Revisiting Great Expectations: Part 1

The start of the affair
25 July 2008
I have always had a soft spot for Great Expectations, Charles Dickens’s final masterpiece, which I first read as a set text for my English Literature GCSE. Most of the books I had to read for English class at school were somehow made much less enjoyable by the simple [...]

CDS essay: Neither good nor bad enough

Neither good nor bad enough
11th January, 2007
I occasionally wish that someone would just publish the novel “Red Flower Swans of the Sky Daughter Falling” and get it over with. If the title sounds curiously familiar, then it is because Chinese expatriate Literature has been such a success story. And at its heart is one big [...]

My Countrymen

As Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” is to fantasy Literature, and Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is to magical realism, the circle of Chinese expatriate Literature has at its heart the one cliché that is “Wild Swans” by Jung Chang. First, let me be clear that I am not disputing its [...]

Beautiful fools

“I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.” Every time I remember that line from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel “The Great Gatsby”, it leaves me in a deathly cold. It is said in response to learning that a newborn is a girl, by [...]