On my first read of this book, I raced through the matte black pages reading as fast as I could, both to discover the ending and to reassure myself that the characters I adored could survive. (Horror, as a genre, can be cruel to the flawed, nerdy, and eccentric sorts of characters that I tend to sympathize with.) So it was my second, more measured, pass through the fantastically dark graphic novel that allowed me to absorb far more of its world and reflect on my own as well. As much as this story is about demons, human sacrifices, and horrific entities summoned from hellish realms, it’s also very much about how we each navigate our humanity.
When Ipo, the matriarch of her family, broods on how much of her heritage and personal history to pass on to her children, her dilemma truly resonated with me. Her circumstances and identity…
The Night Eaters: She Eats the Nights is the first volume in a graphic novel horror trilogy from author Marjorie Liu and illustrator Sana Takeda—the creative team behind the New York Times bestselling series Monstress.
NAMED A BEST GRAPHIC NOVEL OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST NAMED A BOOK WE LOVED BY NPR
Chinese American twins Milly and Billy are having a tough time. On top of the multiple failures in their personal and professional lives, they’re struggling to keep their restaurant afloat. Luckily their parents, Ipo and Keon, are in town for their annual visit. Having immigrated from…
I love books that deal with justice and make you feel
strong emotions. This book did that and more.
The story included discrimination
against Chinese and Black Americans in the South in the early 1900s. The plot was
moving, riveting and the writing was impeccable.
I'd often stop and be amazed
at the wonderful way the author strung her words together. Stacey Lee is a
talented and unique writer. It was filled with love, hope, and surprises.
A Reese's Book Club YA Pick and New York Times Bestseller
From the critically acclaimed author of Luck of the Titanic, Under a Painted Sky, and Outrun the Moon comes a powerful novel about identity, betrayal, and the meaning of family.
By day, seventeen-year-old Jo Kuan works as a lady's maid for the cruel daughter of one of the wealthiest men in Atlanta. But by night, Jo moonlights as the pseudonymous author of a newspaper advice column for the genteel Southern lady, "Dear Miss Sweetie." When her column becomes wildly popular, she uses the power of the pen to address…
Katherine Pryor is the award-winning author of several picture books about food and gardens. In addition to writing, she has worked to create better food choices at institutions, corporations, and food banks. She gardens with her young twins at their home on an island in northwest Washington.
A young girl wishes her family’s garden looked as pretty as their neighbors’ gardens—bursting with flowers and fragrance rather than the “ugly vegetables” her mom insists on growing. Her mom assures her their garden is worth waiting for, and that these vegetables will be better than flowers. At harvest time, she makes a soup that brings the neighborhood together. Based on events from author/illustrator Grace Lin’s own childhood, The Ugly Vegetables is a story about how food rooted in culture can pass history and identity down through generations, and the importance of growing food that tastes like home.
In this charming story about celebrating differences a Chinese-American girl wishes for a garden of bright flowers instead of one full of bumpy, ugly, vegetables.
The neighbors' gardens look so much prettier and so much more inviting to the young gardener than the garden of "black-purple-green vines, fuzzy wrinkled leaves, prickly stems, and a few little yellow flowers" that she and her mother grow. Nevertheless, mother assures her that "these are better than flowers." Come harvest time, everyone agrees as those ugly Chinese vegetables become the tastiest, most aromatic soup they have ever known. As the neighborhood comes together to…
Crossing is a vividly human re-imagining of the love, sacrifices, and accomplishments that two Chinese brothers - American Immigrants - experience as they travel to California to build the Transcontinental Railroad.
Crossing is a vividly human re-imagining of the love, sacrifices, and history that laid tracks for the North America of today.
Leaving behind ancestral Chinese homelands and their family, brothers Yang and Lee face harrowing challenges as they join countless immigrants seeking a better life in the 1860s.
This story follows their remarkable journey across the ocean to San Francisco, then into the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where they'll labor to build the Transcontinental Railroad. Surrounded by California's new marvels, and carrying their cultural traditions in their hearts, Yang and Lee find themselves in precarious situations. Their passions, struggles, dreams, and…
I’m a Swedish American journalist, blogger, and author whose writings about Scandinavian parenting culture have appeared in newspapers, magazines, and online publications across the world, including Time.com, Parents.com, and Green Child Magazine. I’m particularly interested in the role of nature in childhood and believe the best memories are created outside, while jumping in puddles, digging in dirt, catching bugs and climbing trees. In 2013, I started the blog Rain or Shine Mamma to inspire other parents and caregivers to get outside with their children every day, regardless of the weather. I’m currently working on my second book, about the Nordic outdoor tradition friluftsliv, which will be published by Tarcher Perigee in 2022.
