The Red Pearl single work   short story  
Issue Details: First known date: 1990... 1990 The Red Pearl
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Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon My Look's Caress : A Collection of Modern Romances Beth Yahp (editor), Margo Daly (editor), Lorraine Falconer (editor), Sydney : Local Consumption Publications , 1990 Z512295 1990 anthology short story Sydney : Local Consumption Publications , 1990 pg. 43-53
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Australian Love Stories Kerryn Goldsworthy (editor), South Melbourne : Oxford University Press , 1996 Z329737 1996 anthology short story extract humour satire South Melbourne : Oxford University Press , 1996 pg. 326-337
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon The Red Pearl and Other Stories Beth Yahp , Newtown : Vagabond Press , 2017 11681093 2017 selected work short story

    'The Red Pearl and Other Stories is an invitation from an idiosyncratic but endearing bunch of misfits and outsiders to travel to emotional sites just beyond our GPS coordinates. Welcome to Kuala Lumpur, Paris, Namche Bazaar - but also to unnamed, weirdly recognizable spaces of desire, anxiety or nightmare. Here, race riots unfold in 1960s Malaysia; an 'Asian' student faces 'Go home' graffiti on incessant train rides around Sydney; dogs in love twirl and tumble in the high mountains of Nepal. Here, too, is the parallel Gothic world of the Shanghai Bar, where an Orientalist seductress bites back; and the concrete world of expatriate Kuala Lumpur where Dragon Princes and spirit travellers can also be found. Here is a vision of Sydney at its mythical best: golden, shaded in jacaranda blossoms and offering benevolent asylum to an array of newcomers and old hands. Moving between genres and cultures, the stories in this collection capture moments of intensity and yearning, points of turbulence or rest in the lives of characters who inhabit a globalised world. Their quest is for new arrangements of family, home, friendship and workplaces; new ways of living and loving in a rapidly changing world. The Red Pearl and Other Stories is award-winning novelist Beth Yahp's first collection of short stories.' (Publication summary)

    Newtown : Vagabond Press , 2017
    pg. 40-55

Works about this Work

Paul Giffard-Foret Reviews The Red Pearl by Beth Yahp Paul Giffard-Foret , 2019 single work review
— Appears in: Mascara Literary Review , March no. 23 2019;

— Review of The Red Pearl Beth Yahp , 1990 single work short story

'Australian, Malaysian-born writer Beth Yahp’s short story collection The Red Pearl and Other Stories (2017) navigates between different locations and time periods. It is resolutely transnational and transhistorical in nature. At times, the collection veers towards the metaphysical and abstract. Yahp also experiments with different forms, styles, modes and genres of writing. The title story draws its suggestive force from what a specialist in Asian Australian fiction, Tseen Khoo, had defined as “Oriental grunge” in her analysis of Lillian Ng’s novel Swallowing Clouds. As often in Asian Australian women’s writing, the “sexotic” is deployed as a strategic (al)lure. The cultural politics of the collection’s cover page is relevant in this matter. A young Orientalised woman appears dressed in a crimson cheongsam, looking passive, her lips closed, with the top of her face cropped out from the cover frame. In so doing the Orient comes to be marketed and packaged as a desired object of fantasy deprived of the basic attributes of subjecthood, such as the power to think and reflect, as well as to see and develop a critical worldview, or speak of its own volition. “The Red Pearl” is a love tale between a sailor and a dancer met at the Shanghai Bar. Located in an unnamed Asian port city (most likely Singapore), the story bears “the promise of anonymity, abandonment, delirium, dream,” (Yahp 43) as well as poetic grace. Counter to what might be expected from the book cover, the lover clearly has an agency and power of her own, as proven by the fact that “when she agrees to dance, the sailor lies mesmerised.” (44)' (Introduction)

Your Worst Nightmare: Hybridised Demonology in Asian-Australian Women's Writing Shirley Tucker , 2000 single work criticism
— Appears in: Journal of Australian Studies , no. 65 2000; (p. 150-157)
This essay examines historical and contemporary fictional representations of Asian women and locates their 'unheimlich' counterparts in alternative portraits of, and by, Asian-Australian women writers.
Paul Giffard-Foret Reviews The Red Pearl by Beth Yahp Paul Giffard-Foret , 2019 single work review
— Appears in: Mascara Literary Review , March no. 23 2019;

— Review of The Red Pearl Beth Yahp , 1990 single work short story

'Australian, Malaysian-born writer Beth Yahp’s short story collection The Red Pearl and Other Stories (2017) navigates between different locations and time periods. It is resolutely transnational and transhistorical in nature. At times, the collection veers towards the metaphysical and abstract. Yahp also experiments with different forms, styles, modes and genres of writing. The title story draws its suggestive force from what a specialist in Asian Australian fiction, Tseen Khoo, had defined as “Oriental grunge” in her analysis of Lillian Ng’s novel Swallowing Clouds. As often in Asian Australian women’s writing, the “sexotic” is deployed as a strategic (al)lure. The cultural politics of the collection’s cover page is relevant in this matter. A young Orientalised woman appears dressed in a crimson cheongsam, looking passive, her lips closed, with the top of her face cropped out from the cover frame. In so doing the Orient comes to be marketed and packaged as a desired object of fantasy deprived of the basic attributes of subjecthood, such as the power to think and reflect, as well as to see and develop a critical worldview, or speak of its own volition. “The Red Pearl” is a love tale between a sailor and a dancer met at the Shanghai Bar. Located in an unnamed Asian port city (most likely Singapore), the story bears “the promise of anonymity, abandonment, delirium, dream,” (Yahp 43) as well as poetic grace. Counter to what might be expected from the book cover, the lover clearly has an agency and power of her own, as proven by the fact that “when she agrees to dance, the sailor lies mesmerised.” (44)' (Introduction)

Your Worst Nightmare: Hybridised Demonology in Asian-Australian Women's Writing Shirley Tucker , 2000 single work criticism
— Appears in: Journal of Australian Studies , no. 65 2000; (p. 150-157)
This essay examines historical and contemporary fictional representations of Asian women and locates their 'unheimlich' counterparts in alternative portraits of, and by, Asian-Australian women writers.
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