Malaysian American writer Chin Woon Ping will read Dadah: A Meditation on Opium, featured in CUNY FORUM Volume 3:1, which evokes the times and life of the overseas Chinese who grew up in Malacca, Malaysia, once a British port for the opium trade. In prose and poetry, in the form of a linked imaginary historical diary, Chin recounts her own family history riddled with deaths from opium, and heroin – its derivative. Chin later moves to Vermont, where she sees “that opium has followed me here too, with addiction and crime reaching alarming portions.”
