Interview in EFE, March 4, 2009

Writer Siu Kam Wen Back in the Public Eye in Peru

By David Blanco Bonilla

EFE. The work of Siu Kam Wen, a Chinese-Peruvian writer who has lived for several decades in the United States, is once again attracting notice with the republishing in Lima of his first book of short stories and the release of his latest novel.

Born in the Chinese town of Zhongshan in 1951, he arrived in Peru at the age of eight and lived there until 1985, when he traveled to Hawaii to pursue "better work opportunities," the writer told Efe.

But despite the geographical distance, he has always maintained ties with Peru and the Chinese community in the Andean nation through his work and therefore considers himself to be "a Peruvian writer."

"My nationality may be American and I may be Chinese by birth, but I'm a Peruvian writer because almost everything I've written is about Peru, about its people, about my experience in Peru," the author said.

Siu acknowledged, however, that, even though he feels his works are part of the Peruvian literary canon, his ties to that tradition are not as strong as some other authors and therefore he still is considered "a writer of the periphery."

Currently on a visit to Lima after being away for several years, he is presenting this week a republished version of his story collection titled "El tramo final" (The Final Stretch), part of the Contemporary Peruvian Classics series put out by the Casatomada publishing house.

In a curious side-note to the work, chosen as book of the year in Peru after being published for the first time in 1986, several literary critics and commentators initially said the title had been published under a pseudonym.

"A lot of people thought that way. What happened is that when I published my first book I'd already left Lima and there was no way to show my face in public. No one knew who I was and when people saw my photograph they thought it was a fake," he joked.

Also contributing to that perception was his physical distance from Peru because, even though he was always yearning for Lima and the traditional neighborhood of Rimac where he grew up and spent much of his youth, he was fully dedicated at that time to his work as an accountant at a government institution in Hawaii.

"I feel more nostalgia for Peru than for China. I spent part of my childhood and adolescence and youth here, and so all my memories are connected with Peru. Of course they're not all pleasant," he said.

On Thursday, Siu also will present his novel "La vida no es una tombola" (Life is not a Tombola), published by the Fondo Editorial of the National University of San Marcos, where he studied accounting but also discovered his literary vocation.

He wrote from the age of 10 in Chinese, his dominant language at that time, and only switched to Spanish at the age of 29 to cope with the "unhappiness" he felt over having pursued a career imposed on him by his parents.