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Quell Reflect+

Games and Entertainment

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App

***** Thanks to the 4 million+ players who’ve already fallen in love with Quell, Quell Reflect,...

Goddess in the Stacks (553 KP) rated The Astonishing Color of After in Books

Mar 29, 2018

Evocative descriptions (1 more)

Good characters

Just WOW. The Astonishing Color of After is about a teenage girl, an artist, dealing with her mother's depression and ensuing suicide. Part of what makes the book so fascinating is Leigh's constant description of colors. She uses color as shorthand for emotions - her grandmother might have a vermilion expression on her face, or she might be feeling very orange while staring at her mother's coffin at the funeral. Between colors-as-feelings and her insomnia-induced hallucinations (or magic - the book is deliberately, I think, noncommittal on whether some things only happen in her head or not) the entire book feels a little surrealistic. But grief and mourning DO feel surrealistic. The book is amazingly evocative and emotional and I absolutely adore it. This, along with City of Brass and Children of Blood and Bone, are definitely on my Best of 2018 list.

As an added bonus, the author is the American child of Taiwanese immigrants herself. So all the ghost traditions and folklore from Leigh's journey to Taiwan are from her ancestry as well.

This book was gorgeous. It may need a trigger warning for depression and suicide. If you can handle those themes, read it.

You can find all my reviews at http://goddessinthestacks.wordpress.com

Kudos

Heart + Design League: Contemporary Asian Interiors

Kelly Jiang

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Book

Created in collaboration with MoHen Studio in Hong Kong, this volume is the definitive selection of...

Voice Text

Social Networking

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App

Just use your voice to send texts! Speak into your phone and the app immediately convert your words...

Our Wayward Fate

Gloria Chao

8.0 (1 Ratings) Rate It

Book

Seventeen-year-old Ali Chu knows that as the only Asian person at her school in middle-of-nowhere...

Internationalization and Managing Networks in the Asia Pacific

Nipawan Thirawat

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Book

Internationalization and Managing Networks in the Asia Pacific consists of theories and analysis in...

Ang Lee recommended The Farewell (2019) in Movies (curated)

The Farewell (2019)

2019 | Comedy, Drama

8.9

(7 Ratings)

Movie Favorite

"When I watched Lulu Wang’s “The Farewell,” it was a bit like revisiting my own past, as the young director who made “The Wedding Banquet” (1993). Both works center on a family celebration that’s based on a fundamental lie. In “The Wedding Banquet,” the wedding itself is a sham, an attempt to hide the main character’s gay identity from his Taiwanese family. In “The Farewell,” the banquet masks the fact that the grandmother Nai Nai (Shuzhen Zhao) is terminally ill, something that is known to everyone except her: the family hasn’t told her, and so the joyous celebration is also a disguised, melancholy farewell. As a film by an Asian American writer-director, “The Farewell” operates between two cultures, American and Chinese. This awkwardness is embodied in the character of Billi (Awkwafina), who was born in China but moved to the States when she was 6 years old. Her feeling of displacement is at the heart of the film’s two most affecting scenes: first, when Billi reveals to her mother how much she missed growing up in China, how lost she felt as a child in America; and second, Billi’s farewell to her grandmother when she returns to the States. Such a scene could easily have been very sentimental; instead, it’s stoic and moving and quiet — a testimony to Lulu Wang’s control of her material, and a lovely ending to a very heartfelt and personal film."

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