Bøger om Asian American people

While mainstream Vietnamese history chronicles a few woman warriors of the past and some contemporary female activists, Vietnamese women always have performed their roles in the quiet shadows of men. To illuminate those shadows, Quan Manh Ha and Quynh H. Vo have brought into English the first anthology of its kind, featuring twenty-two contemporary stories written by Vietnamese women whose narratives make visible the multitudinous lives of Vietnamese women over the last two decades. All the stories in Longings appear in English for the first time, inviting new readers to appreciate the "Longings" or aspirations of Vietnamese women as they have had to face suffering and struggle, hope and despair, sorrow and joy, while navigating an uncharted course through the social and economic waves that have lifted or lowered their lives since the US-Vietnam normalization in the mid-1990s. The wife in Da Ngan's "The Innermost Feelings of White Pillows" suppresses sexual frustration at her husband's impotence by stuffing her pillows with new fibers. The rural women in Tran Thuy Mai's "Green Plums" have no choice but to become prostitutes to earn a living. The mother in Pham Thi Phong Diep's "Mother and Son" demonstrates an unconditional sacrifice and ineffable love for her adopted son despite his insolence and ingratitude. A woman in Nguyen Thi Chau Giang's "Late Moon" violates all prescribed gender norms in order to live freely. Longings brings together stories by both well-established and emerging Vietnamese writers, those who come from various regions in Vietnam and represent the diversity and richness in Vietnamese short fiction. This anthology expands the audience for deserving authors and broadens perspective on the heterogeneous voices, narrative styles, and thematic interests of women who contribute to the growing corpus of contemporary Vietnamese short fiction.

Breaking a thirty-year silence, B¿o Ninh has permitted at last the publication of a new work in English. Ninh is perhaps Vietnam's foremost chronicler of the war, which he joined at age 17. Bringing to life the full range of his inventive and poetic language, Quan Manh Ha and Cab Tran are granting to English readers B¿o Ninh's first book-length work since The Sorrow of War, which catapulted him to fame and which was banned in Vietnam until 2006. In Hà N¿i at Midnight, ten stories are appearing in the West for the first time. Juxtaposed with tranquility and geniality are abandoned landscapes and defoliated forests. Polluted rivers and streams, the war-torn sky, pungent air filled with the stench of decomposing human corpses, and the deafening roar of helicopters and bombers hovering in the gloom dominate the settings of B¿o Ninh's stories. Intertwined with these horrific images are human tears shed during farewell ceremonies, when recruits are separated from their loved ones, when parents live in anxiety and hope while their children are fighting in remote regions, and when soldiers bury their comrades and burden themselves with the fallen's unfulfilled wishes. Hà N¿i at Midnight delineates the complex outpourings of war and the way it remakes human relationships.

Rendered mute following a traumatic friendship breakup, seventeen-year-old Machi prays to a Japanese goddess to become a vacuum cleaner robot, but accidentally conjures the deity, who's determined to show Machi that life is worth living.

Told with deadpan humor and brutal honesty, this debut novel follows Vietnamese American Linh Ly s unraveling as she reckons with the traumas of both her past and present.

The first comprehensive biography of unjustly forgotten war hero Ben Kuroki, a Japanese American farm boy from Nebraska who flew fifty-eight combat missions, fighting the Axis Powers during World War II and battled racism, injustice, and prejudice on the home front.Foreword by Naomi Ostwald Kawamura of Densho Introduction by William Fujioka of JANM Afterword by Jonathan EigBen Kuroki was a twenty-four-year-old Japanese American farm boy whose heritage was never a problem in remote Nebraska—until Pearl Harbor. Among the millions of Americans who flocked to military stations to enlist, Ben wanted to avenge the attack, reclaim his family honor, and prove his patriotism. But as anti-Japanese sentiment soared, Ben had to fight to be allowed to fight for America. And fight he did.As a gunner on Army Air Forces bombers, Ben flew fifty-eight missions spanning three combat theaters: Europe, North Africa, and the Pacific, including the climactic B-29 firebombing campaign against Japan that culminated with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He flew some of the war’s boldest and bloodiest air missions and lived to tell about it. In between his tours in Europe and the Pacific, he challenged FDR’s shameful incarceration of more than one hundred thousand people of Japanese ancestry in America, and he would be credited by some with setting in motion the debate that reversed a grave national dishonor. In the euphoric wake of America’s victory, the decorated war hero used his national platform to carry out what he called his “fifty-ninth mission,” urging his fellow Americans to do more to eliminate bigotry and racism at home.Told in full for the first time, and long overdue, Ben’s extraordinary story is a quintessentially American one of patriotism, principle, perseverance, and courage. It’s about being in the vanguard of history, the bonding of a band of brothers united in a just cause, a timeless and unflinching account of racial bigotry, and one man’s transcendent sense of belonging—in war, in peace, abroad, and at home.

