This book provides detailed and engaging narratives about 25 pivotal events in Asian American history, celebrates Asian Americans' contributions to U.S. history, and examines the ways their experiences have shaped American culture. Asian Americans have made significant contributions to American history, society, and culture. This book presents key events in the Asian American experience through 25 well-developed, accessible essays; detailed timelines; biographies of notable figures; excerpts of primary source documents; and sidebars and images that provide narrative and visual information on high-interest topics. Arranged chronologically, the 25 essays showcase the ways in which Asian Americans have contributed to U.S. history and culture and bear witness to their struggles, activism, and accomplishments. The book offers a unique look at the Asian American experience, from the California Gold Rush in the mid-nineteenth century to the 2017 travel ban. Highlighting events with national and international significance, such as the Central Pacific Railroad Construction, the Korean War, and 9/11, it documents the Asian American experience and demonstrates Asian Americans' impact on American life.
In Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future, Candace Fujikane contends that the practice of mapping abundance is a radical act in the face of settler capital's fear of an abundance that feeds. Cartographies of capital enable the seizure of abundant lands by enclosing "wastelands" claimed to be underdeveloped. By contrast, Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) cartographies map the continuities of abundant worlds. Vital to restoration movements is the art of kilo, intergenerational observation of elemental forms encoded in storied histories, chants, and songs. As a participant in these movements, Fujikane maps the ecological lessons of these elemental forms: reptilian deities who protect the waterways, sharks who swim into the mountains, the navigator Māui who fishes up the islands, the deities of snow and mists on Mauna Kea. The laws of these elements are now being violated by toxic waste dumping, leaking military jet fuel tanks, and astronomical-industrial complexes. As Kānaka Maoli and their allies stand as land and water protectors, Fujikane calls for a profound attunement to the elemental forms in order to transform climate events into renewed possibilities for planetary abundance.
This comprehensive compilation of entries documents the origins, transmissions, and transformations of Asian American folklore and folklife. Equally instructive and intriguing, the Encyclopedia of Asian American Folklore and Folklife provides an illuminating overview of Asian American folklore as a way of life. Surveying the histories, peoples, and cultures of numerous Asian American ethnic and cultural groups, the work covers everything from ancient Asian folklore, folktales, and folk practices that have been transmitted and transformed in America to new expressions of Asian American folklore and folktales unique to the Asian American historical and contemporary experiences. The encyclopedia's three comprehensive volumes cover an extraordinarily wide range of Asian American cultural and ethnic groups, as well as mixed-race and mixed-heritage Asian Americans. Each group section is introduced by a historical overview essay followed by short entries on topics such as ghosts and spirits, clothes and jewelry, arts and crafts, home decorations, family and community, religious practices, rituals, holidays, music, foodways, literature, traditional healing and medicine, and much, much more. Topics and theories are examined from cross-cultural and interdisciplinary perspectives to add to the value of the work.
Noenoe K. Silva creates a model indigenous intellectual history of a culture where--using Western standards--none is presumed to exist by examining the work of two lesser-known Hawaiian language writers from the nineteenth century whose prolific output across many genres created a record of Native Hawaiian cultural history and thought.
From hip-hop artists in the Marshall Islands to innovative multimedia producers in Vanuatu to racial justice writers in Utah, Pacific Islander youth are using radical expression to transform their communities. Exploring multiple perspectives about Pacific Islander youth cultures in such locations as Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Hawai'i, and Tonga, this cross-disciplinary volume foregrounds social justice methodologies and programs that confront the ongoing legacies of colonization, incarceration, and militarization. The ten essays in this collection also highlight the ways in which youth across Oceania and the diaspora have embraced digital technologies to communicate across national boundaries, mobilize sites of political resistance, and remix popular media. By centering Indigenous peoples' creativity and self-determination, Reppin' vividly illuminates the dynamic power of Pacific Islander youth to reshape the present and future of settler cities and other urban spaces in Oceania and beyond.
The American Dream of success for many Asian Americans includes the highest levels of education. But what does it mean to live that success? In Straight A's Asian American students at Harvard reflect on their common experiences with discrimination, immigrant communities, their relationships to their Asian heritage, and their place in the university. They also explore the difficulties of living up to family expectations and the real-world effects of the "model minority" stereotype. While many of the issues they face are familiar to a wide swath of college students, their examinations of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and culture directly speak to the Asian American experience in U.S. higher education. Unique and revealing, intimate and unreserved, Straight A's further the conversation about immigrant histories, racial and ethnic stereotypes, and multiculturalism in contemporary American society.
Asian Americans are a growing, minority population in the United States. After a 46 percent population growth between 2000 and 2010 according to the 2010 Census, there are 17.3 million Asian Americans today. Yet Asian Americans as a category are a diverse set of people from over 30 distinctive Asian-origin subgroups that defy simplistic descriptions or generalizations. They face a wide range of issues and problems within the larger American social universe despite the persistence of common stereotypes that label them as a "model minority" for the generalized attributes offered uncritically in many media depictions. Asian American Society: An Encyclopedia provides a thorough introduction to the wide-ranging and fast-developing field of Asian American studies. Published with the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS), two volumes of the four-volume encyclopedia feature more than 300 A-to-Z articles authored by AAAS members and experts in the field who examine the social, cultural, psychological, economic, and political dimensions of the Asian American experience. The next two volumes of this work contain approximately 200 annotated primary documents, organized chronologically, that detail the impact American society has had on reshaping Asian American identities and social structures over time. Features: More than 300 articles authored by experts in the field, organized in A-to-Z format, help students understand Asian American influences on American life, as well as the impact of American society on reshaping Asian American identities and social structures over time. A core collection of primary documents and key demographic and social science data provide historical context and key information.
War Baby / Love Child examines hybrid Asian American identity through a collection of essays, artworks, and interviews at the intersection of critical mixed-race studies and contemporary art. The book pairs artwork and interviews with nineteen emerging, mid-career, and established mixed race/mixed heritage Asian American artists, including Li-lan and Kip Fulbeck, with scholarly essays exploring such topics as Vietnamese Amerasians, Korean transracial adoptions, and multiethnic Hawai'i. As an increasingly ethnically ambiguous Asian American generation is coming of age in an era of "optional identity," this collection brings together first-person perspectives and a wider scholarly context to shed light on changing Asian American cultures.
