In the sprawling streets of the big city, a storm brews. In our 37th issue, we venture to explore vastness in an issue that spans continents and car trips. We called on contributors to examine their relationships to space, to unpick obsessions and iterations, to turn their attention to the structures that oversee our lives, to probe into infinity. What can we uncover from the world around us? What do we leave behind?
In the issue:
- In London, Interviews Editor Chi S. Tsu speaks to debut novelist Stacey Yu about Yu’s book Kitten (Sceptre/Random House) and the desire to prolong childhood.
- In New York, Chi S. Tsu visits chef and food journalist Annie Faye Cheng for a discussion spanning from Cheng’s evolving career to analyses of restaurant culture and food labor.
- Editor Yue Chen and Northwestern University academic Michelle N. Huang exchange a thought-provoking conversation about Asian American studies and Huang’s new work Racial Beings (Duke University Press).
- Editor-in-chief Jiaqi Kang sits down on call with multimedia artist Maggie Wong to talk about memory, language, activism, and materiality.
- Xinyi Wang transports us to Jiangxi in “Grey Starlings”, a short story of childhood grief; Lavinia Liang’s “Wenyuan Alley” is alive with sensory imagery as an aunt returns to China after time abroad.
- Winifred Mok’s found poem reimagines space and landscape with text about the Antarctic.
- Lena Li traces familial rhythms and mourning rituals.
- New poetry by Olivia Sio Tse, Nora Sun and Helen Gu captures moving, quietly evocative tableaus, conjuring ‘water rings on wood’, ‘June bug carcasses’, and ‘coagulated interstates’.
- In “Yangtze Blindings”, Stephen Yang measures memory in terms of shifting rivers.
- New art from JESS HUAN HU bursts with color and texture.
- Staff contributor Juliette J Wu illustrates a striking cityscape viewed on high in new digital work “Aspara Over the City”.
Cover by designer Dorcas Lim.