Colors of Heaven

by Trevor Carolan

Gathers stories from Japan, China, Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, Indonesia, Australia, and New Zealand

319 pages, Paperback

First published October 27, 1992

About the author

Trevor Carolan(born 1951) is a Canadian writer. He has published 16 books of non-fiction, poetry, fiction, translations and anthologies.

Reviews

[Kaye Arnold · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hit and miss for me. Some interesting stories and some a tad wordy with no real ability to hold my attention.

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is probably something inherently uneven about grand projects like this one -- "an exhiliratingly diverse collection of fiction from Eastern Asia and the South Pacific", the blurb claims. It is probably impossible to do justice to every place on a journey that begins in Japan, passes through Korea and China, with several stops on Southeast Asia, to wind up in Australia and New Zealand. In many of those places -- in Indonesia and Viet Nam, at least -- the short story remains a vital sector of the entertainment industry, showing up in newspapers on a weekly basis. The Philippines claim the only writer of much reknown in English (in part because he writes in it). F. Sionil Jose acquits himself here with a stinging indictment of his country's official corruption and its effect on a woman who just wants a promotion due her; his countryman Jose Dalisay Jr. has an effective portrait of an Army doctor treating an insurgent. Shirley Geok-Lin Lim and K.S. Maniam take up the respective misogynies of Malaysia's Chinese and Indian minorities, and Catherine Lim looks at similar issues in Singapore. Zhu Lin of China's "Festival of Graves" is a ferocious critique of a woman who chooses the "people" over her family; Nhat Tien contributes a vision of a village Marxism in Viet Nam that finds it easy to sacrifice its members. One of the curious things about this book is that the contributions of free Taiwan, South Korea and Japan are less probing than those from Marxist countries. The best of these stories form an interesting contrast with the short story community of the United States, which often looks inward, or at least not very far around. In contrast, these stories are about people struggling and usually failing against societal forces that seek to control them. Not all of them -- the representatives of Japan are of the Ozu/Kawabata tradition of delicate, barely-expressed emotion; the Thai contribution is, perhaps inevitably, about a sex performer. But the most effective of these stories arise out of long observation of the writer's culture and how it denies humanity; these writers may use their artistic instincts to shape and control their stories, but their anger is deeply felt.