Li Zi Shu, Translated by YZ Chin
The Age of Goodbyes
The Feminist Press: 2022
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The publication of The Age of Goodbyes—the English translation of the award-winning novel by Li Zi Shu—was a celebrated event, eagerly awaited by connoisseurs and enthusiasts of Mahua (Malaysian Chinese) literature. This translation by YZ Chin, published by the Feminist Press, has made Li Zi Shu’s delicate work of art accessible to even more readers. In The Age of Goodbyes, Chin, an accomplished and sensitive translator, captures Li Zi Shu’s vivid, colourful wit in the narrative recounted through the clean structure of metafiction. Chin won the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize in 2017 for her own collection of short stories, Though I Get Home.

A subject of interest in the novel is its ambiguity—what does it actually bid goodbye to? The Age of Goodbyes has an evocative yet bewildering beginning, for it starts on page 513. Where are the previous 512 pages? one may wonder. Framed in a multitonal, metafictional historical setting, a book within the novel, also named The Age of Goodbyes, was published but forgotten and hidden away in a lower corner of an old library where spiders make their home. Du Li An, the protagonist in the first storyline, is reminded by her deceased ‘Mother’ to visit the library to find her ‘father’, a taboo word to mention until then. Mother breathes her last in the Mayflower—her brothel home where Du Li An was raised—seemingly at peace. However, the search continues with Du Li An, who has now been commissioned to seek the people and events of years bygone.

• Tags: Florence Kuek, Issue 31, Li Zi Shu, Malaysia