Gallery / Sussy Chako / UMass Magazine Home / Spring table of Contents
| "BASES LOADED, A TRIBUTE TO THE NEGRO BASEBALL LEAGUES," was organized to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in major league baseball. Among the works exhibited at teh Augusta Savage Gallery was work by Michael Coblyn, including the painting above. Coblyn received his BFA, MFA, and Ed.D. from UMass; he is an Assistant Professor in the Art Department. | Savoy Dancers by art professor Richard Yard- "one of the great American watercolorists of the twentieth century," writes the Boston Globe - was among the Yarde watercolors highlighted at R. Michelson's Northampton gallery this winter. A mojor Yarde exhibition rean concurrently at Smith College. |
Sussy Chako MFA '84: a writer at home in Hong Kong's financial district
Describing Sussy Chako a little like trying to describe the world. Born in Indonesia of ethnic Chinese parents, she soon after moved with her family to Hong Kong, where she grew up. She came to America to study and travel; married here; traveled in Europe (becoming especially fond of Greece), then settled for a time in New York City, where she worked for, among other firms, Chase Manhattan Bank. But Hong Kong called her home. After being lured away briefly for a job in Singapore, and after a divorce, she returned yet again to Hong Kong, this time to work for an advertising agency. Now's she's distribution and marketing director for Asia Wall Street Journal.
The resume, however impressive, tells but part of the tale. Chako's graduate degree from UMass is not in business, but in creative writing. (She has especially fond memories of studying with writers George Cuomo and Tomaz Aczel, to whom her second book, The Daughters of Hui is dedicated.) In 1991, while still in the U.S., Chako was awarded a New York State Arts Foundation fiction fellowship. In 1992 one of her stories won the Southeast Asia Post fiction contest and drew the attention of the Hong Kong publishing house Asia 2000, which released her Chinese Walls in 1994. An Asiaweek critic recently deemed that novel one of the best books in English to come out of Southeast Asia over the last decade.
Chako's readers can look forward to another novel, Hong Kong Rose, in the near future. "Sometimes I wish people would stop writing about me as the business woman who writes," Chako says, "and talk about me as the writer who also engages in business."
Sussy Chako's nomme de plume for the novel-in-progress, as well as for the recent collection of stories, is Xu Xi. As everyone knows, this summer Hong Kong ceases to be a British colony and becomes a special economic zone of the Republic of China. The name under which Chako has chosen to write reflects her deepening involvement with the history and concerns of Hong Kong, and her commitment to sticking with the city through the tides of historical change.
"Where else could I use all the skills I have?" she asks, referring to her trilingualism in Cantonese, Mandarin and English. "My parents are here, and so much of my personal history.
"Besides," she adds, "I feel Hong Kong is my city. Maybe it's bit like Nero's Rome right now, and if so, I will be chronicling the end of something. But maybe it is the beginning of something, too."
-Robert Abel MFA '74