A survey of Asian American modernists active during the era of Abstract Expressionism sets out to re-evaluate a generation of neglected artists. Paintings, stone and metal sculptures, woodcuts, works on paper, ceramics, and collages are all presented in this volume.
For centuries, Asian immigrants have been making vital contributions to the cultures of North and South America. Yet in many of these countries, Asians are commonly viewed as undifferentiated racial "others," lumped together as Chinos regardless of whether they have Chinese ancestry. How might this struggle for recognition in their adopted homelands affect the ways that Asians in the Americas imagine community and cultural identity? The essays in Imagining Asia in the Americas investigate the myriad ways that Asians throughout the Americas use language, literature, religion, commerce, and other cultural practices to establish a sense of community, commemorate their countries of origin, and anticipate the possibilities presented by life in a new land. Focusing on a variety of locations across South America, Central America, the Caribbean, and the United States, the book's contributors reveal the rich diversity of Asian American identities. Yet taken together, they provide an illuminating portrait of how immigrants negotiate between their native and adopted cultures. Drawing from a rich array of source materials, including texts in Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and Gujarati that have never before been translated into English, this collection represents a groundbreaking work of scholarship. Through its unique comparative approach, Imagining Asia in the Americas opens up a conversation between various Asian communities within the Americas and beyond.
Why do Asian and Asian-American students consistently perform so well on standardized tests? Why are students of Asian descent disproportionately admitted to America's top colleges? This informative and entertainingly written comparison of educational methods in America and China answers these questions and more, while assessing the strengths and weaknesses of each culture's distinctly different education systems. Education expert Quanyu Huang notes that both Asian and Asian American students excel early on at mastering lesson material and test-taking, whereas many of their non-Asian American peers do not perform as well. The author also points out that American students generally demonstrate far more creativity and independence than students in China, where conformity and rote learning are emphasized. This is evident from the American record of award-winning innovations and discoveries. By contrast, the Chinese educational system has not yet produced a Nobel Prize winner in science. For Americans to achieve more consistent academic success at primary and secondary grade levels, the author recommends a blend of the virtues inherent in both cultures. He says this is exactly what often gives Asian American students an edge. They have the advantage of an Asian heritage that drives them to succeed and an American culture that teaches them creativity and independent thinking. Above all, Asian families extoll the virtues of education; this attitude is a key component in the success of these students. Drawing on his own experiences as an immigrant to this country in the 1980s, and as a parent to a son raised in the US, the author concludes by suggesting that Americans rediscover the immigrant attitudes of their ancestors several generations ago. Like Asian immigrants today, they too saw education as a ladder to success in American society. Students anywhere will thrive when their families reinforce the seriousness of education and help children develop the study and discipline habits that ensure academic success.
Asian American literature dates back to the close of the 19th century, and during the years following World War II, it significantly expanded in volume and diversity. Monumental in scope, this encyclopedia surveys Asian American literature from its origins through 2007. Included are more than 270 alphabetically arranged entries on writers, major works, significant historical events, and important terms and concepts. Thus the encyclopedia gives special attention to the historical, social, cultural, and legal contexts surrounding Asian American literature and central to the Asian American experience. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and cites works for further reading, and the encyclopedia closes with a selected, general bibliography of essential print and electronic resources. While literature students will value this encyclopedia as a guide to writings by Asian Americans, the encyclopedia also supports the social studies curriculum by helping students use literature to learn about Asian American history and culture, as it pertains to writers from a host of Asian ethnic and cultural backgrounds, including Afghans, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos, Iranians, Indians, Vietnamese, Hawaiians, and other Asian Pacific Islanders. The encyclopedia supports the literature curriculum by helping students learn more about Asian American literature. In addition, it supports the social studies curriculum by helping students learn about the Asian American historical and cultural experience.
How has a game brought together Americans and defined separate ethnic communities? This book tells the first history of mahjong and its meaning in American culture.Click-click-click. The sound of mahjong tiles connects American expatriates in Shanghai, Jazz Age white Americans, urban Chinese Americans in the 1930s, incarcerated Japanese Americans in wartime, Jewish American suburban mothers, and Air Force officers' wives in the postwar era. Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture illustrates how the spaces between tiles and the moments between games have fostered distinct social cultures in the United States. This mass-produced game crossed the Pacific, creating waves of popularity over the twentieth century. Annelise Heinz narrates the history of this game to show how it has created a variety of meanings, among them American modernity, Chinese American heritage, and Jewish American women's culture. As it traveled from China to the United States and caught on with Hollywood starlets, high society, middle-class housewives, and immigrants alike, mahjong became a quintessentially American game. Heinz also reveals the ways in which women leveraged a game to gain access to respectable leisure. The result was the forging of friendships within ethnic groups that lasted decades and the creation of organizations that raised funds for the war effort and philanthropy. No other game has signified both belonging and standing apart in American culture. Drawing on photographs, advertising, popular media, and dozens of oral histories, Heinz's rich and colorful account offers the first history of the wildly popular game of mahjong.
While the number of Asians in Michigan was small for a good portion of the state's history, many Asian-derived communities have settled in the area and grown significantly over time. In Asian Americans in Michigan: Voices from the Midwest, editors Sook Wilkinson and Victor Jew have assembled forty-one contributors to give an intimate glimpse into Michigan's Asian-American communities, creating a fuller picture of these often overlooked groups. Accounts in the collection come from a range of perspectives, including first-generation immigrants, those born in the United States, and third- and fourth-generation Americans of Asian heritage. In five sections, contributors consider the historical and demographic origins of Michigan's Asian American communities, explore their experiences in memory and legacy keeping, highlight particular aspects of community culture and heritage, and comment on prospects and hopes for the future. This volume's vibrant mix of contributors trace their ancestries back to East Asia (China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan), South Asia (Bangladesh, India, Pakistan), and Southeast Asia (Cambodia, Laos, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Hmong). Though each contributor writes from his or her unique set of experiences, Asian Americans in Michigan also reveal universal values and memories held by larger communities. Asian Americans in Michigan make clear the significant contributions of individuals in many fields--including art, business, education, religion, sports, medicine, and politics--and demonstrate the central role of community organizations in bringing ethnic groups together and preserving memories. Readers interested in Michigan history, sociology, and Asian American studies will enjoy this volume.
