Paul Yee will speak at VIU on October 19 about his latest work, A Superior Man and his remarkable writing career that has spanned more than three decades.
October 16, 2015 - 3:30pm
By Maurice Gallant
Award-winning Canadian author Paul Yee will speak at Vancouver Island University (VIU) on October 19 about his latest work, A Superior Man and his remarkable writing career that has spanned more than three decades.
Much of Yee’s work has been devoted to young readers with memorable books such as the 1996 Governor General’s Literary Award-winning Ghost Train. Whether the stories are about the Chinese in Asia or North America in the past or present, Yee’s books are peopled by embattled characters who must overcome obstacles fashioned by other humans, nature, fate, or a combination of all three.
Paul Yee’s upbringing played a major role in his choice of material. In the website learner.org, Yee is quoted as saying that when he was growing up in Vancouver’s Chinatown in the early sixties, he “was surrounded by plenty of Chinese images.”
During this period, he was “yearning to move away from the neighborhood,” but later he was drawn back to his culture and would go on to write, as he notes on his website, about his “world--the world of immigrants, racial minorities, and different histories.”
Yee’s most recent work, A Superior Man is his first novel for adults but it is not his first foray into more adult-oriented writing. Yee’s bibliography includes historical work such as Saltwater City: An Illustrated History of the Chinese in Vancouver and a play Jade in the Coal, set in the Vancouver Island coal mining town of Cumberland.
In A Superior Man, Yee returns to frontier BC the setting for some of his most memorable young adult fiction. But from the opening pages, in which the reader is immersed in a colorfully gritty scene in 1885 Victoria, it quickly becomes clear that this is a novel for a more mature audience.
Readers are taken on a journey with the main character, Yang Hok, a gambling hall bouncer. He may be undeniably physically and mentally tough, but does he possess the moral strength to gain the redemption he seeks and become a superior man?
Find out about this character’s journey and the lives of Yee’s other characters as well as the man himself on October 19 at VIU’s Nanaimo campus, 900 Fifth Street, at 2:30 pm in Room 203, Building 200. The closest general parking is in Lots C/E, which are off Fifth Street.
For more information about Yee, visit http://www.paulyee.ca
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Editor’s note: Maurice Gallant teaches English as a Second Language at Vancouver Island University.
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