Tomato Avenue and Other Coming-of-Age Stories
by Lien Mingwei
Translated by Brandon Yen
On the long, diesel-choked stretch of Del Monte Avenue — better known as Tomato Avenue — children build boats they may never sail, speak languages that belong to no single country, and learn that the people they love are capable of vanishing without warning.
Tomato Avenue and Other Coming-of-Age Stories gathers three linked novellas set among the Chinese Filipino communities of Metro Manila. A Taiwanese boy transplanted to Quezon City forges fierce friendships in the chaos of a Philippine summer — only to watch them fracture before the season is through. An adopted Filipino boy raised in a wealthy Chinese household is drawn into the orbit of his older brother’s self-destruction, forced to confront violence, silence and the limits of fraternal love. And 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, Lien Mingwei’s fiction is alive to the textures of diaspora life — the babel of Hokkien, Mandarin, Tagalog and English; the aromas of balut and star apple and sorghum liquor; the sweltering avenues where jeepneys belch fumes and children shed tears. These stories move fearlessly between tenderness and brutality, comedy and grief, capturing adolescence as a state of permanent dislocation — and finding, in that dislocation, something close to grace.
Tomato Avenue is a startling literary debut: proof that the coming-of-age story, in the right hands, can hold within it an entire world.
About the Author
Lien 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, translator, artist and letterpress printer. He holds a PhD in English from Queens’ College, Cambridge, and is the author of The Excursion and Wordsworth’s Iconography and co-author of Versed in Living Nature: Wordsworth’s Trees. His translation of Li Tong’s Again I See the Gaillardias, also published by Balestier Press, won an award from the National Museum of Taiwan Literature.
ISBN: 978-1-913891-65-7
Publication date: August 2026
Format: Paperback (Demy octavo) 216mm x 138mm
Pages: 300 pp