"I listen and gather people's stories. Then I write them down in a way that I hope will communicate something to others so that seeing these stories will give readers something of value. I tell myself that this isn't going to be done unless I do it, just because of who I am. It's a way of making my mark, leaving something behind . . . not that I'm planning on going anywhere right now." So explains Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu in this touching, introspective, and insightful examination of mixed-race Asian American experiences. The son of an Irish American father and Japanese mother, Murphy-Shigematsu uses his personal journey of identity exploration and discovery of his diverse roots to illuminate the journeys of others. Throughout the book, his reflections are interspersed among portraits of persons of biracial and mixed ethnicity and accounts of their efforts to answer a seemingly simple question: Who am I? Here we meet Norma, raised in postwar Japan, the daughter of a Japanese woman and an American serviceman, who struggled to make sense of her ethnic heritage and national belonging. Wei Ming, born in Australia and raised in San Francisco in the 1970s and 1980s, grapples as well with issues of identity, in her case both ethnic and sexual. We also encounter Rudy, a "Mexipino"; Marshall, a "Jewish, adopted Korean"; Mitzi, a "Blackinawan"; and other extraordinary people who find how connecting to all parts of themselves also connects them to others. With its attention on people who have been regarded as "half" this or "half" that throughout their lives, these stories make vivid the process of becoming whole.
Beyond Yellow English is the first edited volume to examine issues of language, identity, and culture among the rapidly growing Asian Pacific American (APA) population. The distinguished contributors represent a broad range of perspectives from anthropology, sociolinguistics, English, and education on the analysis of spoken interaction and explore multiple facets of the APA experience. The authors cover topics such as media representations of APAs; codeswitching and language crossing; and narratives of ethnic identity. The collection examines the experiences of Asian Pacific Americans of different ethnicities, generations, ages, and geographic locations across home, school, community, and performance sites.
Foreign Accents examines the various transpacific signifying strategies by which poets of Chinese descent in the U.S. have sought to represent cultural tradition in their articulations of an ethnic subjectivity, in Chinese as well as in English. In assessing both the dynamics and the politics of poetic expression by writers engaging with a specific cultural heritage, the study develops a general theory of ethnic literary production that clarifies the significance of "Asian American" literature in relation to both other forms of U.S. "minority discourse," as well as canonical "American" literature more generally. At the same time, it maps an expanded textual arena and a new methodology for Asian American literary studies that can be further explored by scholars of other traditions. Yao discusses a range of works, including Ezra Pound's Cathay and the Angel Island poems. He examines the careers of four contemporary Chinese/American poets: Ha Jin, Li-young Lee, Marilyn Chin, and John Yau, each of whom bears a distinctive relationship to the linguistic and cultural tradition he or she seeks to represent. Specifically, Yao investigates the range of rhetorical and formal strategies by which these writers have sought to incorporate Chinese culture and, especially, language in their works. Combining such analysis with extensive social contextualization, Foreign Accents delineates the historical poetics of Chinese American verse from the early twentieth century to the present.
Saffron-robed monks and long-haired gurus have become familiar characters on the American popular culture scene. Jane Iwamura examines the contemporary fascination with Eastern spirituality and provides a cultural history of the representation of Asian religions in American mass media. Encounters with monks, gurus, bhikkhus, sages, sifus, healers, and masters from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds and religious traditions provided initial engagements with Asian spiritual traditions. Virtual Orientalism shows the evolution of these interactions, from direct engagements with specific individuals to mediated relations with a conventionalized icon: the Oriental Monk. Visually and psychically compelling, the Oriental Monk becomes for Americans a ''figure of translation"- a convenient symbol for alternative spiritualities and modes of being. Through the figure of the solitary Monk, who generously and purposefully shares his wisdom with the West, Asian religiosity is made manageable-psychologically, socially, and politically--for popular culture consumption. Iwamura's insightful study shows that though popular engagement with Asian religions in the United States has increased, the fact that much of this has taken virtual form makes stereotypical constructions of "the spiritual East" obdurate and especially difficult to challenge.
Featuring detailed maps and authoritative text, Atlas of Asian-American History offers an in-depth look at the political and social history of this diverse ethnic group. This important volume addresses an often-neglected area of our cultural studies, telling the story of not one group of people but many.
Professor Lal has been remarkably successful in combining scholarship with autobiography in Mr Tulsi’s Store. In the essays that cover the author’s childhood and education up to university, diligent scholarship combines with evocative autobiographical details to reveal a philosophical pattern that encompasses the experience of the descendants of all Indian indentured workers everywhere.
Painters, photographers, sculptors, and installation artists are among the seventy-five artists represented in this guide to Asian American artists. Within each entry, Kara Hallmark describes the artists' early life, education and training, and impact on the art world both in their country of heritage as well as the U.S. While some artists dismiss any notion of their heritage influencing their work, others describe how assimilation and immigration affected themselves and their families, particularly those affected by World War II and the Japanese internment camps. Interviews with living artists, as well as extensive images, enhance entries that celebrate the contributions of Asian American Artists to American art.
Art from Oceania, the region encompassing the islands of the central and south Pacific, spans hundreds of distinct artistic processes, formats, and mediums. Many people's exposure to Oceanic art comes through its influence on the work of European artists, and therefore Oceanic works themselves often remain difficult for Western viewers to interpret and comprehend. How to Read Oceanic Art, the third book in a series of guides to understanding different artistic genres, helps elucidate this subject through an explanation of specific objects. The book analyzes the most illustrative Oceanic pieces from the Metropolitan Museum's collection--including lively painted masks, powerful figurines, and intricately carved wooden poles--which together represent the extraordinary diversity of artistic traditions in the region. Attractive photography and clear, engaging texts explain how and why various works were made as well as how they were used. This publication is an invaluable resource for art historical study, and also an important gateway to wider appreciation of Oceanic heritage and visual culture.
This collection of essays focuses on the construction of identity among people of Asian descent who claim multiple heritage. In their consideration of people of mixed Asian identities, the contributors to this study disrupt standard discussions.
