here're the links::
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1Gd4_K2MaM
Hellooooo! This is Yuan Changming hailing from Vancouver. Here’s my debut novel, titled Detaching, newly released by Alien Buddha Press. On this occasion, I am, needless to say, as nervous as excited. Nervous because I am no speaker even in Mandarin, my mother tongue, let alone in English. As a matter of fact, I didn’t start to learn the English alphabet until I became an ESL major in Shanghai at age 19. Consequently, people around me, including my teachers and classmates then, and my family and friends later, often made fun of my broken English with a strong village accent. To prepare for today’s oral presentation, I got little sleep last night, trying to think about and practice in my mind what I should say in front of a camera. At the same time, I am very excited because this book stands for one of the 7 biggest happy surprises in my entire life. When I attended junior high school in rural China, I could never write anything longer than a page. For each composition assignment, I would beg my Chinese teacher to show mercy on me by accepting three to five poems instead. Later on, when I worked on my term papers, thesis and dissertation in the U of Saskatchewan, I could usually draft no more than five sentences on a whole day. Though I did have a dream book to write as early as thirty years ago, it’s remained a wishful thinking only. But in early 2022, before I caught covid, I began to write my first novel at age 65. Within 100 days, I completed drafting a trilogy to my own surprise, and since then I’ve written 40 short stories in addition to more than 100 love poems and a contemporary romance, most of which have been either accepted or published already, all inspired by one Chinese person, who doesn’t speak a single English word, but who is my first crush I reencountered after nearly half a century of separation without knowing each other’s whereabouts. In Detaching, which is actually the first part of my ambitious trilogy – the second and third parts are scheduled for publication as a duology next year by an LA-based press, I intend to tell a mega story about how Ming, as one of the first new immigrants from post-Mao China with a typical Chinese cultural personality, tries after achieving his ‘Canadian Dream’ to find meaning and happiness in life manly by developing a positive mentality based on free meditation and self-examination.
