CYJO + “KYOPO” = MARVEL Come one, come all! Get ready for the upcoming Asian Pacific American invasion at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. “Portraiture Now: Asian American Portraits of Encounter” opens this Thursday, August 12 and runs through October 14, 2012. Presented in conjunction with the...
Just sigh with me a moment. Deep breath in, deep breath out ...
Hattie Kong's email inbox is full of desperate pleas from various relatives to please send back her parents' bones to the family plot in Qufu, China. Because her American missionary mother and her Confucius-descended Chinese father found their final rest in Iowa, the remaining Kong...
Born and raised in a small Pennsylvania town, the only connection 14-year-old Grace has to her Cambodian heritage are her mother and her grandmother. While these three generations of women clearly need and love one another, they are uncertain as to how to truly know each...
To reduce this rich, complicated, multi-layered story into a few sentences seems almost disrespectful ...
Unhappily distracted on her walk home – her immigrant mother's fatty cooking, her growing body, her less-than-ideal only friend, her unrequited love for the school jock, her disdain for that other Russian immigrant with whom she has absolutely nothing in common, no FOB is she! – Anya falls...
Following up two unforgettable novels that earned her a MacArthur Fellows Program "Genius" Award (which comes with a no-strings-attached $500,000 "stipend" over five years!) in 2008 was surely going to be hard work. Last year, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie debuted her first short story collection ...
According to her official website bio, Lorraine Adams left her Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper career in 2000 "to recount the lost stories of Algerians she knew without the strictures of journalism, and the conventional sentiment of the moment." Even before 9/11, Adams well understood about "ambiguity" and...
I didn't actually read most of Jean Kwok's debut novel, but Grayce Wey who read it to me made it un-put-downable. Wey's gentle, lilting accent which fades in and out depending on...
When the local San Francisco public school denied Mamie Tape admission solely based on her Chinese heritage, her parents sued the city's Board of Education in what became the landmark 1885 case, Tape vs. Hurley. Mamie was seven years old, the American-born child of middle-class Chinese...
I'm not so sure about my tween son reading this sooner than later (it's part of his English curriculum this school year) ...
While Xu crafts breathtaking prose in her debut, her storytelling doesn't yet match her formidable writing prowess. The book opens with a tantalizing premise: Li Jing – 32-year-old Shanghai finance wizard, devoted son, husband, and father – emerges from a horrific accident with Broca's aphasia, which leaves...
With the publication of her first memoir, Infidel (2007), Ayaan Hirsi Ali spent the better part of a year seeing her debut on the New York Times bestseller list. Born in Somalia, at times neglected, abandoned, or abused by her parents, the strictly-raised Muslim child that...
By the time I actually met Sonya Chung, debut novelist of Long for This World, which hit shelves in March, I was already a groupie. Long was one of those suddenly-surprising-out-of-nowhere books that make you gasp. A publicist sent it to me initially and it...
If the observations, memories, and pop culture references here weren't so obviously recognizable in our post-9/11 western world, you might have read this graphic memoir as a hack comedy. The black-and-white panels initially seem almost unfinished, as if still in rough-draft mode. The contents might...
Timing is everything, right? Last weekend, I had our teenage daughter and a friend of hers wandering NYC, and we happened to do the fabulous, downloadable Soundwalk/Chinatown walking tour narrated by Chinatown native Jami Gong – all three of us were attached to one iPod...
How fitting to finish reading University of Michigan Professor Scott Kurashige's debut title on the 68th annual Day of Remembrance, which marks the anniversary of the signing of Executive Order 9066 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt which led to the imprisonment of 120,000 Americans of...
*STARRED REVIEW The title of Sonya Chung’s exquisite novel, Long for This World, seems to be missing a word: “not long for this world” would be the easy, expected phrase. But little is ‘easy’ or ‘expected’ in this multilayered story of two brothers – one Korean,...
Andy Nguyen is most definitely Australian, not Vietnamese. And yet his father insists they're going "home" to Vietnam, somewhere Andy has never been. Andy's Dad is Viet Kieu, a name given to Vietnamese-born immigrants who live in other countries around the world. Returning Viet Kieu...
Surely, I have never been part of a more raucous audience than when I saw David Henry Hwang's latest play, Yellow Face, at New York's Public Theater in December 2007. The man at the end of the row in front of us LITERALLY FELL OUT...