Muncie, Indiana, remains the epitome of an American town. Yet scholars built the image of so-called typical communities across the United States on an illusion. Their decades of studies ignored the racial, ethnic, and religious diversity and tensions woven into the American communities that Muncie supposedly embodied. Himanee Gupta-Carlson puts forth an essential question: what do nonwhites, non-Christians, and/or non-natives mean when they call themselves American? A daughter in one of Muncie's first Indian American families, Gupta-Carlson merges personal experience, the life histories of others, and critical analysis to explore the answers. Her stories of members of Muncie's South Asian communities unearth the silences imposed by past studies while challenging the body of scholarship in fundamental ways. At the same time, Gupta-Carlson shares personal memories and experiences that illuminate her place within the historical, political, and socio-cultural currents she engages in her work. It also reveals how that work informs and transforms her as a scholar and a person. As meditative as it is insightful, Muncie, India(na) invites readers to feel the truth of the fascinating stories behind one woman's revised portrait of an American community.
A century of Asian American writing has generated a forceful cascade of "bold words." This anthology covers writings by Asian Americans in all genres, from the early twentieth century to the present. Some sixty authors of Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, South Asian, and Southeast Asian American origin are represented, with an equal split between male and female writers. The collection is divided into four sections: memoir, fiction, poetry, and drama- prefaced by an introductory essay from a well-known practitioner of that genre: Meena Alexander on memoir, Gary Pak on fiction, Eileen Tabios on poetry, and Roberta Uno on drama. The selections depict the complex realities and wide range of experiences of Asians in the United States. They illuminate the writers' creative responses to issues as diverse as resistance, aesthetics, biculturalism, sexuality, gender relations, racism, war, diaspora, and family.
Around 200 A.D., intrepid Polynesians arrived at an undisturbed archipelago. For centuries, their descendants lived with little contact from the Western world. In 1778, their isolation was shattered with the arrival of Captain Cook. Deftly weaving together a memorable cast of characters, Lost Kingdom brings to life the ensuing clash between a vulnerable Polynesian people and relentlessly expanding capitalist powers. Portraits of royalty and rogues, sugar barons, and missionaries combine into a sweeping tale of the Hawaiian Kingdom's rise and fall. At the center of the story is Lili'uokalani, the last queen of Hawai'i. Born in 1838, she lived through the nearly complete economic transformation of the islands. Lucrative sugar plantations gradually subsumed the majority of the land, owned almost exclusively by white planters, dubbed the "Sugar Kings." Hawai'i became a prize in the contest between America, Britain, and France, each seeking to expand their military and commercial influence in the Pacific. The monarchy had become a figurehead, victim to manipulation from the wealthy sugar plantation owners. Lili'uokalani was determined to enact a constitution to reinstate the monarchy's power but was outmaneuvered by the U.S. The annexation of Hawai'i had begun, ushering in a new century of American imperialism.
An intimate and poignant graphic novel portraying one family's journey from war-torn Vietnam, from debut author Thi Bui. This beautifully illustrated and emotional story is an evocative memoir about the search for a better future and a longing for the past. Exploring the anguish of immigration and the lasting effects that displacement has on a child and her family, Bui documents the story of her family's daring escape after the fall of South Vietnam in the 1970s, and the difficulties they faced building new lives for themselves. At the heart of Bui's story is a universal struggle: While adjusting to life as a first-time mother, she ultimately discovers what it means to be a parent - the endless sacrifices, the unnoticed gestures, and the depths of unspoken love. Despite how impossible it seems to take on the simultaneous roles of both parent and child, Bui pushes through. With haunting, poetic writing and breathtaking art, she examines the strength of family, the importance of identity, and the meaning of home. In what Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen calls "a book to break your heart and heal it," The Best We Could Do brings to life Thi Bui's journey of understanding, and provides inspiration to all of those who search for a better future while longing for a simpler past.
Our Voices, Our Histories brings together thirty-five Asian American and Pacific Islander authors in a single volume to explore the historical experiences, perspectives, and actions of Asian American and Pacific Islander women in the United States and beyond. This volume is unique in exploring Asian American and Pacific Islander women's lives along local, transnational, and global dimensions. The contributions present new research on diverse aspects of Asian American and Pacific Islander women's history, from the politics of language to the role of food, to experiences as adoptees, mixed race, and second generation, while acknowledging shared experiences as women of color in the United States. Our Voices, Our Histories showcases how new approaches in US history, Asian American and Pacific Islander studies, and Women's and Gender studies inform research on Asian American and Pacific Islander women. Attending to the collective voices of the women themselves, the volume seeks to transform current understandings of Asian American and Pacific Islander women's histories.
The first-person narratives in this book provide a glimpse into the personal lives of fourteen Vietnamese-Americans who were devastated by war and the refugee experience but who were able to create new lives in a new cultural environment.
In search of a place to call home, thousands of Hmong families made the journey from the war-torn jungles of Laos to the overcrowded refugee camps of Thailand and onward to America. But lacking a written language of their own, the Hmong experience has been primarily recorded by others. Driven to tell her family's story after her grandmother's death, The Latehomecomer is Kao Kalia Yang's tribute to the remarkable woman whose spirit held them all together. It is also an eloquent, firsthand account of people who have worked hard to make their voices heard. Beginning in the 1970s, as the Hmong were being massacred for their collaboration with the United States during the Vietnam War, Yang recounts the harrowing story of her family's captivity, the daring rescue undertaken by her father and uncles, and their narrow escape into Thailand where Yang was born in the Ban Vinai Refugee Camp. When she was six years old, Yang's family immigrated to America, and she evocatively captures the challenges of adapting to a new place and a new language. Through her words, the dreams, wisdom, and traditions passed down from her grandmother and shared by an entire community have finally found a voice.
Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative--and its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world. Binding these essays together is Hong's theory of "minor feelings." As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these "minor feelings" occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality--when you believe the lies you're told about your own racial identity. Minor feelings are not small, they're dissonant--and in their tension, Hong finds the key to the questions that haunt her.
