The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee: Observations on Not Fitting In by Paisley Rekdal + Author Interview [in aOnline]
18 Nov, by in Adult Readers, Author Interview/Profile, Chinese American, Hapa/Mixed-race, Memoir, Nonfiction, Repost
International Quest: Paisley Rekdal’s Search for Identity
Born to a Chinese mother and a Norwegian father, Paisley Rekdal has traversed the world, in search of her identity,...
The Easiest Thing to Do Is Stop Writing
Having just returned from Italy where he got a little R&R and did some research on his next novel, Chang-rae Lee didn’t even have time to recover...
Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest work, When We Were Orphans, is a remarkable novel of love, loss, and potential redemption. In the same understated, quiet style that worked so well in his...
In Search of Mothers
Joanna Catherine Scott, British by birth, Australian by upbringing, and American by chance, is also Asian by association. She is one of a handful – thus far – of...
Court Intrigue: An interview with Liza Dalby about her new book, The Tale of Murasaki
Six hundred years before the Western world saw its first novel, Lady Murasaki Shikibu’s brilliant tome, The Tale...
As I read Karen Shepard’s debut novel, An Empire of Women, I couldn’t help thinking if the title was some sort of sarcastic joke, if not a blatant mistake, because the utter...
A rare first-person account of an immigrant's journey to America during the period of Chinese Exclusion. The memoir, written with his daughter, covers over a half century of Chin's life from his entry into...
Twelve short stories about daily life in modern China, penned by National Book Award winner for Waiting. The collection could be read as a companion title to Waiting, as Ha Jin returns to the same Muji...
Modern Girls
Growing up in a large, extended family in Hong Kong, 
With A Blessing Over Ashes: The Remarkable Odyssey of My Unlikely Brother, Adam Fifield adds a new twist to the currently trendy suffering-child memoir boom (a lá Angela’s Ashes – and really, no disrespect...
Lost and Found: An Interview with Karin Evans
Just days after the death of her beloved father, Karin Evans and her husband, Mark, experienced one of the most joyful events of...
Kyoko Mori’s Stone Field, True Arrow is a love story – or sorts. An exasperating one, at that, filled with characters emotionally paralyzed to the point of utter immobility. Maya...
My initial reaction – and it does not fade through the course of the book – is utter annoyance at yet another non-Asian exoticizing, objectifying, making inscrutable the Asian culture and its people. But...
Raj Kamal Jha’s slim debut novel, The Blue Bedspread, is fabulous. It is perhaps the best book I’ve read this year – maybe even several years. It’s also a precious find, not the least...
In Overdrive: Frances Park’s Sweet Road to Success
What began as a short story has quickly become Frances Park’s breakout novel. When My Sister Was Cleopatra Moon...
A word of advice: Don’t read The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (which just won the Pulitzer for fiction) at the same time as Anita Desai’s new collection of short stories, Diamond Dust....
A Legacy of Survival
What began as a casual lunch in San Francisco with a then-business acquaintance ended in a cathartic literary accomplishment for journalist Elizabeth Kim. After exchanging life stories, agent Patti...
To reveal that the theme song to Meera Syal's novel, Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee is Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” might...
The Divine Dr. Deepak Chopra
Named by Time Magazine as one of their 100 heroes and icons of the century, earning him the title of “the poet-prophet of alternative medicine,” Dr....