Shiamin Kwa – författare

When it comes to really knowing a person, is what you see really what you get? Is it ever all you get? In this first critical study and annotated translation of the dramatic masterpiece Four Cries of a Gibbon by the late-Ming dynasty Chinese playwright Xu Wei, author Shiamin Kwa considers the ways that people encounter and understand each other in extraordinary circumstances. With its tales of crimes redressed in the next world and girls masquerading as men to achieve everlasting fame, Four Cries of a Gibbon complicated issues of self and identity when it appeared in the late Ming dynasty, paving the way for increasingly nuanced reflections on such questions in late Ming and early Qing fiction and drama. Beyond their historical context, Xu Wei’s influential plays serve as testimony to what Kwa argues are universal strategies found within drama. The heroes and heroines in these plays glide back and forth across the borders of life and death, of male and female, as they seek to articulate who they truly are. As the actors sort out these truths onstage, the members of the audience are invited to consider the truths that they live with offstage.

In this irresistible memoir of food, family and migration, Shiamin Kwa relates her search for identity, authenticity and belonging – and how in the end, like every migrant, she created her own menu for lifeKwa tells of first moving from Malaysia to the ‘You-Ess’ as a child, where she desperately tried to fit in; returning to her home town of Kuala Lumpur a year later to find herself an unwelcome foreigner in the place she had thought of as home; of struggling to adjust to the arcane codes of her Ivy League university; and of being baffled by ‘fake’ and ‘real’ American Chinese restaurants – just as her contemporaries were confused by her own identity. Caught between competing ideas of herself, she grapples with what it means to live an ‘authentic’ life.Through exquisitely observed writing about food - from the curry mee of ‘home’ to the unsettlingly repellent texture of baked apples - as a site where identities are claimed, forged and questioned, The Secret Menu explores the immigrant experience, what it means to belong to and succeed in a second country and how to remain true to whatever one might consider an authentic self. Writing with humour, insight and heart, Kwa explores the unwritten codes we use to identify ourselves and others – from the social castes of university to the ‘secret menus’ of Chinese restaurants – and the confounding nature of the immigrant experience in a memoir that is as profound about the meanings of food as it is about identity

Regarding Frames explores the ways that literary comics engage readers in the mutual construction of meaning.Part interpretive criticism, part philosophical meditation, Regarding Frames: Thinking with Comics in the Twenty-First Century explores the ways that literary comics engage readers in the mutual construction of meaning. Kwa draws from a wide range of philosophical, critical, and theoretical texts to analyze the visual and verbal narrative strategies that artists use. She examines the work of comic artists Gabrielle Bell, Michael DeForge, Kevin Huizenga, Laura Park, and Dash Shaw who construct their particular visions of the world. These creators' experiments with form pose questions about the difference between how things appear to be and how they are. Regarding Frames makes a case for the rewards of close reading at the surface.

Analyzing the way that recent works of graphic narrative use the comics form to engage with the "problem" of reproduction, Shiamin Kwa's Perfect Copies reminds us that the mode of production and the manner in which we perceive comics are often quite similar to the stories they tell. Perfect Copies considers the dual notions of reproduction, mechanical as well as biological, and explores how comics are works of reproduction that embed questions about the nature of reproduction itself. Through close readings of the comics My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris, The Black Project by Gareth Brookes, The Generous Bosom series by Conor Stechschulte, Sabrina by Nick Drnaso, and Panther by Brecht Evens, Perfect Copies shows how these comics makers push the limits of different ideas of "reproduction" in strikingly different ways. Kwa suggests that reading and thinking about books like these, that push us to engage with these complicated questions, teaches us how to become better readers.