Lili: A Novel of Tiananmen by Annie Wang [in Christian Science Monitor]
31 May, by in Adult Readers, Awful Duds, Chinese, Chinese American, Fiction, Repost
Let's face it, the media is great at creating and perpetuating stereotypes. Take Asians: inscrutable and mysterious, sly and calculating, from the shuffling house boy to the prostitute with the heart of gold, from Ming the...
Never mind its faults. Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail, by Malika Oufkir and Michele Fitoussi is going to sell well. It's already a runaway bestseller in France, where it debuted in 1999 as...
This anthology, which includes both short stories and excerpts from larger works, celebrates the diversity of Asian American literature, from the many literary styles to the various ethnic backgrounds, ages...
A great book overall because most of it is told in the actual voices of the very Asian Americans who helped create our history. Takaki's follow-up, A Different...
Dogeaters Run
Jessica Hagedorn still sees her bestselling classic, 
Laying a Golden Egg
Everything – let me say that again – everything about this book is fabulous. So you’re off the hook: you can stop reading this review right now.
A...
Reading the essays collected in Countervisions: Asian American Film Criticism, edited by Darrell Y. Hamamoto and Sandra Liu, you might think that Rea Tajiri’s History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige is the only Asian American...
The Girl in the Picture
It is undoubtedly the most famous image of the tragedy of War: in its center, a young, naked girl screams in agony and terror, her thin...
Readers will really appreciate the back blurb on Alvin Lu’s first novel, The Hell Screens. Because it’s probably going to be the most coherent page of the book.
Here’s what seems to be the gist...
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...