This archival version of AsianVoices features over 200 poems, stories and articles by young Asian poets and writers. AsianVoices was a website that I managed from 1997 to 2004. The contributors were mainly young adults and older teens (so there are mature themes in some of the works).
Contents
The poems, stories, articles and plays are categorized according to themes like family, love, death, travel and spirituality. You can click the following links to start exploring the poems, short stories, creative non-fiction and drama scripts.
- Bloodlines: Family
- Passions: Love & heartbreak
- Edible Words: Food
- Life’s Journey: Innocence & experience
- Scenes: Everyday life
- Requiem: Death & remembrance
- Reflections: Self-discovery & spirituality
- In Class: School life & education
- In Transit: Travel & transportation
- Destinations: Places
- Nature: Animals & the environment
- Muses: The creative process
- Conflict: War and its effects
- Kids’ Corner: For younger readers
- Pets: About, for and by pets
- Friendship: Cherished bonds
- Emotions: Emotional states
- Haiku: Concise poems
- Brushstrokes: Chinese-language works
If you are interested in reading newer work or if you are a writer interested in publishing your work, I would suggest submitting your poems or stories to Asian writing sites such as AsianCha or The Asian Writer.
About the Original Site
The AsianVoices site started as an online publication for my students at City University. I then opened up the site to contributions from other young writers in Hong Kong (it was called ExpressionsHK at that time) before blossoming into a pan-Asian site. This is why many of the works are by Hong Kong writers.
Writers would send in the work and I would format and upload it (and sometimes give suggestions for revisions). The definition of ‘Asian writers’ was broad and included non-Asians living in Asia and people of Asian ancestry living overseas. More experienced guest writers also contributed some of their works.
In 2004, I stopped working at the City University of Hong Kong, where the site was hosted. Fortunately another website—Cha: An Asian Literary Journal—took up where I left off, serving AsianVoices’ original purpose of being a platform for young Asian writers (and writers in Asia) while taking the concept one step further by trying to build a stronger sense of community among writers with its blog.
I thought it would be a shame for the wonderful contributions I received to disappear forever, so I have published this archive of the site here.
Here is a sample page showing the design of the AsianVoices site:
Doing website design at that time was especially challenging because monitor sizes were small (e.g., many people were still using a monitor resolution of 640 x 480 (the above screenshot, for example would have taken up most of the screen horizontally and you would have to scroll down to see the whole page) and Internet speeds were very low. Before inserting even a small images, you would need to consider if the aesthetic effect would be worth the page-loading delay.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank all the contributors for their participation in the AsianVoices experience. I received a lot of pleasure and inspiration from reading their poetry and fiction (longzijun: longzijun.wordpress.com zijun01@gmail.com).
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Longzijun 
Dear Stephen,
I am completing my second volume of “Asian Voices” which offers analysis of a broad cross-section of Asian texts including poetry, prose, film and memoirs. I have stumbled across your site and was wondering if your ex-students would like their work published and analysed. If suitable, they might even choose to write a short memoir piece that examines their poetic purpose and the issues they were exploring. The first volume did not feature any texts from Hong Kong composers and two of the poems that I would be interested in including are “Mother” from the ‘Destination’ group and ‘Cityscape’ from ‘Places’.
It seems fated that some collaboration might be possible given that I have ttitled my educational resource books ‘Asian Voices’.
You can view details about my work from my publisher’s site, including getting a sense of what ‘Asian Voices 1’ was like.
https://www.phoenixeduc.com
https://www.stannersenglish.com/
Regards,
Barbara Stanners
Hi. Unfortunately, that web project was wrapped up around 12 years ago (with most of the entries having been posted 4 years before that), so I have long lost touch with almost all the writers (only some of whom were my students and none of whom were students at the school where I now teach). If I had been cleverer, I would have had them sign release forms allowing for the work to be republished, but that was my first such project.
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