Chua set off an international firestorm with her memoir, a frank account of the trials and tribulations of raising her two daughters the Chinese way in the U.S. Her strict, achievement-oriented parenting tactics often run counter to mainstream Western ideals about raising children and have drawn harsh criticism from many readers. Whether you agree with her methods or not, it’s impossible not to be touched by Chua’s book.
A SUNDAY TIMES AND NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER: the most talked-about book of the year
'Blissfully funny' India Knight, Sunday Times
'Entertaining, bracingly honest and, yes, thought-provoking' New York Times
'A treat from first to last: ruefully funny, endlessly self-deprecating, riven with ironies .. I relished this memoir' I
Updated with a new postscript by Amy Chua and a letter from her eldest daughter, Sophia
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is a story about a mother, two daughters, and two dogs. It was supposed to be a story of how Chinese parents are better at raising kids than Western…
In this debut collection, Zhang writes so well about the
peculiar loneliness of living far from home.
I grew up in Scotland, and I never get to go back there as often as I
would like, or to stay as long, so I have huge sympathy for her
characters, many of whom are immigrants who can’t stop thinking about the places
and the people they’ve left behind.
I love
that in these stories, making jello salad or getting a perm can be a major
event.
Set in China and America, in the generations after the Cultural Revolution, The Sorrows of Others is a dazzling collection about people confronted with being outsiders―as immigrants, as revolutionaries, and even, often, within their own families.
"Writers with virtually perfect debuts are certainly rare; Zhang joins that short list with a magnificent ten-story collection filled with lost souls aching for connection on both sides of the world." ―Booklist starred review
In New York City, an art student finds an unexpected subject when she moves in with a grandmother from Xi’an, and boundaries are…
I dig into family dramas of the past. But these dramas interest me most when I understand how personal stories intersected with the legal and policy structures that shaped what was possible for families. Overall, I am interested in the many ways that inequality—between races, genders, and classes—began at home. I am now working on a project on sex across class lines in the 20th century United States. I am an associate professor in the Federated History Department at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers-Newark.
Mary Lui’s fascinating book hinges on a hook that nearly always works—a murder mystery. In this case, the victim was Elsie Siegel, a young white woman from a good family who did missionary work with the Chinese American community in New York City. She was the picture of innocence until her body was found bound up in a trunk in a Chinese American man’s apartment. Further investigations uncovered a set of love letters not only to this man but also to another Americanized Chinese immigrant. Seemingly one of her lovers had killed her out of jealousy. What followed was not only a manhunt for her killer but also a backlash against the Chinese American community including the many hand laundries scattered throughout New York City. Elsie Siegel’s death prompted rumors that these laundries allowed widespread assaults against white women and girls. Lui paints us a heartbreaking account of the suffering…
In the summer of 1909, the gruesome murder of nineteen-year-old Elsie Sigel sent shock waves through New York City and the nation at large. The young woman's strangled corpse was discovered inside a trunk in the midtown Manhattan apartment of her reputed former Sunday school student and lover, a Chinese man named Leon Ling. Through the lens of this unsolved murder, Mary Ting Yi Lui offers a fascinating snapshot of social and sexual relations between Chinese and non-Chinese populations in turn-of-the-century New York City. Sigel's murder was more than a notorious crime, Lui contends. It was a clear signal that…
Raised in a Mexican-Italian family, I grew up traveling across the Arizona-Sonora borderlands to visit my extended family. As a kid, I took for granted movement across boundaries and cultural and racial mixture, but eventually, I came to see it framed my experience and outlook. In researching the Chinese in northern Mexico, I learned that Mexican women and Chinese-Mexican children followed their expelled men, whether by force or choice, and I became enthralled. I had to find out how these families fared after crossing not just borders but oceans. My passion for reading about how the long presence of Asians in the Americas complicates our understanding of history has only deepened.
Taking a transnational frame and drawing on English- and Chinese-language sources by and about Eurasians, this book uses juxtaposition to bring different perspectives to bear on each other. People’s lives, the choices they make amid various external limitations, are at the heart. The book takes a unique structural approach, with a prologue before each main chapter that describes a central story and helps ground and guide the larger narrative. In exploring interracial marriages and the lives of couples and children, the work shows how Eurasians have been producers of knowledge. Through highly diverse sources from the era, the author demonstrates that Eurasians have engaged in self-representation in complex ways and a broad range of voices and experiences comprise the category “Eurasian.”
