The Chinese American Experience—and Those Who Survived and Thrived to Tell the Tales
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Ruthanne Lum McCunn |
Jean Pfaelzer |
Jack Tchen |
What a fabulous evening we had to celebrate women writers who are brightly illuminating the Chinese American experience ….
Time:
Friday, October 12, 2007, 6:30 – 8:30 p.m.
Location:
Rasmuson Theater
National Museum of the American Indian
Fourth Street and Independence Avenue, SW
Metro:
L’Enfant Plaza (all lines except Red); exit Maryland Avenue/Smithsonian Museums
Ruthanne Lum McCunn, an award-winning writer of such APA classics as Pie-Biter and Thousand Pieces of Gold, debuted her latest novel, God of Luck, to Smithsonian audiences. Luck explores the little-known tragic experience of young Chinese men who were kidnapped in the 19th century and forced into what amounted to slave labor in the guano mines of faraway Peru. God of Luck introduces the poignant love story of Ah Lung and his beloved wife, Bo See, who although separated by a cruel fate, never lose hope of someday being reunited. Strong women continue to abound in McCunn’s resonating stories.
Jean Pfaelzer, professor at University of Delaware, arrived hot off her book tour to talk about her latest title, the critically-acclaimed Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans. Originally inspired by tales that haunted her for three decades, Pfaelzer reveals the unspoken history about one of this country’s darkest episodes: a firestorm of ethnic cleansing that erupted in the forced expulsion of over 200 Chinese communities and thousands of Chinese forced from their homes in the 19th-century American West. Driven Out is not just a story of injustice and victimization; here, Pfaelzer chronicles for the first time the valiant and tenacious Chinese resistance, about how early Chinese Americans filed and won the first lawsuits for reparations in the United States.
Historian and cultural activist Jack Tchen provided context and commentary. Tchen is the founding director of the A/P/A (Asian/Pacific/American) Studies Program and Institute at New York University. He is an Associate Professor of the Gallatin School for Individualized Study and the History Department of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences. In 1980, Tchen and Charles Lai co-founded the New York Chinatown History Project—now the Museum of Chinese in the America—that has enabled the largest Chinese settlement outside of Asia to document and explore its 160-year-long history and share it with hundreds of thousands of non-Chinese New Yorkers and visitors.
[…] with Jeannie Pfaelzer and Jack Tchen, for the Smithsonian APA Program’s literary event, “The Chinese American Experience – and Those Who Survived and Thrived to Tell the Tales,” on October 12, […]
[…] Jeannie Pfaelzer and Jack Tchen, for the Smithsonian APA Program’s literary event, “The Chinese American Experience – and Those Who Survived and Thrived to Tell the Tales,” on October 12, […]