Larissa Lai's Automaton Biographies Reading

Long-time Ricepaper contributor, writer, and UBC English professor, Larissa Lai brings us Automaton Biographies. Larissa's new book of poetry consists of four long poems: “Rachel,” a meditation in the voice of the cyborg figure Rachel from Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner and its source material, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; “nascent fashion,” which addresses contemporary war and its excesses; “Ham,” which circulates around the chimpanzee named Ham sent up into space as part of the Mercury Redstone missions by NASA in the 1960s and later donated to the Coulston Foundation for biomedical research; and “auto matter,” a kind of unfolding autobiography told in poems.

Judy Fong-Bates in Vancouver

On Friday May 29, 2010, Judy Fong-Bates gave a reading at UBC's Irving K. Barber Learning Centre. In partnership with Random House Canada, UBC Community Partners for Learning, the Chinese Canadian Historical Society (CCHSBC), the Asian Canadian Writers' Workshop (ACWW), Schema Magazine, the North American Association of Asian Professionals (NAAAP), and ExplorAsian, the IKBLC invited author Judy Fong-Bates' for a reading of her new book, Year of Finding Memory. An elegant and surprising book about a Chinese family's difficult arrival in Canada, and a daughter's search to understand remarkable and terrible truths about her parents' past lives. Growing up in her father's hand laundry in small town Ontario, Judy Fong Bates listened to stories of her parents' past lives in China, a place far removed from their every-day life of poverty and misery. But in spite of the allure of these stories, Fong Bates longed to be a Canadian girl. Fifty years later she finally followed her curiosity back to her ancestral home in China for a reunion that spiralled into a series of unanticipated discoveries. The Year of Finding Memory explores a particular, yet universal, world of family secrets, love, loss, courage and shame. This is a memoir of a daughter's emotional journey, and her painful acceptance of conflicting truths. In telling the story of her parents, Fong Bates is telling the story of how she came to know them, of finding memory. Watch as Larry Wong, Vancouver community historian, introduce Judy to the audience.