Xue Yiwei's short stories of Shenzhen out in English

For Montreal-based writer Xue Yiwei, the publication of the English version of his collection of short stories in Chinese is a remarkable event.

It is the first of a kind in Canada where he has lived for nearly two decades, and all nine stories in the book are about a city in his home country China. With a history of more than three decades, the city in his book developed out of a small fishing village as an epitome of China's reform and opening-up since the 1970s.

Shenzhen, China's first special economic zone in the south, saw the initial wave of reforms and paved the way for massive development in the rest of the country.