About the Book
The Spirits Have Nothing to Do with Us is an anthology of fascinating and singular short stories from some of the best Chinese Canadian authors writing today.
Assembled by Dan K. Woo, who was named a Canadian author to watch by CBC in 2022, the stories in the anthology span a wide variety of Chinese Canadian voices, experiences and styles. The collection has contributions from established writers such Sam Cheuk, Sheung-King and Lydia Kwa; up-and-coming voices such as Isabella Wang and even a story available for the first time in English from Bingji Ye. From the practiced fielding of family questions by young women in a Hong Kong living room to a child’s ghost searching for a way to move to the next world to a family living with the unsettling sounds of constant explosions an industrial district on the edges of Beijing, each story is a stunning window into a world new to many North American readers. The Spirits Have Nothing to Do with Us is a powerful and elegant collection of stories that works to redefine Chinese Canadian writing.
About the Author :
Dan K. Woo's family came to Canada in the 1970s. His grandfather was a fire captain and the first firefighter to die on duty in British Hong Kong, partly a result of the British colonial system. In 2018, Woo won the Ken Klonsky Award for Learning How to Love China (Quattro Books). His writing has appeared in such publications as the South China Morning Post, Quill & Quire and China Daily USA. A Toronto native, he lives with his partner in the city and writes in his free time.
Bingji Ye came to Canada from Northern China. With majors in international business and economics, she graduated from Hebei University of Economics and Business and the University of Alberta. A poet, novelist and educator, Bingji wrote poems and stories for Chinese language media in Canada. Her first novel, The Trap of Yves Saint Laurent Scent, was published by one of China’s biggest publishers in 2006. The novel is about romance, conspiracy and commercial war. She has lived in Edmonton, Regina, Ottawa
and the Greater Toronto Area with her family.
Ellen Chang-Richardson is an award-winning poet of Taiwanese and Chinese Cambodian descent whose multi-genre writing has appeared in Augur, The Fiddlehead, Grain, Plenitude, Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis, The Spirits Have Nothing to Do with Us: New Chinese Canadian Fiction and others. The co-founder of Riverbed Reading Series, they are a member of Room’s editorial collective, long con magazine’s editorial board and the creative poetry collective VII. They are represented by Tasneem Motala at the Rights Factory and currently live on the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Nation (Ottawa, Canada).
Isabella Wang is the author of the chapbook On Forgetting a Language (Baseline Press, 2019), and her full-length debut, Pebble Swing (Nightwood Editions, 2021), shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Among other recognitions, she has been shortlisted for Arc’s Poem of the Year contest, The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Award and Long Poem Contest and was the youngest writer to be shortlisted twice for The New Quarterly’s Edna Staebler Essay Contest. Her poetry and prose have appeared in over thirty literary journals and three anthologies. An editor at Room magazine, she also works for poetry in canada and Massy Books, and directs her own non-profit mentorship and consulting business, 4827 Revise Revision St. (iBella Inc.).
Eddy Boudel Tanwrites stories that depict a world much like our own – the heroes are flawed, truth is distorted and there is as much hope as there is heartbreak. He’s the author of two novels: After Elias, a finalist for the ReLit Awards and the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, and The Rebellious Tide (Dundurn Press). In 2021, he was named a Rising Star by Writers’ Trust of Canada. His short stories can be found in Joyland, Yolk, Gertrude Press and The G&LR, as well as in Queer Little Nightmares: An Anthology of Monstrous Fiction and Poetry (Arsenal Pulp Press). He lives in Vancouver with his husband where he is currently writing his next novel while listening to the language of birds from his balcony.
Yilin Wang (she/they) is a writer, poet and Chinese-English translator who lives on the unceded lands of the Musqueam, Squalism and Tsleil-Waututh nations (Vancouver, BC). Her writing and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Clarkesworld, Fantasy Magazine, POETRY, Guernica, Words Without Borders, Malahat Review, Room, CV2 and elsewhere. She is the editor and translator of The Lantern and the Night Moths, forthcoming with Invisible Publishing 2024, which features her translations by five modern and contemporary Chinese poets. Yilin has won the Foster Poetry Prize, received an ALTA Virtual Travel Fellowship and been a two-time finalist for the Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC and is a graduate of the 2021 Clarion West Writers Workshop.
Sam Cheuk is a Hong Kong-born Canadian author of Love Figures, Deus et Machina and Postscripts from a City Burning. He is currently working on Marginalia, which examines the function, execution and generative potential behind censorship.
Anna Ling Kaye is a writer and columnist. She has served as artistic editor at PRISM international and Ricepaper magazines, and guest editor at The New Quarterly. Kaye’s fiction has been finalist for the Journey Prize, CBC Short Story Prize and PEN Canada New Voices Award, and won the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award. A third-culture kid of mixed-heritage, Kaye is grateful to live in Vancouver on the traditional and unceded homelands of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.
Sheung-King (Aaron Tang)’s debut novel You are Eating an Orange. You are Naked (Book*hug Press), was a finalist for the 2021 Governor General's Award, a finalist for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, longlisted for CBC’s Canada Reads 2021 and named one of the best book debuts of 2020 by the Globe and Mail. Born in Vancouver, Sheung-King grew up in Hong Kong. His work examines “the interior lives of the transnational Asian diaspora” (Thea Lim, The Nation). He taught creative writing at the University of Guelph. He now teaches at Avenues: The World School, Shenzhen. His next novel, BATSHIT SEVEN, will be published by Penguin Random House Canada in 2024. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Guelph
Lydia Kwa has published two books of poetry and four novels. Her fourth novel, Oracle Bone, was published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2017 as the first novel in the chuanqi 傳奇 duology. A new version of The Walking Boy was released in Spring 2019 (Arsenal Pulp Press). Her next novel, A Dream Wants Waking, will be published by Buckrider Books, an imprint of Wolsak & Wynn, in Fall 2023. She lives and works on the traditional and unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples, known by its colonial name, Vancouver.
Review :
"The effect of the Taobao is striking. Woo's stories make for difficult, often discomforting, but necessary reading. They linger, not always easily, but like the best writing should, long after the book is done." - The Temz Review on Taobao