Grace Talusan's critically acclaimed memoir, The Body Papers, powerfully explores the fraught contours of her own life as a Filipino immigrant and survivor of cancer and childhood abuse. Born in the Philippines, young Grace Talusan moves with her family to a New England suburb in the 1970s. At school, she confronts racism as one of the few kids with a brown face. At home, the confusion is worse: her grandfather's nightly visits to her room leave her hurt and terrified, and she learns to build a protective wall of silence that maps onto the larger silence practiced by her Catholic Filipino family. Talusan learns as a teenager that her family's legal status in the country has always hung by a thread—for a time, they were “illegal.” Family, she's told, must be put first. The abuse and trauma Talusan suffers as a child affects all her relationships, her mental health, and her relationship with her own body. Later, she learns that her family history is threaded with violence and abuse. And she discovers another devastating family thread: cancer. In her thirties, Talusan must decide whether to undergo preventive surgeries to remove her breasts and ovaries. Despite all this, she finds love, and success as a teacher. On a fellowship, Talusan and her husband return to the Philippines, where she revisits her family's ancestral home and tries to reclaim a lost piece of herself. Not every family legacy is destructive. From her parents, Talusan has learned to tell stories to continue. The generosity of spirit and literary acuity of this debut memoir is a testament to her determination and resilience. In excavating such abuse and trauma, and supplementing her story with government documents, medical records, and family photos, Talusan gives voice to unspeakable experience and shines a light of hope into the darkness.
In 1996, poet Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha ran away from America with two backpacks and ended up in Canada, where she discovered queer anarcho-punk love and revolution, yet remained haunted by the reasons she left home in the first place. This passionate and riveting memoir is a mixtape of dreams and nightmares, of immigration court lineups and queer South Asian dance nights; it reveals how a disabled queer woman of color and abuse survivor navigates the dirty river of the past and, as the subtitle suggests, "dreams her way home."
In Nimrods, Kawika Guillermo chronicles the agonizing absurdities of being a newly minted professor (and overtired father) hired to teach in a Social Justice Institute while haunted by the inner ghosts of patriarchy, racial pessimism, and imperial arrogance. Charged with the "personal is political" mandate of feminist critique, Guillermo honestly and powerfully recounts his wayward path, from being raised by two preachers' kids in a chaotic mixed-race family to his uncle's death from HIV-related illness, which helped prompt his parents' divorce and his mother's move to Las Vegas, to his many attempts to flee from American gender, racial, and religious norms by immigrating to South Korea, China, Hong Kong, and Canada. Through an often crass, cringe, and raw hybrid prose-poetic style, Guillermo reflects on anger, alcoholism, and suicidal ideation--traits that do not simply vanish after one is cast into the treacherous role of fatherhood or the dreaded role of professor. Guillermo's shameless mixtures of auto theory, queer punk poetry, musical ekphrasis, haibun, academic (mis)quotations, and bad dad jokes present a bold new take on the autobiography: the fake-punk self-hurt anti-memoir.
A firsthand look at Asian women of the Midwest, Voices of the Heart is a comprehensive and comparative oral history that includes Chinese, Japanese, Filipina, Korean, and Asian Indian women as well as the newer Asian groups of Vietnamese, Laotians, Hmong, Thais, and Pakistanis. Huping Ling gathers these women's heartfelt stories about their journeys to America, their aspirations, their strides in education and employment, their cultural heritage, and their family dynamics. The women featured tell how their experiences align with their expectations of life in America, and the challenges of adjusting to a new culture while preserving their own. These colorful personal stories allow for a unique glimpse into the worlds of these often-overlooked women.
In this critically acclaimed memoir, Lim lays bare the turns in her early life in wartorn Malaysia, from wealth and security to poverty and family violence. Her struggles to fashion a meaningful life that will include professional achievement and self-determined sexuality take her on a journey across cultural and geographical borders. In time, she moves from a numbered isolation to a self-forged identity as an Asian American, aware of her relationship to the land she left behind, her new homeland, and the homeland she carries within herself.
First published in 1943, this classic memoir by well-known Filipino poet Carlos Bulosan describes his boyhood in the Philippines, his voyage to America, and his years of hardship and despair as an itinerant laborer following the harvest trail in the rural West.
As a leading dissident in the World War II concentration camps for Japanese Americans, the controversial figure Joseph Yoshisuke Kurihara stands out as an icon of Japanese American resistance. In emotional, often inflammatory speeches, Kurihara attacked the U.S. government for its treatment of innocent citizens and immigrants. Because he articulated what other inmates dared not voice openly, he became a spokesperson for camp inmates. In this astute biography, Kurihara's life provides a window into the history of Japanese Americans during the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Hawai'i to Japanese parents who immigrated to work on the sugar plantations, Kurihara worked throughout his youth and early adult life to make a place for himself as an American: seeking quality education, embracing Christianity, and serving as a soldier in the U.S. Army during World War I. Though he bore the brunt of anti-Japanese hostility in the decades before World War II, he remained adamantly positive about the prospects of his own life in America. The U.S. entry into World War II and the forced removal and incarceration of ethnic Japanese destroyed that perspective and transformed Kurihara. As an inmate at Manzanar in California, Kurihara became one of the leaders of a dissident group within the camp and was implicated in "the Manzanar incident," a serious civil disturbance that erupted on December 6, 1942. In 1945, after three years and seven months of incarceration, he renounced his U.S. citizenship and boarded a ship for Japan, where he had never been before. He never returned to the United States. Kurihara's personal story illuminates the tragedy of the forced removal and incarceration of U.S. citizens among the West Coast Nikkei, even as it dramatizes the heroic resistance to that injustice. Shedding light on the turmoil within the camps as well as the sensitive and formerly unspoken issue of citizenship renunciation among Japanese Americans, In Defense of Justice explores one man's struggles with the complexities of loyalty and resistance.
Takuichi Fujii (1891-1964) left Japan in 1906 to make his home in Seattle, where he established a business, started a family, and began his artistic practice. When war broke out between the United States and Japan, he and his family were incarcerated along with the more than 100,000 ethnic Japanese located on the West Coast. Sent to detention camps at Puyallup, Washington, and then Minidoka in Idaho, Fujii documented his daily experiences in words and art. The Hope of Another Spring reveals the rare find of a large and heretofore unknown collection of art produced during World War II. The centerpiece of the collection is Fujii's illustrated diary which historian Roger Daniels has called 'the most remarkable document created by a Japanese American prisoner during the wartime incarceration.' Barbara Johns presents Takuichi Fujii's life story and his artistic achievements within the social and political context of the time. Sandy Kita, the artist's grandson, provides translations and an introduction to the diary. The Hope of Another Spring is a significant contribution to Asian American studies, American and regional history, and art history.
