‘My Life in China’ film screening
Sheffield — On Friday, December 4 at 8 p.m., Race Brook Lodge will present the first Berkshire film screening of Ken Eng’s newest documentary, “My Life in China,” followed by a discussion with the director. “My Life in China” is a personal film that takes viewers on a journey to rural China, where an emotional revelation takes place: A story of migration is passed down from father to son, retracing the precarious steps risked in the search for a better life.
“My father would always tell us the story about how he walked for seven days and six nights before swimming for four hours to Macau to escape communism in 1966. Ever since his restaurant went bankrupt, my father feels like he failed at the American dream,” says Eng. “That’s when my father started talking about moving back to the motherland. In 2008 we retraced his journey back to the home village while visiting family along the way. My father wanted to see for himself if he could spend the rest of his days in the place where he was born. During my entire childhood, I couldn’t comprehend the magnitude of my father’s story until I saw it with my own eyes. It’s only now that I am beginning to understand his selfless act.”
Ken Eng is a Boston native who moved to New York City to study filmmaking at the School of Visual Arts in 1994. Eng’s film “Kokoyakyu: High-School Baseball” a documentary film about baseball in Japan, premiered in 2006 on PBS. In 2007 Eng was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to launch “My Life In China.”
Tickets are $10 at the door. Contact Race Brook Lodge for more information at (413) 229-2916.
–E.E.
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J.K. Lawson poetry reading at Lauren Clark Fine Art
Great Barrington — On Sunday, December 6 from 3 p.m. – 5 p.m., Lauren Clark Fine Art will present author, painter, and poet J. K. Lawson reading from his poetry collection ”Now.”
Published in the United Kingdom by Westwords Press, the poems are at once joyful and angry, celebratory and tragic, raving and utterly sensible. Lawson lives with his family in Berkshire County and is a regular contributor to the Berkshire Edge.
The event will include a book signing and light refreshments. For more information contact the gallery at (413) 528-0432.
–E.E.
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Williams College professor wins jazz research award
Williamstown — Rashida K. Braggs, assistant professor of Africana Studies at Williams College, has received a grant from the Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies (IJS) to continue her research on jazz. Braggs received the grant for her new research titled “In the Shadow of Josephine: Migrating Jazz Women Negotiate Racial and National Identity.”
The Morroe Berger-Benny Carter Jazz Research Fund grant will allow Braggs advance her project investigating jazz women of color who migrate away from their homelands. The resources at IJS have already proved instrumental to Braggs’ forthcoming book “Jazz Diasporas: Race, Music and Migration in Post-World War II Paris.” The book explores the shift in perceptions of jazz as a black music to a global music and analyzes the migratory experiences, collaborations, and negotiations of identity of African American musicians residing in postwar France.
Braggs holds a Ph.D. in performance studies from Northwestern University, an M.S. in mass communications from Boston University, and a B.A. in English and theater studies from Yale University. She has held a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University and a visiting professorship at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, and has been published in the journals Nottingham French Studies, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and the James Baldwin Review.
–E.E.