During World War II, Detroit emerged as a relative space of freedom for Nisei permitted by the War Relocation Authority to leave sites of incarceration but banned from returning to their homes in the exclusion zones. These Nisei connected with an existing Japanese American community that had been formed by immigrant trailblazers who came to Detroit in the early twentieth century to be part of the booming auto industry. While many of the wartime migrants later returned to the West Coast, those who stayed in Detroit negotiated living and raising families in a region torn apart by Black-white conflict and then scarred by "Japan-bashing" in the face of economic decline.Drawing from a community-based oral history and archiving project, Exiled to Motown captures the compelling stories of Japanese Americans in the Midwest, filling in overlooked aspects of the Asian American experience. It serves as a model for collaboration on projects between scholars, elders, and community activists.

"The American suburb conjures an image of picturesque privilege: manicured lawns, quiet streets, and, most important to parents, high-quality schools. These elite enclaves are also historically white, allowing many white Americans to safeguard their privileges by using public schools to help their children enter top colleges. That's changing, however, as Asian American professionals increasingly move into wealthy suburban areas to give their kids that same leg up for their college applications and future careers."--

In Can I Have Your Pearl Bracelet? award-winning author, poet and advice columnist Frances H. Kakugawa presents stories and poems gleaned from a lifetime search for answers to life's existential questions. This rich anthology introduces a memorable cast of characters in adventures ranging from teaching in Micronesia to the pitfalls of publishing to growing up in a Hawaiian village later buried by lava. Here are insights shared and lessons learned in Kakugawa's long career as an educator and as a sought-after speaker on creative writing, children's poetry and eldercare. Can I Have Your Pearl Bracelet? is her seventeenth book.

A new Canterbury Tales for our time, Sample and Loop tells the story of the migration of Singaporeans to the United States of America, rendering the surprising trajectory of lived experience in musical verse. Based on personal interviews, these poems together tell a part of the story of the migration of Singaporeans to the United States of America. A new Canterbury Tales for our time, Sample and Loop traces the nonlinear, multidimensional, and surprising trajectory of lived experience in musical verse. Here are the Ceramicist, the Pediatrician, the Scenic Designer, the Chef, the Porn Star, and a host of other migrant-pilgrims sharing the tales of their lives even as they continue to make those lives in a country not of their birth. By narrating their discoveries, troubles, hopes, and sorrows, they refract a powerful beam of light on both countries and compose a wayward music for the road.

A Marianas Mosaic: Signs and Shifts in Contemporary Island Life features authors in and of the Mariana Islands writing in voices that range from scholarly to poetic about the social, political, and cultural dynamics unfolding across the archipelago. This mosaic of perspectives touches on topics pertinent to contemporary island life including traditional healing, family trauma, sovereignty movements, local clothing brands, multimedia advocacy, spirituality, and more. This collection illuminates the complexity and beauty of the region and provides a deeper understanding of Marianas history and experiences.

A thrilling, emotionally rich debut novel about a “rental stranger”—a companion hired under various guises—whose ongoing role as a part-time father to a young girl sparks questions about ethics, identity, and love.

"A tender, slyly comical, and shamelessly honest debut novel following a Japanese widow raising her son between worlds with the help of her Jewish mother-in-law, as she wrestles with grief, loss, and-strangest of all, joy. Shortly after her husband Levi's untimely death, Kyoko decides to raise their young son, Alex, in San Francisco, rather than return to Japan. Her nosy yet loving Jewish mother-in-law, Bubbe, encourages her to find new love and abandon frugality but her own mother wants Kyoko to celebrate her now husbandless life. Always beside her is Alex, who lives confidently, no matter the circumstance. Four sections of vignettes reflect Kyoko's fluctuating emotional states-sometimes ugly, other times funny, but always uniquely hers. While freshly mourning Levi, Kyoko and Alex confront another death-that of Alex's pet betta fish. Kyoko and Bubbe take a road trip to a psychic and discover that Kyoko carries bad karma. On visits back to Japan, Kyoko and her mother clash over how best to connect Alex with his Japanese heritage, and as Alex enters his teenage years and brings his first girlfriend home, Kyoko lets her imagination run wild as she worries about teen pregnancy. In this openhearted and surprising novel about the choices and relationships that sustain us, there are times where Kyoko is lonely but never alone and others in which she is alone but never lonely. Through these moments, she learns how much more there is to herself in the wake of total and unexpected upheaval."--

