Beijing Foreign Studies University Chinese Canadian Library Collection: Difference between revisions

'''Selected Donor Biography'''

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Donors’ Bio

Canadian Donors (in alphabetical order, not a complete list)

--- “When Professor Wenli Wang first sent an email at the end of September, 2013 to Denise Chong asking for contributions from Chinese Canadian writers for the library at the Beijing Foreign Studies University, Denise immediately contacted every writer she knew. The response was immediate and generous. This endeavour has personal resonance for me. As a child growing up in my father’s hand laundry in Canada, I have a clear memory of listening to him sing arias from Chinese opera and reading poetry that he had written. I never understood his poems; and yet I listened. The language was classical and my spoken Chinese was colloquial. But there was something about the rhythm of his words that captured me. Somehow through this act of sharing his work, my father impressed on me the power of language. It is one of life’s ironies that I too now write, but in English, a language that my father would not have been able to read. When my novel Midnight at the Dragon Cafe was translated into Chinese it felt like the completion of a circle. That my work should now be in a library at a university in Beijing, the centre of learning in China, would be beyond my father’s wildest dreams. Were he alive he would weep tears of joy.”

Judy Fong Bates came to Canada from China as a young child and grew up in several small Ontario towns.

Judy lives with her husband on a farm outside of Toronto. They are both devoted gardeners and enthusiastic hikers.

   

The Canadian Studies program, the University of Toronto

The Canadian Studies program at the University of Toronto is delighted to foster good relations between itself and the Canadian Studies program at Beijing Foreign Studies University. The undergraduate program at University of Toronto encourages students to think critically about contemporary Canadian issues from a wide range of perspectives. In 2011 a new minor in Asian Canadian Studies was launched, and in 2013, the new Richard Charles Lee Chair in Chinese Canadian Studies was announced. In light of these initiatives we are particularly interested in forging trans-Pacific partnerships to further the international study of Canadian Studies, and Asian Canadian Studies in particular.

Anthony Chan:

For more information, please check the link：

http://www.asiancanadianwiki.org/frame/?l=http%3A//www.vmacch.ca/AC_Visual/Chan_Anthony/artistic_contributions_visual_Chan_A.html

Arlene Chan:

Arlene Chan, a third generation Chinese Canadian born in Toronto, is a writer and retired librarian. She has authored non-fiction works for children, young adults, and adults about Chinese festivals, dragon boat racing, and the Chinese in Canada.

Her book The Chinese in Toronto from 1878: From Outside to Inside the Circle (Toronto: Dundurn, 2011) was nominated for the Heritage Toronto Book Award and the Ontario Speaker's Book Award.

Denise Chong:

“I know that the authors and academics at this end in Canada feel privileged to have been asked to help out. Scarcely two decades ago, when I published my first book, The Concubine’s Children, I asked academics and teachers in Canada why I had learned nothing of the history or social conditions of what I wrote about when I was in grade school. The reply came back that “Teachers need books with which to teach! We didn’t have any resources!” In that way at least, The Concubine’s Children, published in 1994, was ground breaking. In a similar way that Canadian authors have since been prolific in writing based on the experience of the Chinese in Canada, I hope the modest contribution to building your library spawns many writings and ideas on the part of those in China.”

Denise Chong is an internationally-published, award-winning writer. The Concubine’s Children, a memoir of her family, which the New York Times Book Review called “beautiful, haunting and wise”, was the first non-fiction narrative of a Chinese family in Canada. Published in 1994, it was a Globe and Mail bestseller for 93 weeks. In 2014, the book joined the library of Penguin Canada's series of "Modern Classics." In her subsequent books, Denise again followed individuals who began life abroad but ended up as Canadian citizens: the napalm girl, the Vietnam War’s most famous casualty and her family's life in the war-torn country; a bus mechanic and his family's life spanning the twentieth century in Hunan, China, and most recently, a book that explores the experience of the lone Chinese immigrant family in small-town Canada. Two of those, The Concubine's Children and The Girl in the Picture are published in Chinese translation. Having begun her working career as an economist and senior advisor to Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, Denise turned to writing upon a two-year move to Beijing in 1985. In 2013, she was awarded Canada's highest civilian honour, the Order of Canada. Married with two children, she lives in Ottawa.

Jim Wong-Chu:

Jim Wong-Chu is a poet, editor and historian. He is a founding member of the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop, the Vancouver Asian Heritage Month Society, Pender Guy Radio, Asian Canadian Performing Arts Resource (ACPAR) and Ricepaper Magazine and liter ASIAN: A Festival of Pacific Rim Asian Canadian Writing. He has published Chinatown Ghosts and has co-edited Many-Mouthed Birds: Contemporary Writing by Chinese Canadians, Swallowing Cloud: an Anthology of Chinese Canadian Poetry and Strike the Wok: New Chinese Canadian Anthology.

