The guards came and escorted her out of her prison block. They walked past the ugly, squat office building. Even here, where the director and his staff worked and ate, the ground was arid. Need another excuse to treat yourself to a new book this week?
I learned a great deal about Malaysian history, politics, and how similar Chinese folk religion is wherever people practice it. I didn't connect with the storytelling and felt that the book was messy overall. I didn't always understand how each story related to one another. There was a story about a concubine that seemed out of place.
Though I get home, YZ Chin
It starts out strong but I lost curiosity and connections between the short stories midway. There are some parts that I really enjoyed though at the beginning and I was hoping that kind of quirky stories with insight will come back, but it didn’t. "Fourteen short stories intertwine in Chin’s beautiful, visceral collection. ... ogether, they powerfully call into question what it means to be free." “Though I Get Home” is the winner of the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize, which honors author Louise Meriwether by publishing a debut work by a woman or nonbinary writer of color. ” her mother cried out before she reached the wire mesh screen. It was a nickname she’d used when Isa was a child, a generic label that meant nothing more than “little sister.” Isa had not heard anyone call her that for many years, and now she was sobbing.
It is the longest story in the book, and at first, I didn't understand why he even mattered. Chin does reveal the relevance of this character at the end, but I wish there was some foreshadowing in the earlier stories. Also, there is a thread in the story where Howie Ho witnessed an incident of abuse and violence in his college dorm room but chose to do nothing. That annoyed me—not only because I thought he was a coward, but I also didn't understand how the incident added to his character.
Author
Isa Sin, a frustrated writer, provides the fixed point around which these other characters rotate. She is held prisoner in Malaysia’s infamous Kamunting Detention Center. Like Penelope, Chin’s weaves these shifting points of view into a tapestry that gives the reader tantalizing glimpses of clarity before eventually revealing the events on which she actually focused.
In the early 21st century, Isabella “Isa” Sin, 28, wants to be a writer. Instead, she’s imprisoned in her native Malaysia ... YZ Chin was born and raised in Taiping, Malaysia. She now lives in New York, working as a software engineer by day and a writer by night. The righteousness of cultural appropriation in the name of liberating the world, the white-hero complex.
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There are so many wonderful characters in this book. There is a butler who becomes almost a caretaker for one of the British colonizers in Malaya. And there is the lovelorn woman who pines after her lost lover. There is a clash between old and new worlds and how the meaning of old and new and its markers keep changing. This is a lovely glimpse into how a society and culture changes, for better or worse. Stories of political stagnation , family, identity, and protest in Malaysia.
A young man flies halfway around the world to vote in an election that he knows is rigged — or that’s what he tells himself. Written in the form of short stories that together tell the story of Isabella Sin, wrongly accused of "sedition", and sent to the country's most notorious prison. This happened at the peak of the general election that threatened to topple the long ruling of a political party in the country. Reading this as a born-and-bred Malaysian, I can relate to these all to well. However, after reading parts of it a few times to write this review, I grew to appreciate it. It's like a bottle of good, vintage wine that takes time and patience to enjoy.
When the hard-won victory was finally delivered, she held in her hands a child’s mirror made of plexiglass or similar, a toy with a skinny pink plastic handle. Over two weeks elapsed before Isa was told to expect her first visitor. Paperwork, the prison guard had explained regarding the delay. YZ Chin is the author of Edge Case, a New York Times Editors' Choice and an NPR pick for best books of 2021. Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. Find this title in Libby, the library reading app by OverDrive.
She hadn’t cried like this in front of other people, not since the rattan cane thrashing, that awful snap of the instrument. Would it never end, this taking away of her bit by bit? The acceptance of loss itself a loss, the broken spirit’s brand of Zen. Encik Yas jutted his head in, jerked his chin a few times, then left, slamming the door behind him. Isa froze in terror, not knowing what the chin jerks meant. Then she realized that he must have been giving a signal to the guard behind her.
The fretting behavior over princely sons while sisters and daughters languish, forgotten. The blind execution of morality management by quite literally the religious police force. The wise man who can predict the rains and the future.
The place of the British within the landscape of a place forcibly taken. The angry, hopeful youth hoping to take back power. They're themes we know but stunningly-written characters that we need more of in their nuance and human weaknesses. Though I Get Home is the literary debut of YZ Chin. Born and raised in Taiping, Malaysia, Ms. Chin moved to the United States when she was nineteen, and wrote this book while working as a software engineer.
The book centers around Isabella Sin, known as Isa, an aspiring writer-activist who was imprisoned for writing obscene poetry. The government arrested her he along with others who participated in a protest in Kuala Lumpur. Her grandfather, Gong Gong, had worked as a butler and a nanny for a British family during colonial times, had told her stories that ignited Isa's fascination with England. After his death, Isa spent a year in London, which led her mother to blame her lack of marital prospects on her Anglophone speech and attitude. There is also the story about her friend K, who at the opening of Starbucks in Taiping, pondered whether or not to leave her ex-boyfriend who had already broken up with her.
She could see that her mother wanted an entirely different kind of conversation. The medley of arguing voices separated into their components. The person she was bombarding was Encik Yas, the prison director, whose voice cut into hers now and then. This is a connected set of stories and vignettes centered around the arrest of a young woman for controversial poetry in Malaysia. The connections with disappearance of a the daughter of an English ...
What was the point of trying to outsmart the future? The choice was between seeing that lone option as choosing, and not. She slowly swept the handheld mirror up and down her body, as if she were using a metal detector on herself. She wanted to know what she must look like to others, these days. That was how she found four loose threads, two paint chips and an unidentified substance that was slightly gooey, ensnared in the insufficiently washed nooks and folds of her flesh.
And, speaking more broadly, Southeast Asian literature. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Though I Get Home by YZ Chin.