"A charming rom-com about a young woman's desperate attempts to fend off her meddling mother ... only to find that maybe mother does know best ... Writer and barista Emily Hung is tired of hearing about the great Mark Chan, the son of her parents' friends. You'd think he single-handedly stopped climate change and ended child poverty from the way her mother raves about him. But in reality, he's just a boring, sweater-vest-wearing engineer, and when they're forced together at Emily's sister's wedding, it's obvious he thinks he's too good for her. But now that Emily is her family's last single daughter, her mother is fixated on getting her married and she has her sights on Mark. There's only one solution, clearly: convince Mark to be in a fake relationship with her long enough to put an end to her mom's meddling. He reluctantly agrees. Unfortunately, lying isn't enough. Family friends keep popping up at their supposed dates--including a bubble tea shop and cake-decorating class--so they'll have to spend more time together to make their relationship look real. With each fake date, though, Emily realizes that Mark's not quite what she assumed and maybe that argyle sweater isn't so ugly after all"--

"A daughter of Korean immigrants, Hyeseung Song spends her earliest years in the cane fields of Texas where her loyalties are divided between a restless father in search of Big Money, and a beautiful yet domineering mother whose resentments about her own life compromise her relationship with her daughter. ... When the family's fake Gucci business lands them in bankruptcy, Song moves to a new elementary school. ... Neither rich nor white, Song does what is necessary to be visible: she internalizes the model minority myth as well as her beloved mother's dreams to see her on a secure path. Song meets these expectations by attending the best Ivy League universities in the country. But when she wavers, in search of an artistic life on her own terms, her mother warns, 'Happiness is what unexceptional people tell themselves when they don't have the talent and drive to go after real success.' Years of self-erasure take a toll and Song experiences recurring episodes of depression and mania. ... Song enters a psychiatric hospital where she meets patients with similar struggles. So begins her sweeping journey to heal herself by losing everything"--

"At the turn of the twentieth century, Yun Hong is born into a loving family in the southern China countryside, but as Communism consumes her older brothers, it threatens her stability--and her love affair with the son of a wealthy landlord. The line of women who later descend from Yun Hong share the burden of a family birthmark and are also each forced to reckon with both dramatic political change and the ghosts of the past"--

A fresh and vivid new voice brings a contemporary edge to the classic espionage novel. A New York Times "Best Thrillers of the Year (So Far)”At twenty-six, Princeton grad Michael Wang is trapped. Stifled under the bamboo ceiling at General Motors, he’s working quietly on a breakthrough in self-driving car technology that he hopes will catapult him out of obscurity. Disaffected and largely friendless in San Francisco, he’s dogged by resentment towards the Ivy Leaguers who never accepted him and his colleagues at GM who see him as passive and faceless. But all that changes when one night, on a freelance coding platform, he meets the beautiful and enigmatic Vivian. She’s been admiring Michael’s work from afar and represents a rival Beijing tech company that’s eager to poach him as a newly minted executive, liberate his ideas from the stagnant confines of GM, and help him find success in the wilder, less regulated business environs of China. For Michael—alienated and underappreciated—it’s no choice at all. But as soon as Michael arrives in Beijing, Vivian vanishes. When the true nature of his new position is made clear, Michael finds himself enmeshed in a dangerous web of industrial espionage and counterintelligence. Caught between two countries that view him as a pawn, where do his loyalties lie? Piercingly intelligent and ruthlessly contemporary, The Expat is both a white-knuckle spy novel and a thrilling exploration of the myth of meritocracy, high-tech immigration, U.S.-China conflicts, identity, and disaffection that asks: in the pursuit of self-actualization, who will we betray and how far will we go?

"A candid and moving autobiography by the 'Black Widow' of billiards. Jeanette Lee was 18 years old when she walked into a New York City pool hall and became enamored by the elegant geometry of the game. Before long, she was an unmistakable figure on the international competition circuit, dressed head-to-toe in black, stalking the billiards table and gazing down her cue as if tracking her prey. In this new memoir, the woman nicknamed 'The Black Widow' opens up about her legendary career and the rich, unpredictable life she's woven around it. Lee details her upbringing in a Korean-American household in the Bronx, her single-minded drive to reach the pinnacle of her sport, and her unlikely entry into the realm of mainstream celebrity in an era where female athletes rarely got their share of the limelight. Lee also reflects on her lifelong struggle with scoliosis, which necessitated over twenty operations during her playing career; her public battle with Stage 4 ovarian cancer; the communities that gave her strength throughout. Written with warmth and candor, this the definitive story of a true icon"--

