Song of a Reformed Headhunter

 SNOW AT 5 PM receives a really engaged and engaging review in French on Amazon! (English translation follows.) Snow at 5 M est sans doute la fiction la plus intéressante que j’ai pu lire depuis très longtemps. Mais est-il possible de parler de fiction ? C’est bien plus que cela. Le dernier ouvrage de Jee Leong Koh est assez inclassable. C’est de la poésie en premier lieu mais c’est aussi un livre engagé notamment contre les discriminations (raciales, sociétales, basées sur le genre, etc.) et un regard très incisif sur la société américaine depuis les années 40 jusqu’à 2066. Oui, il faut mentionner que ce livre est également une œuvre d’anticipation aux tonalités dystopiques. Si les haïkus sont superbes, si les sujets abordés sont sérieux, il n’en est pas moins que l’auteur ne néglige pas l’humour, y compris l’auto-dérision, et certains passages sont pour le moins croustillants. L’originalité demeure en ce que Jee Leong Koh s’imagine avoir découvert une liasse de 107 haïkus légère...

This hybrid memoir offers many pleasures and insights, but I will return to it for poetic prose passages such as this one about migration:  "I had once thought life here would be divided into before and after. It's not like that at all. Rather, it is what is now and what is yet going to happen. Whatever is "now" includes the so-called past, no matter across which border. Forgive me—it turned out that I like being an emigree, just as like the 30th of a long month: it seems to be over, but look, there is still the 31st."

A restless intelligence drives the plotting and thinking in this collection of stories and essays, many of which are about the author's love affair with Hong Kong, where she grew up. The writing is laced with a wry humor and, more surprising, a tender sympathy for the young, particularly young Hongkongers who have to live with the political and social changes that have befallen on their city. There is next-to-no sloganeering in Xu Xi's writing, but plenty of hard-earned insight into what it means to be a transnational and ethnically Chinese writer, born in Indonesia, grown up in Hong Kong, and thereafter gone back and forth between Hong Kong and the United States.

I had a lovely day. It was also the start of my spring break. In the morning, did a bit of work for Singapore Unbound/Gaudy Boy. Took a nap. Read Krystyna Dąbrowska's Tideline , yet another wonderful book of poems by another contemporary Polish poet bought at AWP from the terrific Zephyr Press. Her poetry reminded me of Cavafy and Szymborska. In the evening, GH took me to Osteria 106 where we had a delicious dinner. And then, back home, we watched two episodes of The Amazing Race and dreamed of traveling around the world.  Here's "Wooden Figure of a Hunchbacked Dignitary" by Krystyna Dąbrowska:  All his life he tried to hide the dromedary  ridge within the splendor of distinction and accolades.  He obtained all possible honors,  among them the love of a beautiful woman.  At last he climbed so high  he had the right, like a king,  to disguise himself after death in a perfect body  chiseled by a famous hand.  He could have gone on for ages...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here .   In Capital, Volume One , Karl Marx shows that capitalism is the thief of time. In pursuit of ever-greater profits, capitalism increases either the working hours or the productivity of those hours in order to cream off the surplus value from the wages paid to workers for maintaining bare life. Individual capitalists cannot help doing so if their business is to stay afloat in the market competition. Since capitalism is pretty much the global mode of production now, national economies cannot escape the logic either. If they cannot exploit their own citizens due to labor laws, they will exploit vulnerable migrant children .  Written in the 1950s, when the American postwar economy was supposedly booming, the play A Raisin in the Sun , by Lorraine Hansberry, revolves ostensibly around a Black family's difficulties in purchasing and owning a house in a white Chicago neighborhood. Yet, to put the emphasi...

The graveyard scenes were moving and alive with personalities, but the telling of the Lincoln narrative through real and fictional excerpts falls somewhat flat for me.