America has long been a destination, then a launching pad, for newcomers seeking better lives. In recent years, immigration by South Asians to the United States has increased dramatically, doubling between the 1990 and 2000 censuses. Rather than settling in large cities, many are moving directly to the suburbs. S. Mitra Kalita focuses on three recent waves of immigration through the stories of three families: the Kotharis, Patels, and Sarmas. Readers learn why these families decided to leave India, experience the tensions they encountered upon their arrival here, and witness the realities of life in the United States for South Asians. Suburban Sahibs delves into how immigration has altered the American suburb, and how the suburb, in turn, has altered the immigrant. Middlesex County, New Jersey, is home to one of the largest Indian populations in the world outside India. Their mark on the region has been gradual but increasingly visible: auto-repair outlets named after "Deepa" and "Singh, " a thriving commercial strip of sari stores and sweet shops, valedictorians named Patel and Shah. The reception from long-time residents has not been entirely welcoming as Indian American shopkeepers regularly contend with vandalism. Yet, as Indians achieve economic success, their desire for political and social parity grows stronger and their acceptance is less a question and more a reality. Kalita began this book to shed light on the pursuit of the American dream for the estimated 1.7 million Indians living in the United States. What she found instead was that their experiences offer a window into what America has become: a nation of suburbs, a nation of immigrants.
Hawai'i's legendary jazz musician Gabe Baltazar Jr. has thrilled audiences since the late 1940s with his powerful and passionate playing. In this, the first book on his life and career, Gabe takes readers through the highs, lows, and in-betweens on the long road to becoming one of the very few Asian Americans who has achieved worldwide acclaim as a jazz artist. At a young age, Gabe was encouraged by his father, an accomplished musician, to take up the clarinet and saxophone. As a teenager during World War II, Gabe performed with the Royal Hawaiian Band but spent his weekends playing in swing bands. After establishing himself in the West Coast jazz scene, in 1960 he rose to prominence as lead alto saxophonist of the Stan Kenton Orchestra. Following a four-year stint with Kenton, Gabe worked as a valued studio musician, recording with Dizzy Gillespie, Oliver Nelson, and James Moody, among others. In 1969 he returned to Honolulu and went on to become Hawai'i's premier jazz artist, a role he admirably fulfilled for over forty years. Even into his eighties, Gabe remained active in jazz education and performed regularly. Gabe's memorable encounters with some of the greatest names in jazz and popular entertainment will delight music fans, while readers of Hawai'i and Asian-American life-writing will find in this work a fond record of days past told with humor and heart.
Dallas Cowboy Dat Nguyen shares the inspirational story of his life--from growing up in a refugee family in Rockport, Texas to his college days at Texas A&M University, and to his life now as the starting middle linebacker for the Cowboys.
Peter Jamero's story of hardship and success illuminates the experience of what he calls the "bridge generation" -- the American-born children of the Filipinos recruited as farm workers in the 1920s and 30s. Their experiences span the gap between these early immigrants and those Filipinos who owe their U.S. residency to the liberalization of immigration laws in 1965. His book is a sequel of sorts to Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart, with themes of heartbreaking struggle against racism and poverty and eventual triumph. Jamero describes his early life in a farm-labor camp in Livingston, California, and the path that took him, through naval service and graduate school, far beyond Livingston. A longtime community activist and civic leader, Jamero describes decades of toil and progress before the Filipino community entered the sociopolitical mainstream. He shares a wealth of anecdotes and reflections from his career as an executive of health and human service programs in Sacramento, Washington, D.C., Seattle, and San Francisco.
This collection of evocative personal testimonies by three generations of Hmong refugees is the first to describe their lives in Laos as slash-and-burn farmers, as refugees after a Communist government came to power in 1975, and as immigrants in the United States. Reflecting on the homes left behind, their narratives chronicle the difficulties of forging a new identity.
In a tower on the New Zealand sea lives Kerewin Holmes: part Maori, part European, asexual and aromantic, an artist estranged from her art, a woman in exile from her family. One night her solitude is disrupted by a visitor--a speechless, mercurial boy named Simon, who tries to steal from her and then repays her with his most precious possession. As Kerewin succumbs to Simon's feral charm, she also falls under the spell of his Maori foster father Joe, who rescued the boy from a shipwreck and now treats him with an unsettling mixture of tenderness and brutality. Out of this unorthodox trinity, Keri Hulme has created what is at once a mystery, a love story, and an ambitious exploration of the zone where indigenous and European New Zealand meet, clash, and sometimes merge. Winner of both a Booker Prize and Pegasus Prize for Literature, The Bone People is a work of unfettered wordplay and mesmerizing emotional complexity.
"Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet." So begins this exquisite novel about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee, and her parents are determined that she will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue. But when Lydia's body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together is destroyed, tumbling them into chaos. A profoundly moving story of family, secrets, and longing, Everything I Never Told You is both a gripping page-turner and a sensitive family portrait, uncovering the ways in which mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and husbands and wives struggle, all their lives, to understand one another.
A powerful coming-of-age story about grief, guilt, and the risks a Filipino-American teenager takes to uncover the truth about his cousin's murder. Jay Reguero plans to spend the last semester of his senior year playing video games before heading to the University of Michigan in the fall. But when he discovers that his Filipino cousin Jun was murdered as part of President Duterte's war on drugs, and no one in the family wants to talk about what happened, Jay travels to the Philippines to find out the real story. Hoping to uncover more about Jun and the events that led to his death, Jay is forced to reckon with the many sides of his cousin before he can face the whole horrible truth -- and the part he played in it. As gripping as it is lyrical, Patron Saints of Nothing is a page-turning portrayal of the struggle to reconcile faith, family, and immigrant identity.
The Refugees is a collection of perfectly formed stories written over a period of twenty years, exploring questions of immigration, identity, love, and family. With the coruscating gaze that informed The Sympathizer, in The Refugees Viet Thanh Nguyen gives voice to lives led between two worlds, the adopted homeland and the country of birth. From a young Vietnamese refugee who suffers profound culture shock when he comes to live with two gay men in San Francisco, to a woman whose husband is suffering from dementia and starts to confuse her for a former lover, to a girl living in Ho Chi Minh City whose older half-sister comes back from America having seemingly accomplished everything she never will, the stories are a captivating testament to the dreams and hardships of immigration.
