Showing results by author "Jean Kwok" in All Categories

WordTheatre, the short story experts, casts the perfect actors to bring great contemporary writing to life. The Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award is the richest prize for a story under 6,000 words. In the lead up to the announcement of each year's winner, the six shortlisted stories are presented to the public with many of the writers present. Recorded live in London and Oxford, England, these nine shortlisted stories inhabit distinct worlds where cultures and personalities collide.

Twenty-two-year-old Charlie Wong grew up in New York's Chinatown, the older daughter of a Beijing ballerina and a noodle maker. Though an ABC (America-born Chinese), Charlie's entire world has been limited to this small area. Now grown, she lives in the same tiny apartment with her widower father and her 11-year-old sister, and works - miserably - as a dishwasher. But when she lands a job as a receptionist at a ballroom dance studio, Charlie gains access to a world she hardly knew exis.

When Kimberly Chang and her mother emigrate from Hong Kong to Brooklyn squalor, she quickly begins a secret double life: exceptional schoolgirl during the day, Chinatown sweatshop worker in the evenings. Disguising the more difficult truths of her life-like the staggering degree of her poverty, the weight of her family's future resting on her shoulders, or her secret love for a factory boy who shares none of her talent or ambition-Kimberly learns to constantly translate not just her language but herself back and forth between the worlds she straddles.