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Koegeler, Kristen Hole, Beth Tsai, Claire Yu, Dylan Godwin, Rita Sung, Wentao Jiang, and many more.
I am very grateful to Professor Victor Mair for believing in this project and including it in his series at Cambria Press, the Cambria Sinophone World Series. The staff at Cambria Press, including director Toni Tan, assistant director Michelle Wright, and editor David Armstrong, has made the production of this book so much easier for me. I am equally appreciative of the very helpful comments and suggestions from the anonymous reviewers. Sinophone Malaysian artist Mr. Yeong Seak Ling has kindly granted me the permission to use his painting titled Kampung Life 01032012 for the book cover. I thank him for his kindness and his son, Mr. Yeong Ning’s help in facilitating our communication.
The Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation has generously awarded me with a Junior Scholar Grant between 2009 and 2010 to complete this book. Early stages of research and preparation for the project were facilitated by multiple summer research fellowships from the Department of Comparative and World Literature and a teaching fellowship from the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies at the University of Illinois. I also want to acknowledge The Fine Arts, Humanities, and lettered Social Sciences (FAHSS) committee at Stony Brook University for funding my research trip to Singapore, which involved the presentation of a chapter from this book at the Conference on Return Migration in Asia organized by the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the Asian Research Institute (ARI) in 2008. To commemorate the tenth anniversary of the passing of the doyen of Singaporean theater Kuo Pao Kun, ARI, NUS, the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), and the Practice Theatre have kindly invited me to the first International Conference on Kuo Pao Kun to present a part of my last chapter in the book. I would like to thank Quah Sy Ren, Chua Beng Huat, and Kuo Jian Hong for their invitation, and also Sy Ren for his support for this book. A short version of this chapter on Kuo Pao Kun has been included in Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader (edited by Shu-mei Shih, Chien-hsin Tsai, and Brian Bernards). I thank