Tomato Avenue and Other Coming-of-Age Stories
by Lien 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. For a moment, I feel like a little boat, bound for an unknown destiny.’
Tomato Avenue and Other Coming-of-Age Stories presents a triptych of novellas set among the Filipino-Chinese communities of Metro Manila. A boy transplanted from Taiwan to Quezon City forges friendships amid the raw realities of life in the Philippines, only to watch his friends drift away 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 impulses, 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, Lien Mingwei’s fiction is alive to the sensory and emotional textures of diasporic life: the babel of Mandarin, Hokkien, Tagalog and English, the aromas of balut eggs, star apples and sorghum liquor, the sweltering streets where jeepneys belch fumes and naked children weep. Engaging fearlessly with taboo subjects, the stories move between tenderness and brutality, comedy and grief. They capture adolescence as a state of dislocation, finding, in that perennial quest for belonging, something akin to grace.
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 The Green Cicada 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: 15 August 2026
Format: Paperback (Demy octavo) 216mm x 138mm
Pages: 450 pp
