How to Be Dead in a Year of Snakes (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781869408183)

In 1905, white supremacist Lionel Terry murdered the Cantonese gold prospector Joe Kum Yung to draw attention to his crusade to rid New Zealand of Chinese and other east Asian immigrants. Author Chris Tse uses this story--and its reenactment for a documentary a hundred years later--to reflect on the experiences of Chinese migrants of the period, their wishes and hopes, their estrangement and alienation, their ghostly reverberation through a white-majority culture. Along the way readers visit the gold fields of the south; a shipwreck in the Hokianga that left the spirits of 500 Chinese gold miners in an unmemorialized limbo for a hundred years; and the streets of Newtown, Wellington, where Lionel Terry went out one night "looking for a Chinaman." Chris Tse's flickering use of imagery, resonant language, and flexible pronouns are particularly suited to the historic events he describes and the viewpoints he shifts through. How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes is a welcome poetic addition to New Zealand literature.

Author: Chris Tse
ISBN-10: 1869408187
ISBN-13: 9781869408183
Publisher: Auckland University Press
Language: English
Published: 12/01/2014
Pages: 80
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.22lbs
Size: 8.00h x 6.30w x 0.20d