Yan Li

Lily in the Snow. Women's Press Literary $24.95

Chinese Canadian literature may be divided into two categories: works by the children of earlier immigrants and those by recent immigrants from China and elsewhere. The first has been documented by critical works such as Lien Chao's groundbreaking book, Beyond Silence: Chinese Canadian Literature in English (1997), which introduced into the Canadian literary canon writers such as Paul Yee, Jim Wong-Chu, Fred Wah, Wayson Choy, Denise Chong, and Sky Lee, and defined Chinese Canadian literature as a collective voice, whose "interior landscapes are emotionally connected with the historical Chinatowns in which the stories and characters are situated." In narrating the experiences of Chinese railroad workers and representing life in Chinatowns, the main literary strategies had been to anthologize and mythologize in order to construct identities that "abrogate the existing racial stereotypes and to appropriate them by constructing the heroes and heroines of the community." Susanne Hilf's Writing the Hyphen: The Articulation of Interculturalism in Contemporary Chinese-Canadian Literature (2000) shifted from an articulation of distinctive traditions of the historical experience of the community, the search for a collective voice and its distinct themes and motifs, and the emphasis on race and ethnicity, to reading the intercultural elements and individual and hybrid identity in works such as Sky Lee's Disappearing Moon Cafe, Larissa Lai's When Fox Is a Thousand, and Fred Wah's Diamond Grill.

The Chinese Canadian community has been undergoing rapid change with the influx of new immigrants from Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and Mainland China. While still concerned with immigration, displacement, the politics of identity, and cultural clashes, literary writing by recent Chinese immigrants has become more diverse in terms of subject matter, genre, and style. For example, Lien Chao (born in 1950 and came to Canada in 1984) published a bilingual narrative long poem, Maples and the Stream (1999); Ting-Xing Ye (born in 1952 and moved to Toronto...