AlliterAsian by Allan Cho Page B

Ricepaper and thinking: These artists are artists first; they have many different identities, one of which is Asian-Canadian, and whether they choose that identity or not, it’s really up to them. I had a lot of questions about putting a label on people. I would have wanted to choose for myself, too. I think I had a lot of unresolved questions that I didn’t know how to answer in that context. I think I would be a better editor now.
    I wish we could make a structure where there was more intergenerational exchange with Ricepaper . Because I feel that Fred Wah or Roy Miki have so much to tell us. And the structures and prejudices and ghettos that they were reacting against still exist. They haven’t changed, only we don’t name them the way they did then. I don’t know how to have those conversations without making people feel targeted. It’s very, very sensitive. And I find myself more and more curious about that conversation, even more now than when I was at Ricepaper . Maybe it’s age.
    HM: Do you find it useful for you to call yourself an Asian-Canadian writer?
    MT: I don’t, partly because I feel—and I felt this way with Dogs atthe Perimeter in Cambodia—that the story around Cambodia is [one] that everyone should feel responsible to and that everyone should see as their own. All our governments were involved, either before or after. And with Cambodia, in particular, it’s been very easy for the West to distance itself and forget. There’s a lot of amnesia about the Vietnam War and the American bombing of Cambodia, which was entirely illegal and secret. It was huge. We actually supported the Khmer Rouge as the representatives of Cambodia until the 1990s, you know. Fifteen years after the genocide, we still recognized Pol Pot as the country’s leader. So in that way, the Asian-Canadian box feels too small. I feel that our stories are as legitimate and mainstream as anyone’s.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  C OMMENTARY BY M ADELEINE T HIEN (2015)
    Only two years have passed since my conversation with Hanako, and so although I’ve been asked to write a commentary, what strikes me most is that I find myself unable to do so. Conversations continue like stories, concluded but not necessarily resolved.
    I’m at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, a country I don’t know well, but one that borders my father’s birth country, Malaysia. Working with writers here, I think about how words—race, Asian, marginal, centre, literature, story, reader, language, writer, history—take on different connotations, sometimes vastly different, in this political context. Concepts, even basic ones, present alternate problems and different freedoms. I think of Hannah Arendt writing about Isak Dinesen, “It is true that storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.”
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  A BOUT THE A UTHOR
    Hanako Masutani is a former creative director of Ricepaper , whose work has appeared in the internationally acclaimed literary journal Grain . She lives in Vancouver, BC.

Travelling between Worlds with Ruth Ozeki
    Ricepaper 18, no. 4 (2013)
    Erika Thorkelson
    When I catch up with Canadian-American-Japanese author Ruth Ozeki over the phone from her home on Cortes Island, BC, she’s still buzzing over the European leg of her book tour to promote her third novel, A Tale for the Time Being . She’s been to Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, and all over England, and she gushes about the independent bookstores there, which seem to be rarer every year in North America.
    In Bath, England, at the whimsically named Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights, a trio of young musicians who perform under the name the Bookshop Band, wrote and performed a song in the book’s honour. It was a dream response for a novelist who toils in solitude on a remote island to see her work reaching across the world to inspire other