No More Cherry Blossoms: Sisters Matsumoto and Other Plays by Philip Kan Gotanda, foreword by Stephen Sumida [in AsianWeek]
Thrilling collection of four recent plays from one of my favorite playwrights: Sisters Matsumoto, The Wind Cries Mary, Ballad of Yachiyo, and Under the Rainbow which combines two playlets, Natalie Wood...
Here’s an auspicious debut about three generations of the Lum family of Orange County, California, who may or may not be trying to survive a death curse, who have...
A careful examination of 48 second-generation South Asian Americans whose parents arrived from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal during 1965 and the mid-1980s. Through personal stories and sociological context, Purkayastha explores how this second...
Somehow missed this title earlier, even as it won the 2004 Paul Zindel First Novel Award. While the story is familiar – a young girl moves from a loving home filled with extended family...
A beautifully produced collection of intertwined poems that have more margin than print – although it’s the sparseness, that which is not written, that lingers.
Review:
Five fascinating Japanese women artists – Yayoi Kusama, Yoko Ono, Takako Saito, Mieko Shiomi and Shigeko Kubato – left the conservative art world in their native Japan for New York. And if you can...
The title, Hua Song, means “in praise of the Chinese community.” Undoubtedly, the remarkable book is a beautifully rendered, bilingual record of Chinese communities throughout the world, past and present.
Review:
Welcome to the fabulous world of the Bindi Babes, otherwise known as the dynamic Dhillon sisters, Amber, Jazz, and Geena. In the first installment of the trilogy, Bindi Babes, they manage to...
Local Bay Area author recounts the inspiring life stories of 21 South Asian American women scattered around the country.
Review:
A loving tribute, memoir-style, to the author’s father, a South Vietnamese pilot shot down during the Vietnam War and assumed dead. Pham and his mother begin a new life in the United...
Personal favorite of the month – and favorite of many others as it won the
Su-Jen becomes “Annie” when she immigrates to Canada at age 6 with her mother. Her father has set up a Chinese restaurant, and in the small Ontario town...
One child escapes, the other is left behind: In this continuation of the bestseller,
Vicenza, 14, is F.O.P. – fresh off the plane – from the Philippines where she was undoubtedly the belle of ball. Now a financially challenged immigrant in San Francisco who’s...
A masterful collection of loosely intertwined short stories from the author of the critically-acclaimed Ginseng and Other Tales from Manila which captures the immigrant life lived in between – not...
Not exactly one of the newest titles (it arrived later than sooner on my desk), but certainly noteworthy because of its subject matter. It opens with the Pakistani birth of Sadika – an unwanted...
Based on 15 years of experience as the faculty advisor to the Vietnamese Student Association at a San Jose, Calif., high school, Barry condenses his experiences to tell the story of a year in...
A hybrid if I ever saw one: At the heart of the book is a sociological look at how food and ethnicity intersect in the immigrant world (think how our APA holiday tables might...
While English is not the native tongue of Saigon-born Dinh, his mastery of his adopted language is undeniable. Throughout this most eclectic collection of shorts – some beyond short, including one-sentence stories...
The collected private writings of film and cultural historian Donald Richie, who is perhaps best known as Japan’s pre-eminent 20th-century American expat. Included in the multiple pages devoted to his almost-six-decade love affair with...