee Maracle and Wayde Compton on December 3!) and a couple of issues of West Coast Line (one, guest-edited by Anne Stone and Amber Dean on the missing women of the Downtown Eastside, and one memorial issue for Nancy Shaw– the Ham poems are in there if you’re at all interested). Last week I went to a meeting at the Michael Smith Laboratories, where they are trying to set up a program to get school kids writing and thinking about science (and “truth” and method). Dave Ng from the Michael Smith Labs is organizing with members of the Creative Writing Department, including Rhea Trebegov, whom I’ve just met.

I’m diggin’ the noon hour talks that occasionally happen at the Chan Centre. Early in the term, heard a very moving talk about surviving torture, and the logic of extraordinary rendition, from Maher Arar. And a couple of days ago heard Alisa Smith and James McKinnon talk about challenges and fruits (so to speak) of the 100-mile diet. It’s pretty astonishing what they did, and also what a movement seems to be afoot.

So I’m swimming in the possibilities of this new life. Also pretty darn tired and overwhelmed. And not writing. See you on the next lungful.

It’s been a pretty action-packed weekend. I spent Thursday and Friday at a symposium called Redress Express, organized by Alice Jim for Centre A in Vancouver. It gets its title from the train trip surviving Head Tax payers took across the country earlier this year to hear Stephen Harper apologize for that nasty piece of racist legislation that forced Chinese immigrants to pay ever increasing amounts of money to enter the country between 1885 and 1923, before the government passed legislation that excluded us altogether. Redress Express, the symposium, is happening in conjunction with a range of activities dubbed Anniversaries of Change, which marks the 1907 Anti-Asiatic Riots in Vancouver, the 1947 repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the 1967 Citizenship Act and the 1997 “return” of Hong Kong to China, which triggered a large wave of immigration to the West Coast of Canada.

The first panel was particularly inspiring. Chris Lee talked about the problems of linear history, the arbitrariness of the number seven, and the act of commemoration. Kirsten McAllister followed with a discussion of events such at the Komagata Maru incident as one among many other incidents not marked by ‘o7′ that contribute to histories of trauma and exclusion. Her discussion focussed the difficulties of embodied experience for the traumatized, and the tension between those kinds of history that are articulable and those that, precisely because of their traumatic nature, are not.

Henry Yu closed the panel by calling for a recognition that the “white Canada” McKenzie King was so desperate to “preserve” is a myth. He suggested that it was in fact late arriving whites who took the jobs of Asian and First Nations people who were already here on the West Coast, when Europeans arrived. (Much of the anti-Asian sentiment in the last century was driven by white labour movements who resented Asian labour and capitalized on the fact that racialized people couldn’t vote.) The Chinese built the railroad because they were already here. And it was that work that enabled the European settlement of this coast.

There were many more great panels and discussions– way more than I can tell you about on this blog. The symposium was attached to an exhibition at Centre A on Chinese Restaurants and the Head Tax Issue. Particularly compelling is Karen Tam’s reproduction of a small town Chop Suey house, part of a series of restaurant reproductions she’s been doing across the country for the last five years. Poster art from Gu Xiong, a fabulous rice crispie pagoda by Shelly Low, a recycling of Ho Tam’s 1993 chapbook project The Yellow Pages, and a series of photographs of old Chinese Canadian restaurants along Hastings Street by Kira Wu.

Powell Street Festival today. I went to a talk at a location cryptically dubbed “The Chapel” (it’s an old funeral home!) in which Kamala Todd, Cease Wyss, Grace Thompson and Wayde Compton talked about the histories of First Nations, Japanese Canadian and Black Canadian presence in the Downtown Eastside. There are so many parallels among the communities in the experience of repression and violence. It was a great coalition building moment to bring those voices together.

In other news, I’m noticing that my ancient website is getting a lot of hits, which tells me I need to update it soon. That material is very old, and I’m not sure why U of C continues to run it, because I took it down two years ago. They don’t let me have my old email account anymore! I’ll try to get a new one up soon. For those of you who don’t know, I begin my tenure-track teaching position in Canadian Literature at UBC this fall. So that’s a bio update. It also means I’m madly prepping and can’t quite apply my head to a website yet. Trying to wrap up a few papers, turn my diss into the book, and steal a moment or two for creative projects languishing on the backburner. I’ve also just taken up the position of Poetry Editor for Canadian Literature. I’m looking for submissions, so check the CL website for guidelines and submit, please!

I’m missing my cousin’s wedding in the States and am bummed about that. It’s great to be in town this weekend though, for Redress Express, Powell Street Festival and Pride. Life in Vancouver is very nourishing these days, both for ideas and for the soul.

