‘’I am now alone, in a non-place, surrounded by street signs with names that are only phonetics - empty signifiers.’’

Two young people find and lose one another across the world. The narrator takes us into the heart of a beautiful and complex relationship that is fed by long conversations and Chinese folk tales. We experience his thoughts on love, loss, colonialism, western idols and appropriations, but most of all, his journey is an ode to a young woman who is as complex as the bond between the east and the West.

‘’Why don't you say something? The silence is making me uncomfortable.’’

In moments of uneasy silence, miscommunication and emotional distance ou narrator contemplates issues of belonging, actions and consequences. Should we be defined by the place in which we had the fortune or misfortune to be born? Should societies like Macau sacrifice their identity to the altar of profit? Do we haunt the street of our childhood long after we died? And what about love? Where does love leaders? How do we retain our personality when we ‘’surrender’’ our daily life to that special person that entered our lives?

Macau, Tokyo, Toronto, Taipei, Prague. Sheung - King creates a beautiful sense of place and time. The scenes in Prague will transport you to the Golden City. The trees, the evening lights, the street lamps in Toronto, the noise of a Mecca of casinos in Macau, the neon signs of Tokyo. And somehow, exquisite, haunting folk tales find their way into the narration to create a unique mixture. I loved the references to Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Haruki Murakami’s After the Quake, Yoko Tawada’s Persona, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian and the acute criticism towards Coppola’s horrible, offensive ‘’ film’’ Lost In Translation that is the epitome of Orientalist racial stereotyping.

The lines between Fiction and Memoir are blurred to create the most beautiful, whimsical confusion and the story of an unforgettable relationship between a sympathetic, tender narrator and a striking, enigmatic woman. I loved every page, every paragraph of this novel and I can’t wait to read more by Sheung - King.

‘’I am the one who waits.’’

My reviews can also be found on https://theopinionatedreaderblog.wordpress.com/ ( )

A disorienting, hallucinatory tale of two people in a fragmenting relationship, You are Eating an Orange. You are Naked leaves the reader with a hazy sense of complex lives briefly intersecting, the fragility of emotional connections, and the ephemeral nature of happiness. The narrator is a young man, a native of Macau who works as a translator in Toronto. He is practical minded, thoughtful, something of a melancholic, emotionally insecure, and sensitive to other people’s moods and needs. His girlfriend is a young Japanese woman, stunningly attractive, breezy and impulsive, who strides through the world in a private realm of confident awareness, knowing that because she is beautiful all sorts of inconsiderate and rude behaviours will be forgiven or at the very least tolerated. The novel describes, in concise snapshots, their life as a couple, their constant search for distraction, their sexual interactions that feed the young man’s desperate desire to please her and cater to her whims, or else lose her. In their time together the two frequently entertain each other with stories. The narrator recounts films or recites Chinese folktales for the girl’s amusement and consideration. These stories act as commentary on their own story, which is thorny and enigmatic. It is very much a one-sided relationship. In a signature moment that occurs early in the book, while on a trip together, she abandons him, leaving him in Macau with no explanation other than that she was bored, making no apology for her actions and not even promising that it won’t happen again. In the novel’s final section, “Kafka’s Guide to Love,” they are no longer together. She has returned to Tokyo, but out of the blue calls him in Toronto, saying she’s going to Prague for a job and asking if he will meet her there. He decides to go—helplessly, it seems, as if the decision has already been made—and is once again drawn into her orbit, seduced sexually and emotionally. Soon he is wondering sadly if they have a future together after all. Sheung-King’s novel, much of it narrated from a second-person perspective, is dreamlike and exhilarating, at once disjointed and fluidly lyrical. The prose is sensually alive, visually evocative. In his first novel, Sheung-King writes with great assurance of the ways we make ourselves vulnerable and expose ourselves to hurt within a relationship, and of the sort of love that is both a joy and a torment. ( )