In the second half of the nineteenth century, global labor migration, trade, and overseas study brought China and the United States into close contact, leading to new cross-cultural encounters that brought mixed-race families into being. Yet the stories of these families remain largely unknown. How did interracial families negotiate their identities within these societies when mixed-race marriage was taboo and "Eurasian" often a derisive term? In Eurasian, Emma Jinhua Teng compares Chinese-Western mixed-race families in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, examining both the range of ideas that shaped the formation of Eurasian identities in these diverse contexts and…
I’ve always enjoyed reading true stories and stories that feel like they could be true. I enjoy learning about other people’s lives and experiences. If a character’s life experiences have been very different than my own, it is eye-opening and informative. If we’ve had similar experiences it helps me feel less alone. When writing, I usually draw inspiration from my own life experiences. With AWOL, I wanted to share military family culture and help readers affected by PTSD feel less alone.
I love Stargazing! On its surface, Stargazing is about friendship and family but it has many layers, making it the perfect book to read again and again. The story of Christine and Moon touches on the diverse experiences of growing up Asian in America, jealousy & conflict, social expectations & feeling comfortable in your own skin, and a little bit of magic. Except the magic turns out to be symptoms of a serious medical condition. With writing as beautiful as the art, this is a story not to be missed!
Moon is everything Christine isn't. She's confident, impulsive, artistic . . . and though they both grew up in the same Chinese-American suburb, Moon is somehow unlike anyone Christine has ever known.
But after Moon moves in next door, these unlikely friends are soon best friends, sharing their favorite music videos and painting their toenails when Christine's strict parents aren't around. Moon even tells Christine her deepest secret: that she has visions, sometimes, of celestial beings who speak to her from the stars. Who reassure her that earth isn't where she really belongs.
Moon's visions have an all-too-earthly root, however,…
Life is pretty dull without passion. Since early childhood I was attracted to Chinese philosophy, then to all the cultural aspects that reflect it. At the same time, I felt the blood in my veins drawing me to ancestral roots. Learning about other cultures helps us learn about our own. I’ve been driven by sympathy for the immigrant experience, the suffering, and sacrifices made for a better, peaceful life. What prepared me to write Wuxia America includes my academic studies, living and working in Asia, and involvement in martial arts. My inspiration for writing stems from a wish to encourage ways to improve human relations.
The Chinese American presence in the USA started with the gold rush and the building of the transcontinental railroad.
It was a blessing to find Chang’s non-fiction work because he utilized a tremendous about of research to accurately cover the book’s topic. I’m also grateful that his writing style is not dull.
Building a railroad trestle through the High Sierra mountains in winter implies work conditions that affect laborers as well as investors. Chang strings the human sentiments throughout the history of those who participated in noble fashion, Chinese and non-Chinese alike.
In portraying the Chinese experience, Chang’s book as underscores how vital the transcontinental railroad was to the development of America.
“Gripping . . . Chang has accomplished the seemingly impossible . . . He has written a remarkably rich, human, and compelling story of the railroad Chinese.” — Peter Cozzens, Wall Street Journal
WINNER OF THE ASIAN/PACIFIC AMERICAN AWARD FOR LITERATURE WINNER OF THE CHINESE AMERICAN LIBRARIANS ASSOCIATION BEST BOOK AWARD
A groundbreaking, breathtaking history of the Chinese workers who built the Transcontinental Railroad, helping to forge modern America only to disappear into the shadows of history until now
From across the sea, they came by the thousands, escaping war and poverty in southern China to seek their fortunes in…
I first went as a student to Beijing in 1984 with a camera and a suitcase of film but not much of a plan. I found myself in a country whose young people were suddenly empowered to put their skills to use rather than let state planning order every aspect of their lives. My academic studies rapidly evolved into a vocation to photograph the changes around me. There was a demand for this: one of my first assignments being for Life magazine and then a slew of US and European publications eager to expand their coverage of all that was reshaping China and in turn the world. I chose street-level life as the most relatable to an international audience and in recent years also for Chinese eager to see how this era began.
After the gradual normalisation of relations between China and the US and the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, a small number of western journalists were allowed to open bureaus in Beijing. Access was limited and travel difficult but one talented Chinese American photojournalist really pushed the boundaries in showing the rest of the world what the long inaccessible country was like. His tenacity and eye for the telling detail were an inspiration for me to take up the challenge to devote my career to covering the historic era of change in due course. Such was Liu’s ability to cover more than his hosts were quite ready to show ethnic Chinese foreign journalists found it near impossible to gain accreditation for many years afterwards.
An entire country captures unposed and authentic in a unique collection of photographs. China is seen emerging from a frightening period of political terror into an era where its true nature can be expressed once again. In decades to come, we and those who follow us will need to look back on post-Maoist China and try to understand what was the experience then of the nearly one-quarter of humanity that is Chinese. It will, I predict, be the images in this collection by Lin Heung Shing that, more than any other single source, will most deeply touch our understanding
