Asia is on!

We just got notification from the Canada Council today. So Roy Miki, Fred Wah, Marilyn Dumont, Wayde Compton, Hiromi Goto, Ashok Mathur, Glen Lowry and yours truly are on our way to a big CanLit blowout in Taiwan. A few of us will go on to Japan afterwards.

Going to Asia feels like going to the future. All the architecture and technology is sleeker, faster, better-designed. It’ll be interesting to bring Canadian critical thinking/politics there, and our open-ended ways writing/performing. The last time I went to Taiwan, I had a chance to talk to people about some pretty interesting stuff– what it’s like to be the citizen of a small country lying in the shadow of a major world power, the effects successive waves of colonization on language and culture, what it’s like to live intimately with new technologies. Yes, I’m wired, but in Taiwan people are really jacked in. Especially young people. I had a long conversation with a young woman there about how she met her boyfriend. The whole conversation revolved around cel phones– the etiquette, the nuances, what kinds of connections they do and don’t make possible, and also the object-ness of the thing. Style, line, size, all that. Hers was pink and sleek, and a third the size of the smallest phone I’ve seen in North America.