In the Altai Mountains of northern Mongolia, the nomadic Tuvan people's ancient way of life is colliding with the pervasive influence of modernity. For the young shepherd boy Dshurukuwaa, the confrontation comes in stages. First, his older siblings leave the family yurt to attend a distant boarding school, followed by the death of his beloved grandmother and with it, the connection to the tribe's traditions and deep relationship to the land. But the greatest tragedy strikes when his dog - "all that was left to me" - dies after ingesting poison set out by the boy's father to protect the herd from wolves. His despairing questions to the Heavenly Blue Sky are answered only by the silence of the wind. The first and only member of the Tuvans to use written language to tell stories, Galsan Tschinag chronicles their traditions in this fascinating, bittersweet novel.
Willis Wu doesn't perceive himself as the protagonist in his own life: he's merely a Generic Asian Man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but always he is relegated to a prop. Yet every day, he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He's a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy--the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. Or is it? After stumbling into the spotlight, Willis finds himself launched into a wider world than he's ever known, discovering not only the secret history of Chinatown but the buried legacy of his own family. Infinitely inventive and deeply personal, exploring the themes of pop culture, assimilation, and immigration - Interior Chinatown is Charles Yu's most moving, daring, and masterful novel yet.
In this ebullient and inventive novel, Gish Jen restores multiculturalism from a high concept to a fact of life. At least that's what it becomes for teenage Mona Chang, who in 1968 moves with her newly prosperous family to Scarshill, New York, where the Chinese have become the new Jews. What could be more natural than for Mona to take this literally--even to the point of converting? As Mona attends temple rap sessions and falls in love (with a nice Jewish boy who lives in a tepee), Jen introduces us to one of the most charming and sweet-spirited heroines in recent fiction, a girl who can wisecrack with perfect aplomb even when she's organizing the help in her father's pancake house. On every page of Mona in the Promised Land, Gish Jen sets our received notions spinning with a wit as dry as a latter-day Jane Austen's.
In this gorgeous, page-turning saga, four generations of a poor Korean immigrant family fight to control their destiny in 20th-century Japan, exiled from a home they never knew. "There could only be a few winners and a lot of losers. And yet we played on because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones." In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant--and that her lover is married--she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son's powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations. Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty.
Hattie Kong, a retired teacher and a descendant of Confucius, has decided that it's time to start over. She moves to the peaceful New England town of Riverlake, a place that once represented the rock-solid base of American life. Instead of quietude, Hattie discovers a town challenged by cell phone towers, chain stores, and struggling farms. Soon Hattie is joined by an immigrant Cambodian family on the run, and--quite unexpectedly--Carter Hatch, a love from her past. As each character seeks to make a new start in life, World and Town asks deep, absorbing questions about religion, love, home, and meaning.
This novel tells the story of a group of young women brought over from Japan to San Francisco as 'picture brides' nearly a century ago. In eight incantatory sections, The Buddha in the Attic traces their extraordinary lives, from their arduous journey by boat, where they exchange photographs of their husbands, imagining uncertain futures in an unknown land; to their arrival in San Francisco and their tremulous first nights as new wives; to their backbreaking work picking fruit in the fields and scrubbing the floors of white women; to their struggles to master a new language and a new culture; to their experiences in childbirth, and then as mothers, raising children who will ultimately reject their heritage and their history; to the deracinating arrival of war. In language that has the force and the fury of poetry, Julie Otsuka has written a singularly spellbinding novel about the American dream.
The Joy Luck Club explores the tender and tenacious bond between four daughters and their mothers. The daughters know one side of their mothers, but they don't know about their earlier never-spoken lives in China. The mothers want love and obedience from their daughters, but they don't know the gifts that the daughters keep to themselves. Heartwarming and bittersweet, this is a novel for mothers, daughters, and those that love them.
Mauri Ola: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English is a follow-up volume to the highly acclaimed Whetu Moana, the first anthropology of Polynesian poems in English edited by Polynesians. The new book includes poetry written over the last twenty-five years by more than eighty writers from Aotearoa, Hawai'i, Tonga, Samoa, the Cook Islands, Niue, Tokelau, Tahiti, and Rotuma. This anthology includes selections from poets including Tusiata Avia, Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, Rangi Faith, Sia Figiel, Imaikalani Kalahele, Brandy Nalani McDougall, Karlo Mila, J. C. Sturm, Robert Sullivan, Apirana Taylor, Konai Helu Thaman, Haunani-Kay Trask, Hone Tuwhare, Albert Wendt, and Wayne Kaumualii Westlake.
With the pace and suspense of a thriller and prose that has been compared to Graham Greene and Saul Bellow, The Sympathizer is a sweeping epic of love and betrayal. The narrator, a communist double agent, is a "man of two minds," a half-French, half-Vietnamese army captain who arranges to come to America after the Fall of Saigon, and while building a new life with other Vietnamese refugees in Los Angeles secretly reporting back to his communist superiors in Vietnam. The Sympathizer is a blistering exploration of identity and America, a gripping espionage novel, and a powerful story of love and friendship.
From the first Nepali author writing in English to be published in the West, Arresting God in Kathmandu brilliantly explores the nature of desire and spirituality in a changing society. With the assurance and unsentimental wisdom of a long-established writer, Upadhyay records the echoes of modernization through love and family. Here are husbands and wives bound together by arranged marriages but sometimes driven elsewhere by an intense desire for connection and transcendence. In a city where gods are omnipresent, where privacy is elusive and family defines identity, these men and women find themselves at the mercy of their desires but at the will of their society. Psychologically rich and astonishingly acute, Arresting God in Kathmandu introduces a potent new voice in contemporary fiction.
From the internationally bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author comes eight dazzling stories--longer and more emotionally complex than any she has yet written--that take readers from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand as they explore the secrets at the heart of family life.
A boy who hears the voices of objects all around him; a mother drowning in her possessions; and a Book that might hold the secret to saving them both—the brilliantly inventive new novel from the Booker Prize-finalist Ruth Ozeki. One year after the death of his beloved musician father, thirteen-year-old Benny Oh begins to hear voices. The voices belong to the things in his house—a sneaker, a broken Christmas ornament, a piece of wilted lettuce. Although Benny doesn't understand what these things are saying, he can sense their emotional tone; some are pleasant, a gentle hum or coo, but others are snide, angry, and full of pain. When his mother, Annabelle, develops a hoarding problem, the voices grow more clamorous. At first, Benny tries to ignore them, but soon the voices follow him outside the house, onto the street, and at school, driving him at last to seek refuge in the silence of a large public library, where objects are well-behaved and known to speak in whispers. There, Benny discovers a strange new world. He falls in love with a mesmerizing street artist with a smug pet ferret, who uses the library as her performance space. He meets a homeless philosopher-poet, who encourages him to ask important questions and find his own voice among the many. And he meets his very own Book—a talking thing—who narrates Benny's life and teaches him to listen to the things that truly matter. With its blend of sympathetic characters, riveting plot, and vibrant engagement with everything from jazz to climate change, to our attachment to material possessions, The Book of Form and Emptiness is classic Ruth Ozeki—bold, wise, poignant, playful, humane, and heartbreaking.
