Name: Viv  

Reading: Half a Lifelong Romance, Eileen Chang  

Why did you want to read this? I read this a few years ago after a slump in reading non-fiction. I'd realised that all the non-fiction I was reading was by white or Japanese men, I was pretty sick of it, so I made a point of looking for books written by East Asian women. It was also around that time when I saw my mum more often in person. She remembers reading Eileen as a teenager, and is one of the few Hong Kong writers whose work has been translated into English for a long time. It made Eileen a natural starting point, and I loved getting lost in the historical drama of it all - somehow for me it's both 1930s Shanghai and 1970s Hong Kong at the same time.  

How did you record yourself? I wanted to play with a new microphone I bought recently when I got myself set up to teach online - so I read from my desk, surrounded by piles of books and scraps of paper. The book has been sat at my right arm for about a week.