Dr. Kate Liu and Dr. Wenchi Lin

Talks by two contemporary Taiwanese film scholars

2PM, Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Room 599
Buchanan Tower
397 – 1873 East Mall
University of British Columbia

Wenchi Lin. The Subtle Complexity of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Poetics

The emergent studies of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s poetics have mainly been cinematography oriented, just as most of the earlier formalist approaches to his films. The aspects of sound and editing are unfortunately neglected and no satisfactory argument of what David Bordwell calls “the poetics of the overarching form” of Hou’s films has been presented yet. This article contends that Zhu Tien-wen’s notion of “subtle complexity” (Miwei) may be a good term to describe the governing principle of the overarching form of Hou’s films: a consistent attempt to simultaneously provide multiple layers of meaning in his films, including the personal, the social/historical/national/urban, the existential, and the (self-reflexively) cinematic. The exemplary use of sound in Boys from Fenguei and Café Lumière as well as the editing of A Time to Live and A Time to Die, Dust of Wind, and City of Sadness is discussed to demonstrate their significant functions in Hou’s poetics. A careful examination of the many symbolic meanings of “puppet” in The Puppetmaster provides a closer look into the subtle complexity of Hou’s poetics.

Kate Liu. Construction of Identity and Home in the Space of Flows in Three Recent Taipei City Films

With three recent Taiwanese films– Love Go Go [1997], The Personals [1998], and Bird Land [2000]—as examples, I will analyze how recent Taipei films (as part of the so-called New New Taiwanese cinema) try to capture and respond to Taipei’s ever-increasing speed of flows in comic, self-reflexive and collage styles. In some comic but poignant manners, the three films show urban migrants either isolated in their small apartments, or drifting in transitory and segmental relations in various urban spaces of flows—e.g. the commercial spaces of beauty salon, bakery and tea house, city traffic and highway, and the information network of mass media. Alienation, transitory relations and even dangers in the space of flows, however, are not the cause for despair; I will analyze the three strategies the films use to seize the flows and make it home, or to make meaningful communication possible in chance encounter: 1. mediated communication; 2. flâneurial looks; 3. self-reflexive use of signs.

Rita has been working on a campaign to urge the Japanese government to apologize to the Korean, Chinese, Filipina, Burmese, Indonesian and Dutch women and children who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Army during WWII. Women and children as young as twelve were held at “comfort stations,” raped and tortured and forced to have sex with up to 40 Japanese soldiers a day. The Japanese government does not acknowledge or take responsibility for these horrors. Canada and the US, along with 46 allied countries signed a peace agreement in 1951 absolving Japan of having to pay reparations for the war. This agreement is used now as a way for the Japanese government and courts to avoid responsibility for the abuse of the “comfort women.” China and Korea were not signatories of that treaty. ie. Our silence is a kind of complicity.

Olivia Chow has recently tabled a motion for the Canadian government to urge the Japanese government to apologize to the survivors. You can do something by encouraging your MP to vote for Motion 291.

The motion itself and more details here:
http://www.alpha-canada.org/

The Writer-in-Residence Program
at Simon Fraser University presents

Count Me In:
Writing Public Selves

SFU, Harbour Centre
Thursday, May 31, 2007

A colloquium exploring “the turn to language” as
medium and limit in current writing practices.

What are the social and creative conditions of this turn? How do writers deal with the uneven effects of power relations, representation, and the politics of identity? How can creative forms take on public visibility as a critical force in our social and cultural interactions?

Join the writers who will address these and related questions in an afternoon session of provocative talks, followed by an evening reading by writers who have consulted with Writer-in-Residence Fred Wah.

Afternoon Session: Room HC 1315
2 – 3:15 pm:
Welcome Remarks: Sophie McCall
Fred Wah, “Me Too (Two): A Poetics Talk”
Jeff Derksen, “Space Agent Wah”

3:30 – 5:00 pm:
“Languaging the ‘I’: Writing in Shifty Contexts”
Moderator: Clint Burnham
Panelists: David Chariandy, Larissa Lai, and Roy Miki

•
7 pm, Evening Reading: Room HC 1700
Mercedes Eng, Jef Clarke, Emmanuel Raymundo, Neda Abkari, Peter Quartermain, Meg Walker, Tony Power, Joy Russell, Emily Fedoruk, Andrew Lee

With Thanks
Sponsored by the Writer-in-Residence Program with funding assistance from the Canada Council, the Office of the President, and the Dean of Arts and Social Sciences, Simon Fraser University