The Poison of Polygamy originally appeared serially in Melbourne’s Chinese Times in 1909–10. Wong Shee Ping’s novella is a kind of Cantonese Rake’s Progress by way of Rider Haggard, relating the wanderings and misadventures of a man sojourning in Australia, and the yearnings of the wife he leaves behind at home. Subtitled as social fiction, its chief concern is not migration but the moral ... (read more)
Josh Stenberg
Josh Stenberg is a Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Sydney. He holds a Discovery Early Career Research Award from the Australian Research Council, and is a translator and author of fiction and poetry. (photograph by H. Romero)
It is 2100, and the states of the world have divvied up the ocean floor, constructing domed cities in which humanity, such as it is, survives. The earth’s irradiated, unliveable surface is the haunt of adventure tourists and archaeologists, the battleground of military androids watched on screens by the humans at the bottom of the sea.
... (read more)