by Lien Mingwei (Author), Brandon Yen (Translator)

'Summer is coming to a close even before it begins. I'm all alone on Tomato Avenue, watching sunlight softly unfurling into a luminous, mysterious river which flows through the long, long thoroughfare, through children who are shedding tears. For a moment, I feel like a little boat, bound for an unknown destiny.'

Tomato Avenue and Other Coming-of-Age Stories presents a triptych of novellas set among the Filipino-Chinese communities of Metro Manila. A boy transplanted from Taiwan to Quezon City forges friendships amid the raw realities of life in the Philippines, only to watch his friends drift away one by one before the long-awaited summer arrives. A Filipino boy adopted by a wealthy Chinese family is drawn into his older brother's self-destructive impulses, forced to confront violence and silence while coming to terms with his own identity. A sharp-tongued Chinoy teenager, raised by his grandmother and her retinue of elderly lovers, navigates the bewildering territories of desire, gender and intimacy as he hurtles towards adulthood.

Translated from the Chinese by Brandon Yen, Lien Mingwei's fiction is alive to the sensory and emotional textures of diasporic life: the babel of Mandarin, Hokkien, Tagalog and English, the aromas of balut eggs, star apples and sorghum liquor, the sweltering streets where jeepneys belch fumes and naked children weep. Engaging fearlessly with taboo subjects, the stories move between tenderness and brutality, comedy and grief. They capture adolescence as a state of dislocation, finding, in that perennial quest for belonging, something akin to grace.

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