Meiling Jin

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Meiling Jin
Born1963 (age 61–62)
St. Cuthbert's Mission, Guyana
Occupation(s)Author, radio broadcaster, playwright, and filmmaker
Years active1985–present
Notable workGifts From my Grandmother (1985); The Thieving Summer (1993; Song of the Boatwoman (1996)

Meiling Jin who was born 1963 is a Guyanese author, radio broadcaster, playwright, and filmmaker who currently lives in London, England.[1]

Early History

In 1963, Meiling Jin was born in Guyana to parents of Chinese ancestry. She has one sibling, a twin sister. Despite her parents' background, Jin did not visit China for the first time until 1981. For the first eight years of her life, she lived and was raised in Guyana. In June 1964, Jin's family fled the country due to the unstable politics and moved to London, England. Jin's family left Guyana two years before it achieved independence within the Commonwealth on 26 May 1966. Her father had travelled first, and the rest of her family followed.[2] It was in London that Jin found her love for literature.

Career

Meiling Jin writes of the initial distress in England that she and her sister faced as the only Chinese girls in their school.[3] She details her own perspective of exile, “otherness” and the issues experienced as a minority group in England.[4] As the only female Chinese students, Jin and her sister were persecuted on racist grounds by boys. The most important teacher for her, who taught arithmetic, was an Asian man. Jin learned a lot from her teachers in London during this time and mentions in numerous articles how they were some of the many people in her everyday life from which she drew inspiration for her works. Although surrounded by people, she led "a solitary and unsupervised life."[5] Today, Meiling Jin's topics and style of writing reflect her identity as a Chinese Caribbean author. However, it was not until around 2012 that she began identifying and marketing her work as a Chinese Caribbean author. Prior to that she simply referred to herself as a Caribbean author.[6] Jin draws inspiration for her works from a range of different sources including Maya Angelou and Alice Walker. Jin also incorporates her many different cultural experiences in her work. She reasons why she writes and how poetry is remembered by so many by the iconic poets of the past several centuries. She expressed, "For me, writing is healing. It is also communicating. But above all, it's powerful. When I think of the mass media and the mausoleum of dead white poets, who have such a hold on people, I feel diminished. It's if, I am hurling myself against an enormous concrete wall; the only dent being my head the mausoleum of dead white poets, who have such a hold on people, I feel diminished."[7]

Works

Gifts From my Grandmother

The Thieving Summer

According to Critical Perspectives on Indo-Caribbean Women's Literature, Meiling Jin uses The Thieving Summer (1993) to "make[s] plain the difficulties and dangers of growing up an outsider in an insular community".[8] Waterstones Marketplace provides a brief summary of The Thieving Summer when they state: "A group of black children who live in North Kensington inadvertently find themselves involved with a petty criminal. The thief has a hold over one of them and blackmails them into keeping quiet – and even helping him in his burglaries. But the children are determined not to give up so easily."[9] Not unlike the themes of her other pieces of work, Meiling Jin writes for older children, but does not shy away from addressing racial issues directly in this piece of literature.

Song of the Boatwoman

Jin has dedicated Song of the Boatwoman to her mother, Stella Kam. In the beginning pages of this book Jin acknowledges and commends her mother for contributing to some of the stories told within Song of the Boatwoman.[10] Song of the Boatwoman was published just seven months after her mother's death.[10]

Bibliography

  • Gifts From my Grandmother (poetry), Sheba Feminist Press, 1985
  • The Thieving Summer (children's story) Hamish Hamilton, 1993
  • Song of the Boatwoman (stories), Peepal Tree Press, 1996

References

  1. ↑ "Meiling Jin | Actress, Director, Producer". IMDb. Retrieved December 20, 2023.
  2. ↑ Brown, Susan, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy. "Meiling Jin", Women's Writing in the British Isles from the Beginning to the Present. Cambridge University Press, 2006. Web.
  3. ↑ "Peepal Tree Press - Author Details". Archived April 16, 2015, at the Wayback Machine Peepal Tree Press - Author Details. Web. 27 February 2015.
  4. ↑ Creighton, Al (January 20, 2019). "The Chinese contribution to Guyanese literature". Stabroek News. Retrieved December 19, 2023.
  5. ↑ Jin, Meiling. Gifts from My Grandmother. Titlepage Title: Gifts from My Grandmother. Poems. Hiang Kee illus. London: Sheba Feminist, 1985: 10.
  6. ↑ Misrahi-Barak, Judith. (2012). "Looking In, Looking Out: The Chinese-Caribbean Diaspora through Literature—Meiling Jin, Patricia Powell, Jan Lowe Shinebourne". Journal of Transnational American Studies, 4(1). acgcc_jtas_12836.
  7. ↑ "O.B.E.M.A." Osnabruck Bilingual Editions of Marginalised Authors. OBEMA. Retrieved April 15, 2015.
  8. ↑ Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named Mahabir, Joy A. I. 2013
  9. ↑ The Thieving Summer. Waterstones Marketplace. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 March 2015.
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 Jin, Meiling (November 1996). Song of the Boatwoman. England: Peepal Tree Press. ISBN 9780948833861.

External links

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