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.

A culinary and philosophical memoir about the secret menus in every aspect of immigrant life, and what it really means to be 'Chinese'What is the secret menu? Hidden from view but commonly known, it’s the menu that insiders pick from to be assured of a delicious, authentic meal - often in immigrant-run restaurants. But there are secret menus in every aspect of life, cheat codes that promise to help us navigate a new home, or a new life in the best possible way: a promise that, if you just follow this formula, everything will be all right. Even if we know that things don’t always work out that way.Shiamin Kwa uses food, history, poetry, art, and the story of her coming of age to explore the deepest and most evocative aspects of what it means to belong to and succeed in a new home, and what it even means to be 'Chinese'. From her childhood in Malaysia to her family’s immigration to the United States and her years in China, Kwa paints a wide-ranging portrait of the centuries of movements between countries and continents that have shaped Chinese culture and food as they adapted to each new place.Kwa’s descriptions of food are lush and vivid, plumbing the historical, personal, and philosophical depths of dishes and bringing in the difficult histories around Chinese immigration to America in complex and illuminating ways. In delicious prose that reads with the swiftness of a novel and the depth of a philosophical treatise, The Secret Menu shows us how the thinking and cooking lives are connected, and how the hunt for harmony, success, and a sense of belonging have helped generations of immigrants find their own menus for a delicious life filled with delights, against the odds.

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.