Flower Drum Song by David Henry Hwang, music by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, based on the novel by C.Y. Lee + Playwright Profile [in aMagazine: Inside Asian America]
01 Dec, by in Adult Readers, Author Interview/Profile, Chinese American, Drama/Theater, Repost
Flower Power
Ask any Asian American familiar with musicals, and they’ll probably be able to sing “I Enjoy Being a Girl," recalling endless images of mirror-cloned Nancy Kwans. Like it or not, as...
Perhaps the biggest news in translated Asian titles is the rebirth of the world’s first novel, The Tale of Genji, by Lady Murasaki Shikibu, translated for the third time into English, this...
With some 30,000 Chinese children, mostly daughters, being raised throughout the West, books addressing transracial adoption are growing rapidly. Wuhu Diary: On Taking My Adopted Daughter Back to Her Hometown in China, by novelist Emily Prager,...
Here's the young adult version of Chen’s lyrical bestseller, Colors of the Mountain.
Reviews: 
Asian American young-adult king Laurence Yep offers two books with recurring characters: In The Amah, Amy learns to shoulder more family responsibility when her widowed mother takes a time-consuming job, while in Angelfish, Amy's friend Robin...
Here's the book that brought more tears of joy, sadness, and the greatest of hope this month: With the ever-growing phenomenon of transracial adoption, Sacred Connections should be in every adoptive family's library. While...
The Kip Club
Kip Fulbeck is not your average performance artist. At age 35, he’s a tenured professor at UC Santa Barbara, does outreach programs for at-risk kids, was a nationally ranked swimmer, and he...
The best of the latest crop of South Asian diaspora titles is The Death of Vishnu, a startling debut novel, the first of a planned trilogy by math professor 
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...
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...
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...
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...