An Evening with Jenna Tang

***Please note: This event will take place at the Books & Books in Coral Gables at 265 Aragon Ave. Tickets are FREE and books will be available for purchase at the event. Want your copy early or can't make it in-person?

The most influential book of Taiwan’s #MeToo movement—a heartbreaking account of sexual violence and a remarkable reinvention of the trauma plot, turning the traditional Lolita narrative upside down as it explores women’s vulnerability, victimization, and the lengths they will go to survive.
Thirteen-year-old Fang Si-Chi lives with her family in an upscale apartment complex in Taiwan, a tightknit community of strict yet doting parents and privileged children raised to be ambitious, dutiful, and virtuous. She and her neighbor Liu Yi-Ting bond over their love of learning and books, devouring classic works—Proust, Gabriel García Márquez, the very best Chinese writers. Yet, it is their lack of real-world education that makes them true kindred spirits.
Si-Chi’s innocence is irresistible to Lee Guo-hua, a revered cram literature teacher and serial predator who lives in her building. When he offers to tutor the academic-minded girls for free, their parents—unaware of Lee’s true nature—happily accept. While Yi-Ting’s studies with Lee are straightforward, Si-Chi learns about things no one teaches them in school—lessons about sex and love that will change the course of her life. Confused and uncertain, Si-Chi turns to her beloved books for guidance. But literature tells her nothing honest about rape or how to cope with the trauma of abuse. For her own salvation, the young girl begins to think of her personal hell as her “first love paradise,” where the power of love, no matter how twisted, gives her the strength to survive.
One of the biggest books to come out of Taiwan in the last decade, Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise is a chilling tale of grooming and its lingering trauma, and the power structures that allow it to flourish. Insightful, unsettling, emotionally raw, it is a staggering work of literature that reverberates across cultures and forces us to confront painful truths about the vulnerability and strength of women and those who use and hurt them.
Translated from the Chinese by Jenna Tang

Jenna Tang is a Taiwanese writer and a literary translator who translates between Mandarin, French, Spanish, and English. She graduated from MFA in Fiction Creative Writing from The New School in New York City. Her translations and essays are published in The Paris Review, Lit Hub, Restless Books, Latin American Literature Today, AAWW, McSweeney’s, Catapult, and elsewhere. Her interviews can be found at World Literature Today and Words Without Borders. She is currently based in Taiwan. She was 2021 Mentee at ALTA Emerging Translators Mentorship program with a focus on Taiwanese prose. She has translated Lin Yi-Han’s novel, Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise, has been released on May 21st, 2024 from HarperVia. To date, she has translated authors from Taiwan, México, Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela, and more.

Host or Publisher Books & Books