Nam Kun and Nam Ki Han, brothers born on a Wahiawa sugar plantation, could not have been more different. Pragmatic and stubborn, Nam Kun dutifully supported his family but refused to become "one Christian fanatic" like his widowed mother and youngest sibling, Nam Ki. When Nam Ki is drafted into the army at the start of the Korean War, he tells Nam Kun that as a Christian he cannot kill. "You gotta do it," Nam Kun replies, thinking the war will make a man of this "mama's boy. " Nam Ki finds refuge from the chaos and brutality of life as a soldier in his love for a young Korean woman, a Christian. He returns after the war to search for her and discovers she has become a prostitute. With his sense of reality shattered, Nam Ki must choose between his faith and all that he has witnessed in war-torn Korea. Brothers under a Same Sky explores the social and psychological turmoil experienced by Korean Americans during and after the war but, more importantly, it examines the individual's decision to keep--or betray--a fundamental belief in human goodness. Set amid the social and political disruptions and forced separations that have characterized the history of modern Korea, this is the story of a struggle toward healing, unity, and perhaps a reconciliation between love and hatred.
In the early 1970s, Frank Chin, the outspoken Chinese American author of such plays as The Chickencoop Chinaman and The Year of the Dragon, wrote a full-length novel that was never published and presumably lost. Nearly four decades later, Calvin McMillin, a literary scholar specializing in Asian American literature, discovered Chin's original manuscripts and embarked on an extensive restoration project. Meticulously reassembled from multiple extant drafts, Frank Chin's "forgotten" novel is a sequel to The Chickencoop Chinaman and follows the further misadventures of Tam Lum, the original play's witty protagonist. Haunted by the bitter memories of a failed marriage and the untimely death of a beloved family member, Tam flees San Francisco's Chinatown for a life of self-imposed exile on the Hawaiian island of Maui. After burning his sole copy of a manuscript he believed would someday be hailed as "The Great Chinese American Novel," Tam stumbles into an unlikely romance with Lily, a former nun fresh out of the convent and looking for love. In the process, he also develops an unusual friendship with Lily's father, a washed-up Hollywood actor once famous for portraying Charlie Chan on the big screen. Thanks in no small part to this bizarre father/daughter pair, not to mention an array of equally quirky locals, Tam soon discovers that his otherwise laidback island existence has been transformed into a farce of epic proportions. Had it been published in the 1970s as originally intended, The Confessions of a Number One Son might have changed the face of Asian American literature as we know it. Written at the height of Frank Chin's creative powers, this formerly "lost" novel ranks as the author's funniest, most powerful, and most poignant work to date. Now, some forty years after its initial conception, The Confessions of a Number One Son is finally available to readers everywhere.
Beginning with a cheery letter penned by a Chinese girl in heaven to “poor Mr. Nixon” in hell, Gish Jen embarks on a fictional journey through U.S.-China relations, capturing the excitement of a world on the brink of tectonic change. Opal Chen reunites with her Chinese sisters after forty years; newly cosmopolitan Lulu Koo wonders why Americans “like to walk around in the woods with the mosquitoes”; Hong Kong parents go to extreme lengths to reestablish contact with their “number-one daughter” in New York; and Betty Koo, brought up on “no politics, just make money,” finds she must reassess her mother's philosophy. With their profound compassion and equally profound humor, these eleven linked stories trace the intimate ways in which humans make and are made by history, capturing an extraordinary era. Delightful, provocative, and powerful, Thank You, Mr. Nixon furnishes yet more proof of Gish Jen's eminent place among American storytellers.
These poems, threaded by the teachings of Buddha, examine loss--the death of a loved one, the longing for a child, the yearning for another place and time--and the suffering such attempts transpire, but ultimately the poems are an affirmation that to be born into human life is our greatest opportunity to transform loss and sorrow into awakening joy.
Out of the Dust is a collection of new poems by activist, leader, poet, and editor Janice Mirikitani. After being named San Francisco's second Poet Laureate in 2000, this fifth book of poems from Mirikitani was written in response to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Drawing from her own background as a Sansei (third-generation) Japanese American, Mirikitani reflects on the many ways we connect through the dust and our ability to rise and renew ourselves from this place. From the dust of the World Trade Center in New York to the retaliatory ashes of the dead in America's war in Afghanistan, the poems in this volume seek to explicate the connections of our humanity to the reactionary profiling of people of Middle Eastern descent and different ethnicities, comparing these choices to the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. Mirikitani's poems cover topics about rape, incest, the continued struggle for justice and economic equality, and the poet's experiences throughout her 50-year career at Glide Foundation and Church in San Francisco, where she has helped to create groundbreaking programs for the poor, women and children, and those who are healing from sexual assault, violence, and abuse. Though constructed from a depth of experiences with struggle, these poems also erupt in celebration of marriage, daughters, and the discovery of self through diversity.
A vibrant story collection about Cambodian-American life--immersive and comic, yet unsparing--that offers profound insight into the intimacy of queer and immigrant communities Seamlessly transitioning between the absurd and the tenderhearted, balancing acerbic humor with sharp emotional depth, Afterparties offers an expansive portrait of the lives of Cambodian-Americans. As the children of refugees carve out radical new paths for themselves in California, they shoulder the inherited weight of the Khmer Rouge genocide and grapple with the complexities of race, sexuality, friendship, and family. A high school badminton coach and failing grocery store owner tries to relive his glory days by beating a rising star teenage player. Two drunken brothers attend a wedding afterparty and hatch a plan to expose their shady uncle's snubbing of the bride and groom. A queer love affair sparks between an older tech entrepreneur trying to launch a "safe space" app and a disillusioned young teacher obsessed with Moby-Dick. In the sweeping final story, a nine-year-old child learns that his mother survived a racist school shooter.
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