Böcker av Carrie Chang

"The Adventures of Mimiko Cat," is a comical romance about a waif that lives a comic book existence in a raving madcap world, a leftist saboteur journalist who keeps flying back and forth from Soho to Shanghai in search of love and the quintessential affair. As a devil-may-care feminist, she finds that the bitchy acumen within her fighting with her desire for "shallow men" and their misfit lingua franca, from the bedroom to the pillory. A spell-binding adventure about raw language, feminism, passion, and symbolic emotions in a meandering world of time, space and everything, this novel borders on hysteria, and lets you see the Asian American heart inside out.

On a quiet summer's day, I will remember the strange mumbo jumbo I've muttered into paisley tea-cups and hat-boxes, into pearly, desperado rooms of anonymous paint and wallpaper, places strewn with highlander words and floral confetti of the most incarnate sort; nonsensical nursery rhymes quacking left and right in the intervals of the fulcrum night, where the silver face of the yellow moon hangs blithely on a string from my doppelgänger ceiling. Nights of peering into the cold-cream mirror stand on the shelf, and flipping through au-tomaton books of ergy; those consonants of watery ilk now rising on the duck tongue like bits of candy, and the daffodil perfume haze in the air making my alien eyes seek the truth of the matter on a Sunday in June--that instantaneous bling in my eyelids which was purple heather now leav-ing a smidgen of awkward destiny within me. Some foolish hours spent dreaming of the iridescence of a gigantic token pearl stolen from the surface of a Manchurian paper crown made me cry for the old dynasties, the chit words missing from my square pillow. Willoughby willow, and rosy wooze? Where were the beautiful, twisted women of the old days, reeling from a sunset distortion of the actual colors--wild onyx, and adamantine ruby, the rhythms of the slow beat outside the drape of my curtain revealed the petering traffic run amok on the planet of no-return; disturbed eyes run hither and slither on the margins of blarney pages of creased, dowdy manuscripts, seeking truth and weathered light. Like the blue funk thumb-prints of paper-cuts, and grief, melting into past and present tokens of my kind; a shitzu runs out of the noire night into the next street, and I am left with absolutely nothing but my gym shoes stinging with acronyms of love. Theatrical heaven could be only taken in doses, with a hint of sassafras candy stolen from out of the snuff box on my desk; that was grim reality, the orphaned cry of grey-haired children, starved for affection in the indefatigable sun, opaline wrists bedizened with Capernaum gems of a keen variety, like betting for horse-races on a Sunday afternoon was this thing called a sylvan iden-tity, full of salacious vim, and quelque chose passions, the stiff circle of flowers hanging above my head.

"The Anorexic Maison," is a coup d'etat of verbal acrobatics, about the Great Habitué of Non-eating, a 21st libertarian circus of snide effects in which the glam gals confess why they take refuge in the Maison after years of being on the diet circuit. (Excerpt from the book) "There are many hypocritical women in this house but lovely women too," says Jenny, the matron of house who wants to eat its doors and shutters. There's a mea culpa attitude in her strange effusive voice, some willingness to concede it is the hour of compassion for all women, a place where they can eat their bingo under the roofs, and kick up their yin-yang heels. "I said Anorexic Mee-sawn, pardon my French, it's fucked, like mice in the house," said Jenny, who wolfs down her Guadeloupe homey Mexican bars by the dozen and shudders in her ocean blue jeans. She admitted the whole thing was about getting even, svelte and more svelte, by the way, until you continued to persist in this fashion, not eating for whatever reason that is wholly personal. "Asian girls don't eat," by the way, she adds, "You never know when it's sneaking up on you."

"Erstwhile Bubble Tea" is 100 percent pure moonshine, a literary topis of strange beliefs and occasional bliss, a humanitarian account of how the sunshine tribe triumphed over darkness and the little cities of the Bay Area celebrated their second shadow; while drinking tea becomes an erstwhile pleasure for the taking, the cool cat Asians of suburban California put to rights their value to conquer the vicissitudes of plainspoken time and outrageous happenstance; whether they are putting on airs, or exhibiting the sur le tat neuroses of a resurrected childhood on a summer's day, these characters lead a charmed existence, putting on a show not unlike "Juneteenth," and making a statement for their ethnic pageantry, and cosmic FOB existence on the planet.

This subconscious ploy into a humorous city enlivened by the diablo ghosts of another era is a soulful breather of incarnate words and post-modern identity; Emily Yew is a down-and-out Chinese American writer who is battling her Werther-like en situ in Funnyvale, where nothing is ever that funny. Propped up by her 80-year-old mother and her sister Audrey, Emily struggles with being "uncured," with dark, creative depressions, and revisited by romantic flashbacks from her primal youth. A heart-warming novel about meta-writing, that will make you ooh and ah.

This fine book of poetic verses is a lingua franca of zoo element and libertarian circus act, filled with ABC identity clauses that will knock your socks off, designed for leisure reading by bratty creaturinas who long to simper under the scintillating sun, and preach by the silver moon

Mulberry Myths is a poetic rouser of sixteen melodies, a razzamatazz of sino-images that are a token of this romantic movement of magical linguistic bravura, a modern symphony of eastern melody

In Carrie Changs winning fifth novel, The Quack, set in the beloved postcard city of Chinatown, San Francisco, the red planetary mists converge with hexagonal bagua wonder as old Chinese families convene with ghostly vexation, debating everything under the sun with sluggish pride and keen neo-religiosity. As the young protagonist, Isabelle Wu forsakes her dual-end journalism career to become a lollygagger in qui dunnit plaid. She finds that the Bohemian life has its innate possibilities and rewards, and she soon meets a quack who pleads with her in the mighty language of the occult, offering to cure her of the Chinatown blues with an off-color foot rub. This book is a must-read for anyone who has heard a frenzied ghost in the wall or experienced a Peking duck fascination. A Chinese fortune-cookie literary special that will make your eyes pop out and your hair turn righteous colors in the dark.