切膚之痛

In these poems, created in both English and Chinese, Lien Chao evokes the lives of Asian Canadians in all their diversity and depth, as she reflects on the issues of identity, assimilation, and language.

These issues occur in the very act of confronting the two very different languages - Chinese and English - with each other, so that the confrontation itself becomes a metaphor of adaptation and conflict of cultures in Canada.