Color of the Sea by John Hideyo Hamamura [in Christian Science Monitor]
23 May, by in Adult Readers, Fiction, Japanese, Japanese American, Repost
A few cheesy, overwritten scenes aside, this is one stunning debut novel that will make you weak in the knees. Sam Hamada, U.S.-born but raised in Japan, arrives at age 9 in Hawai‘i in 1930 to...
Makibaka means 'struggle' – the struggle of Filipino Americans who survived great hardships to become Americans. Young Lakas inspires the inhabitants of the Makibaka Hotel to fight the building owner's attempts to force the tenants from...
A Bangladeshi immigrant family heads to Canada in search of asylum. When the father is inexplicably arrested at the border, the two daughters return alone to New York, where friends and family are disappearing without explanation....
"hapa (hä'pä) adj. 1. Slang. of mixed racial heritage with partial roots in Asian and/or Pacific Islander ancestry. n. 2. Slang. a person of such ancestry. [der./Hawaiian: Hapa Haole (half white)]" Thus opens Fulbeck's fabulous compilation...
Once Korea's greatest movie star – dubbed 'the Queen of Tears' for her ability to cry convincingly on film – Soong Nan Lee arrives in Hawai‘i to face her three adult children. Her two eldest by...
Clara Breed, a children’s librarian at the San Diego Public Library, proved to be a staunch supporter and enduring friend to a group of young Japanese American students who were forced to leave their homes and...
With their loved ones incarcerated behind barbed wire in internment camps, the segregated, all-Japanese American 100th Battalion/442nd Regimental Combat Team, led by Korean American Col. Young Oak Kim who recently passed away, became the most decorated...
Drawing from his own experience of adopting two Chinese daughters, Caldecott Medalist 
This one will break your heart in the most haunting way. The follow-up to An Na’s Michael L. Printz Award-winning 
Loss dominates the lives of the inhabitants of a crumbling, stately home on the Indian-Nepali border along the Himalayas. The Cambridge University-educated, self-hating judge’s isolated life is disrupted by the arrival of his young granddaughter, Sai,...
Originally published in 1951, the final novel from Hayashi – undoubtedly one of Japan’s most important women writers of the 20th century – traces a tormented, destructive love affair. When they meet, Yukiko and Tomioka are...
That’s 1969, when student uprisings shut down Tokyo University, the Beatles put out The White Album, the Rolling Stones released “Honky Tonk Women,” and war raged on in Vietnam. In a Japanese small city high school,...
How Yamanaka can tell some of the most harrowing stories with such lyrically beautiful language is astonishing. In her latest novel, Hawaii’s best known writer captures the story of three lost, tuberculosis-stricken sisters, sent away to...
An important compilation of essays, published posthumously, by longtime activist and Asian American Studies pioneer Ichioka. While numerous volumes focusing on the Japanese American internment already exist, Ichioka’s writings examine the specific period between the two...
Two notable Asian film scholars offer an admirable overview of more than a century’s worth of Chinese film history – including the diaspora represented by films from Taiwan, Hong Kong and even the United States –...
Leading film scholar Marchetti confronts media depictions of China as captured on film at the end of the 20th century, caught somewhere between a revolutionary, political square on one side of the world to a...
The Los Angeles riots that broke out on April 29, 1992, was a turning point for the Korean American community. But the events affected not only Korean Americans, but reverberated through U.S. society at large. Using...
An unput-down-able romp of a fun novel (with a few very serious moments) starring hapa (half-Asian, half-not) Patty Ho who goes from awkward Seattle suburb freshman to adventurous, independent Stanford summer math camper.
Reviews: "In Celebration of...
After Pearl Harbor is bombed, every little thing changes for 12-year-old Sumiko, who lives on her aunt and uncle’s flower farm in California with her brother and cousins. Even though she’s an American, Sumiko and her...
The return in a new paperback edition of the second of a resonating historical trilogy that follows the young life of Adam Pelko. In A Boy at War, Adam is a high school student who experiences...