Joy Deng’s poignant and vivid narrative about love, loss, and memory explores the symbolism of flowers, particularly the rosy dipelta and peonies, as the protagonist grapples with the echoes of a past relationship. With themes of grief, nostalgia, and the passage of time, the tale is a meditation on how small moments and details can carry profound emotional weight.

Zhou Hau Liew’s “Quarantine Hotel” is a lyrical ekphrasis, as if a quarantine hotel were an installation art piece that places participants after the whip and before the lash of a sudden global pandemic, triggering ethereal eidetic imagery across space and time.

Li Jing describes her drama Mr Lu Xun (2015) as “a one-act non-historical drama” (无场次非历史剧)—a fictional re-imagining of history that speaks candidly to the present. Introduced and translated by scholar Andreea Chirita, the selected fragments in this version are from the play’s conclusion.