"Crafted with lines from her late father's letters, Jennifer Tseng's Thanks for Letting Us Know You Are Alive is a portrait of an immigrant, a rootless person whose unspoken loss-that of his native geography, family, traditions, language-underlies every word. Though her father's first language was Mandarin, for more than twenty years he wrote these letters in English, in theory so that she could understand them. His sentences are riddled with errors, some nearly unintelligible. Lines from his letters appear as titles and are scattered throughout the poems, blending voices of father and daughter. This collection enacts what it means to lose someone and commune with them simultaneously-the paradox of grief and all it gives us"--

From its opening insistence on "not love but procedure," Hanae Jonas's Softly Undercover explores the possibilities and limitations of ritual and repetition, asking what it means to believe and see clearly. Formally rangy poems map out territories of devotion and divination, contrasting the realm of mystery, dreams, and symbols with the alienation of the mundane. Against a backdrop of intimate relationships, small towns, rural landscapes, and claustrophobic interiors, Jonas casts her gaze on isolation, nostalgia, repression, visibility, and loss while examining the desire "to go anywhere more docile / than facts." Animated by uncertainty, this elliptical and lyrical debut dwells in the pleasures and hazards of illusion.

Lit Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2023 • Shondaland's The Best Books to Read for Summer 2023 • San Francisco Chronicle's 17 Books We Can't Wait to Read This Summer • Publishers Weekly's Fall 2023 Adult Announcements: Literary Fiction • Goodreads's 88 Upcoming Books the Goodreads Editors Can't Wait to Read • Los Angeles Times's 10 Books to Add to Your Reading List in August • Apple Books's Best Books of AugustThis “sweeping intergenerational saga" tells the story of a pampered and defiant South Korean matriarch thrust into the afterlife from which she seeks a second chance to make amends (Kirstin Chen)—and fights off a tragic curse that could devastate generations to come. In South Korea, a 105-year-old woman receives a letter. Ten days later, she has been thrust into the afterlife, fighting to head off a curse that will otherwise devastate generations to come.   Hak Jeonga has always shouldered the burden of upholding the family name. When she sent her daughter-in-law to America to cover up an illegitimate birth, she was simply doing what was needed to preserve the reputations of her loved ones. How could she have known that decades later, this decision would return to haunt her—threatening to tear apart her bond with her beloved son, her relationship with her infuriatingly insolent sisters, and the future of the family she has worked so hard to protect?   Part ghost story and part family epic, The Apology is an incisive tale of sisterhood and diaspora, reaching back to the days of Japanese colonialism and the Korean War, and told through the singular voice of a defiant, funny, and unforgettable centenarian.

"Evie Lang's life is in shambles. On the heels of losing her beloved aunt, she's unceremoniously fired from her poetry professorship by her secret boyfriend. Lacking income and inspiration, she's stuck in Ohio with no idea how to move forward--until hope arrives in a surprising letter. Auntie Hao left Evie the deed to her San Francisco row house, a place full of Evie's happiest memories. The catch? To inherit, she must go on a pre-arranged matchmaking tour in Vietnam"--

This book provides a comprehensive story of the complicated and rich story of the Japanese American experience-from immigration, to discrimination, to adaptation, achievement and contributions to the American mosaic.Japanese Americans: The History and Culture of a People highlights the enormous contributions of Japanese Americans in history, civil rights, politics, economic development, arts, literature, film, popular culture, sports, and religious landscapes. It not only provides context to important events in Japanese American history and in-depth information about the lives and backgrounds of well-known Japanese Americans, but also captures the essence of everyday life for Japanese Americans as they have adjusted their identities, established communities, and interacted with other ethnic groups. This innovative volume will become the standard resource for exploring why the Japanese came to America more than 130 years ago, where they settled, and what experiences played a role in forming the distinctive Japanese American identity.

'Thoughts, Themes and Images' is a collection of poems written by Preethi Govindaraj. Preethi's poems cover a range of ideas, deeply personal emotions, random musings, and insightful commentary on social and current-day issues, some of which are reflected in the accompanying paintings. The collection of more than one hundred and fifty poems reflects the depth and range of her poetic mind and imagination.The book is full of surprises - love, suffering, chuckles, serious social commentary are brought together like a quintessential Indian curry. Preethi's poems examine the mundane and the sublime with equal honesty, sincerity, and zeal. Something in this potpourri of reflections on family, festivals, relationships, nature and the changing seasons, and serious social issues should appeal to every poetry lover.