ChinaTalk & Unbound Present: Everyday Movement (Monthly China Reads, #2)

​ChinaTalk Book Club — we're doing it again! Per overwhelming requests, we will be reading Gigi Leung Lee-chi’s Everyday Movement 日常運動, translated into English by Jennifer Feeley.

​On a weekend morning, college roommates Ah Lei and Panda wake up in the same apartment. The night before, they were chased and tear-gassed in the streets of Hong Kong, after joining tens of thousands of others to protest the proposed national security law. Ah Lei can’t get out of bed, her heart heavy with the lingering images of violence. Panda puts on a sundress, lines her eyes, and urges Ah Lei to join her for brunch.

​Amid a wave of new books reflecting on Hong Kong's 2019 protest movement, Everyday Movement is essential, visceral, and brilliantly skilled reading. I am especially moved by Taiwanese scholar Yang Tsui's prologue for the Traditional Chinese version:

​[The book] reveals a gray zone between the everyday and the movement. This may disappoint many, for it points to the most elusive, ambiguous, contradictory, and conflicted presences of social movements—things we all dimly recognize but often choose to ignore. Yet if the movement and the everyday are already so deeply entangled, romanticized literary accounts cannot offer true redemption. Only by confronting those shades of gray, those contradictions, and those doubts, hesitations, and bewilderment in our own hearts can we hope to find a sliver of light amid the deepest darkness.

​它揭露了日常與運動的灰階地帶，這可能會讓許多人失望，因為它指認了我們都隱然知道，但大多數時候刻意忽略的那些運動中最幽微、曖昧、矛盾、衝突的存在。但是，如果運動與日常已然如此糾葛纏結，浪漫化的文學書寫並不會提供真正的救贖，唯有直面灰階，直面矛盾，直面內心的質疑、猶疑、茫惑，才可能在最黑暗的底色中，找到一線光隙。

​Translator Jennifer Feeley will be joining us online! Please submit any questions you have for her here: Open Google Form

​Copies are available at Unbound, in store or online in English or Traditional Chinese. Finished it, halfway through, or haven't started? Come anyway.

​Free; RSVP required, space is limited. Hope to see you there!

​— Irene:)