Author Pik-Shuen Fung to discuss “Ghost Forest.”
AUTHOR TALK DETAILS
10/8/2022 at 3:00 PM
EASTWIND BOOKS OF BERKELEY
2066 UNIVERSITY AVE
BERKELEY, CA 94704-1006 USA
About the Author:
Pik-Shuen Fung was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Vancouver, Canada. She has received fellowships and residencies from Kundiman, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Millay Arts, and Storyknife. Ghost Forest, her first book, won the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Literary Fiction.
About the Book:
This “powerful” (BuzzFeed) award-winning debut about love, grief, and family welcomes you into its pages and invites you to linger, staying with you long after you’ve closed its covers.
“Quietly moving . . . connected by a kind of dream logic . . . deeply felt . . . There is joy and tenderness in . . . Fung’s elegant storytelling.”—The New York Times Book Review
How do you grieve, if your family doesn’t talk about feelings?
This is the question the unnamed protagonist of GhostForest considers after her father dies. One of the many Hong Kong “astronaut” fathers, he stays there to work, while the rest of the family immigrated to Canada before the 1997 Handover, when the British returned sovereignty over Hong Kong to China.
As she revisits memories of her father through the years, she struggles with unresolved questions and misunderstandings. Turning to her mother and grandmother for answers, she discovers her own life refracted brightly in theirs.
Buoyant and heartbreaking, Ghost Forest is a slim novel that envelops the reader in joy and sorrow. Fung writes with a poetic and haunting voice, layering detail and abstraction, weaving memory and oral history to paint a moving portrait of a Chinese-Canadian astronaut family.
