A Blissful Moment of Nothingness
About the Book
It’s a moment everyone dreads: that moment before death. But what if it’s just an ordinary
moment when nothing happens? What if it’s no different from any other moment in life, when a dying person can’t even tell what’s coming? That moment could attract no emotional upheaval at all.
A Blissful Moment of Nothingness is a story about the past and the future. Everyone has a past, but Margaret Young is not someone who dwells on history, whether it’s personal or that of a place. She’s someone who’d rather live in the present.
Raised in Hong Kong, Margaret is forced by circumstances to revisit the past to make sense of her present. By recounting major events in her life, she comes to better understand herself and the people around her. She also comes to terms with the invisible power that is larger than life: the something that decides her fate and that of the people she loves.
Margaret sympathises with the young people in Hong Kong who are becoming disillusioned with life. They want to be in control of their destiny beyond 2047, when the city’s “one country, two systems” status expires. What is Margaret’s future during this political turmoil, and what is in store for the people in Hong Kong?
Mother’s Tongue: A Story of Forgiving and Forgetting
About the Book
Is it possible for someone to lose the ability to speak a language she’s been using for the past 50 years after undergoing surgery? Set in Hong Kong, the fascinating novel Mother’s Tongue poses many questions when a woman undergoes brain surgery for 14 hours, far longer than her surgeon expects.
When she wakes up, she speaks in a dialect that no one in her family can understand. Like most of the people in Hong Kong, the woman’s family speaks Cantonese. Some older members also use Hakka, a dialect of the Guangdong Province. So when the woman starts talking in Chiu Chow, her family is puzzled. The woman’s daughter decides to solve the mystery.
What could have happened in this woman’s past that is now blocking her language ability? Her daughter intends to find out the buried secrets in Mother’s Tongue: A Story of Forgiving and Forgetting.
Who’s that Ant?
About the Book
Where there are ants, there is politics. Where there are a lot of ants, there’s bound to be a lot of politics.
Who are these ants and why should you read about them? Ants and education might not appear to have an obvious connection, but they go hand in hand in this novella.
The story takes place in an imaginary colony of ants. It is therefore timeless.
The novella considers the serious subject of education and the political issues related to this billion-dollar business, but in a humorous way. Common universal issues are projected into the setting of the ant colony.
The book tells how this small ant colony becomes internationally known for its achievements in education, which occur in events that are not dissimilar to those of the human world.
It is told in the same voice that links the past with the present in three contexts: a little ant who enjoys talking and learning from his grandfather (representing the distant past), the writer of the history book A Chronicle of Education of Antkind (the immediate past) and a book prize winner who seeks help from a stranger (the present).
Who’s that Ant? Whose Dead End? is a real treat of a story that can be easily read in one sitting. You will most likely want to get more out of it by re-reading certain sections, or simply ponder your understanding of education the next time you see an ant.
About the Author:
After publishing two novels, Mother’s Tongue: A Story of Forgiving and Forgetting (2013), and Who’s that Ant? Whose Dead End? (2016), Susanna Ho continues to write stories about how politics influences ordinary people’s lives. Drawing inspirations from her experiences in Hong Kong, Canada, and China, she wrote A Blissful Moment of Nothingness, giving particular importance to time and place. She became a full-time writer in 2020 and now lives in Tasmania.