Tomato Avenue and Other Coming-of-Age Stories
by Lian Mingwei
Translated by Brandon Yen
‘Summer is coming to a close even before it begins. I’m all alone on Tomato Avenue, watching sunlight turning into a glittering, mysterious river which flows through the long, long thoroughfare, through children who are shedding tears.’
Tomato Avenue and Other Coming-of-Age Stories is a collection of three novellas set among the Chinese-Filipino communities of Metro Manila. A boy transplanted to Quezon City from Taiwan forges friendships in the viscerally raw environment of the Philippines – only to watch his friends leave one by one before the long-awaited summer arrives. A Filipino boy adopted by a wealthy Chinese family is drawn into his older brother’s self-destructive urge, forced to confront violence and silence while coming to terms with his own identity. A sharp-tongued Chinoy teenager, raised by his grandmother and her retinue of elderly lovers, navigates the bewildering territories of desire, gender and intimacy as he hurtles towards adulthood.
Translated from the Chinese by Brandon Yen, Lian Mingwei’s fiction is alive to the material and emotional textures of diasporic life: the babel of Hokkien, Mandarin, Tagalog and English, the aromas of balut, star apples and sorghum liquor, the sweltering streets where jeepneys belch fumes and naked children shed tears. The stories move fearlessly between tenderness and brutality, comedy and grief, capturing adolescence as a state of dislocation — and finding, in that perennial quest for belonging, something close to grace.
About the Author
Lian Mingwei (連明偉) was born in Yilan County, Taiwan, in 1983. After earning an MFA from National Dong Hwa University, he served as a Chinese-language teacher at the Philadelphia School in Quezon City, Philippines — an experience that inspired his debut collection, Tomato Avenue (winner of the inaugural TSMC Literature Prize). His novel Qing Fu Zi (青蚨子) won the Taiwan Literature Award Golden Classics Prize, and he is a recipient of the China Times Literary Award, the Lin Rung-San Literary Award and the United Daily News Literary Prize, among other honours.
About the Translator
Brandon Yen is a writer, artist, letterpress printer and translator based in England. He holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Cambridge and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. His translation of Li Tong’s Again I See the Gaillardias (2016) was also published by Balestier Press.
ISBN: 978-1-913891-65-7
Publication date: August 2026
Format: Paperback (Demy octavo) 216mm x 138mm
Pages: 300 pp