Lydia Kwa:

“Since I situate some of my work in Singapore and Canada, including a novel set in 8th Century China (The Walking Boy), I would like readers at your Canadian Studies Centre to become acquainted with a writer who is creating work outside of the mainstream Canadian literary content, and who writes from a queer perspective.”

Lydia Kwa was born in Singapore but has lived in Canada since 1980. She is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Vancouver, British Columbia. Her first book The Colours of Heroines was published by Toronto's Women's Press in 1994. She has been called by George Woodcock as a "memory writer of Proustian intensity". Her first novel This Place Called Absence (Winnipeg: Turnstone Press, 2000) was nominated for several awards, including the Lambda Literary Prize. The next novel, The Walking Boy (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2005) was nominated for the Ethel Wilson Book Prize. Pulse was the next novel published by Key Porter shortly before the publisher went bankrupt. Kwa has a book-length poem out with Turnstone Press (2013) called sinuous. She has also self-published an unbound art/chapbook called linguistic tantrums. A new edition of Pulse will be released in July 2014.

Fiona Lam:

Born in Scotland, she emigrated to Canada at a young age with her family. She has a B.A. in political science (UBC), an LL.B. (Queen’s University) and an LL.M. (University of Toronto). She articled and worked as an associate in a Vancouver law firm, and later as a staff lawyer at the Law Society of British Columbia. She also has an M.F.A. in creative writing (UBC). She facilitates writing workshops for people of diverse ages, backgrounds and circumstances, including at UBC Continuing Studies and Langara Continuing Studies.

Val Lem:

His father immigrated to Canada from China in 1923.

Yan Li:

Yan Li was born in Beijing, China, where she worked as an instructor, a translator, and a journalist before coming to Canada in 1987. Yan started teaching Chinese culture, literature, history, and language at Renison University College, University of Waterloo, since 1997. She is the Director of the Confucius Institute at the University of Waterloo, and the Coordinator of the Chinese language program at East Asian Studies. In addition to her teaching, Yan is also a bilingual author. Her first English novel, Daughters of the Red Land, was a finalist for Books in Canada’s first novel award in 1996. Her major works include English novel Lily in the Snow and Chinese novels The Deep, Married to the West Wind, and The Lambs of Mapleton.

   

Vivienne Poy:

She has received numerous honorary degrees and professorship from universities in Canada, USA, China, Hong Kong and South Korea, as well as many honours and awards.

John Price:

John Price teaches Japanese and Asian Canadian history at the University of Victoria. He moved to Japan at the age of 18. After returning to Canada he completed his graduate work at U.B.C. His dissertation was published by Cornell University Press under the title Japan Works: Power and Paradox in Postwar Industrial Relations. Beginning around the year 2000 he began to broaden his research interests to Canada-East Asian relations and this work culminated in the publication of his recent book Orienting Canada: Race, Empire and the Transpacific (Vancouver, UBC Press, 2011). He is currently working on a biography (with his collaborator in China, Ningping YU) of Victoria Chung, the first Chinese Canadian to graduate from University of Toronto Medical School and one of the longest-serving medical missionaries to China. An additional book project is an experiential Asian Canadian history examining the politics of race and empire in the colonization and decolonization of Canada and the world.

Betty Quan

As a playwright, Betty Quan's work has been nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Prize for drama (Mother Tongue) and the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Best New Play (adaptation of Paul Yee's Ghost Train). Quan also writes film and animation, including the series Wild Animal Baby Explorers co-produced by Beijing's Xing Xing Digital, as well as a comic book about the Chinese participation in the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway called Nitro (publisher: McClelland & Stewart, True North Comics).

   

Eleanor Ty:

Eleanor Ty (鄭 綺 寧) is Professor of English & Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario. She has published on Asian North American and on 18th Century literature. Author of Unfastened: Globality and Asian North American Narratives (U of Minnesota P, 2010), The Politics of the Visible in Asian North American Narratives (U Toronto P 2004), Empowering the Feminine: The Narratives of Mary Robinson, Jane West, and Amelia Opie, 1796-1812 (U Toronto P 1998), and Unsex’d Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s (U Toronto P 1993), she has edited Memoirs of Emma Courtney (Oxford 1996) and The Victim of Prejudice (Broadview 1994) by Mary Hays. She has co-edited with Russell J.A. Kilbourn, The Memory Effect: The Remediation of Memory in Literature and Film (Wilfrid Laurier UP 2013), with Christl Verduyn a collection of essays, Asian Canadian Writing Beyond Autoethnography (Wilfrid Laurier UP 2008), and with Donald Goellnicht Asian North American Identities Beyond the Hyphen (Indiana UP 2004).

Larry Wong:

He has served on a number of heritage committees and as a mentor, consultant and resource person for a number of writers and scholars.

Rita Wong:

An Associate Professor in Critical + Cultural Studies at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design, she is researching the poetics of water.

Paul Yee