You Are Eating an Orange. You Are Naked.

  ‘'I am now alone, in a non-place, surrounded by street signs with names that are only phonetics - empty signifiers.''
Two young people find and lose one another across the world. The narrator takes us into the heart of a beautiful and complex relationship that is fed by long conversations and Chinese folk tales. We experience his thoughts on love, loss, colonialism, western idols and appropriations, but most of all, his journey is an ode to a young woman who is as complex as the bond between the east and the West.
‘'Why don't you say something? The silence is making me uncomfortable.''
In moments of uneasy silence, miscommunication and emotional distance ou narrator contemplates issues of belonging, actions and consequences. Should we be defined by the place in which we had the fortune or misfortune to be born? Should societies like Macau sacrifice their identity to the altar of profit? Do we haunt the street of our childhood long after we died? And what about love? Where does love leaders? How do we retain our personality when we ‘'surrender'' our daily life to that special person that entered our lives?
Macau, Tokyo, Toronto, Taipei, Prague. Sheung - King creates a beautiful sense of place and time. The scenes in Prague will transport you to the Golden City. The trees, the evening lights, the street lamps in Toronto, the noise of a Mecca of casinos in Macau, the neon signs of Tokyo. And somehow, exquisite, haunting folk tales find their way into the narration to create a unique mixture. I loved the references to Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Haruki Murakami's After the Quake, Yoko Tawada's Persona, Han Kang's The Vegetarian and the acute criticism towards Coppola's horrible, offensive ‘' film'' Lost In Translation that is the epitome of Orientalist racial stereotyping. 
The lines between Fiction and Memoir are blurred to create the most beautiful, whimsical confusion and the story of an unforgettable relationship between a sympathetic, tender narrator and a striking, enigmatic woman. I loved every page, every paragraph of this novel and I can't wait to read more by Sheung - King.
‘'I am the one who waits.''
My reviews can also be found on https://theopinionatedreaderblog.wordpress.com/ 

This is a quiet, thoughtful set of vignettes about a translator and an unnamed woman (“you” in all of the stories but one). Absurd and fantastical but grounded in reality, this really does feel like spying on the quiet parts of someone's life - small kindnesses and moments of love, but also petty jealousy and a sort of thoughtless cruelty where the characters are speaking at cross purposes. There is also some great meditation on colonialism and the way racism can shape people's lives.

<3

It's a confident debut that namedrops Goethe, Nietzsche, Judith Butler, Ai WeiWei and Mo Yen. It was inspired by the films of Wong Kar-wai and written as part of Sheung King's Masters thesis - and despite all this, avoids coming across as insufferably pretentious. That doesn't make it any less challenging a read though.

“In the Meiji Era, Natsume Soseki translated the English phrase I love you as The moon is beautiful, isn't it? He believed that feelings should be expressed indirectly rather than directly. And to him, that question—the moon is beautiful, isn't it?—perfectly captured the state of affection known as love.”

That is how the book reads to me. My normal galloping pace of reading renders the text inscrutable and opaque. (I know I said it wasn't pretentious, but I love this paragraph and how it fits into the larger story) If only you'd sit with it a bit it could bloom in understanding and significance, but I'm already 2 pages past that. The fault lies with me and my inability to slow down, reread and consider what is being hinted at here. In that sense it's closer to poetry and its need to be more closely considered. Right book at the wrong time for me.