You Are Eating an Orange. You Are Naked.
CBC Books | | Posted: August 31, 2020 7:12 PM | Last Updated: October 14, 2021
Sheung-King
A young translator living in Toronto frequently travels abroad — to Hong Kong, Macau, Prague, Tokyo — often with his unnamed lover. In restaurants and hotel rooms, the couple begin telling folk tales to each other, perhaps as a way to fill the undefined space between them. Theirs is a comic and enigmatic relationship in which emotions are often muted and sometimes masked by verbal play and philosophical questions, and further complicated by the woman's frequent unexplained disappearances.
You Are Eating an Orange. You Are Naked. is an intimate novel of memory and longing that challenges Western tropes and Orientalism. Embracing the playful surrealism of Haruki Murakami and the atmospheric narratives of filmmaker Wong Kar-wai, Sheung-King's debut is at once lyrical and punctuated, and wholly unique, and marks the arrival of a bold new voice in Asian-Canadian literature. (From Book*Hug)
You Are Eating An Orange. You Are Naked. was on the Canada Reads 2021 longlist.
You Are Eating An Orange. You Are Naked. is on the shortlist for the 2021 Governor General's Literary Award for fiction. The winners will be announced on Nov. 17, 2021.
Sheung-King is a writer born in Vancouver, raised in Hong Kong and currently living in Toronto. You Are Eating an Orange. You Are Naked. is his first book.
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From the book
The ancient Chinese scholar Guo Po writes: "At the age of fifty, a fox can transform into a woman. At the age of a hundred, it has the choice to either metamorphose into a wizard, or become a seducer; it can know of happenings a thousand li away; it can bewitch people, leading them astray and causing them to lose their wits. At the age of a thousand, it can communicate with the heavens and be-come a celestial fox." On one of our first dates, you suggest that we go to a zoo to see some foxes. The foxes in the zoo have yet to turn fifty. They walk around on four legs and lie on the ground and smell like skunks. You smell nice and have the most elegant walk.
From You are Eating an Orange. You are Naked. by Sheung-King ©2020. Published by Book*Hug Press.