by Felix Wong
On May 26, 1991, Lauda Air Flight 004 broke apart mid-flight shortly after a routine layover in Bangkok, raining cargo, metal, jet fuel, and bodies over the mountains of Suphan Buri province in what remains Thailand’s deadliest aviation incident to date.
When Felix Wong turns twenty-five, he chances upon a family secret: among the victims of Flight 004 was an aunt he never met, along with her newly-wed husband.
Why didn’t his family tell him sooner? And why are they still refusing to speak to him about it now, three decades later?
To untangle the past, Felix decides to trace the trajectory of his aunt’s life, from the crash site in Suphan Buri, where fragments of the plane can still be seen today, to his birthplace of Hong Kong, a city caught in the crossfire of the 2019 anti-extradition bill protests and on the cusp of a global pandemic. What he expects to be a straightforward trip, however, grows unexpectedly personal. As he balances the competing demands of his Chinese heritage and Canadian upbringing, he finds himself trapped in a web of family deceptions and personal secrets that challenge the very core of his identity. When an encounter with a mysterious girl threatens to evolve into romance, he must ultimately ask himself, where does he truly consider home?
Interweaving personal experience with interviews of family members whose lives have been irreversibly altered by Lauda Air Flight 004, Shall We Talk is a coming-of-age memoir about Felix Wong’s quest to piece together a fractured family history and figure out his place in the world.
Publication: Fall 2027
Publisher:
ECW Press
Rights sold:
- World: ECW Press