To begin with, King Lear is the most unconventional, the most nearly hysterical, the most outré and outrageous play Shakespeare ever wrote.

In New Orleans, for example, the mirliton (chayote) tree has grown for centuries […]

For a while, purple-robed, heel-dangling, I sat on the edge of one of the rude tables, under the wooshing pines.

Father was from the third generation of the Gunn family whose patriarch hailed from Eng Choon county in the Chinese province of Fujian. (In Mandarin, this county is known as Yongchun.) Many of the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia had come from Eng Choon.