Reviews

Room/Ystafell/Phòng is critically invested in verbalising, documenting, picturing the embodied experience of living in that queerness.

Parasibu boldly takes different approaches to storytelling, from metafictional to slice-of-life, from realist to surrealist.

While raw and brutalist in its self-critique, Le’s poetry also grants grace to the immigrant child who becomes a writer.

The body is a major theme in Lieu’s stories. The body that exists pluralistically, that takes up multiple cultural spaces, the body as a refugee, and as a body that exists in a culture that promotes ridiculous beauty standards.

About five years ago, I watched Susan Lieu perform her one-woman show, 140LBS: How Beauty Killed My Mother as part of the Center for Asian American Media’s CAAMFest in San Francisco. The show captured Susan’s journey as she tried to piece together portraits of her mother in search of answers to about 100 questions she had, a reasonable amount for any child who unexpectedly lost their mother at 11. I left the show emotionally shattered and distraught, deeply feeling the pain and grief that Susan lay bare on stage.

The running thread throughout the selected works as addressing boundaries and borders, what’s considered in and out of a state, the inner and outer, and the private and public spheres of the social, economic, and political.