Gail Vida Hamburg's 3 favorite reads in 2024

Weekend treks to Chinatown, to satisfy cravings for dim sum, roast duck, et al, are a ritual for those of us of non-Chinese descent  with adventurous palates. But how many of us have considered the lives of the people who cook and serve us the food that we make the trek for? Jane Wong, a poet and creative writing professor, grew up as a "restaurant baby" in Jersey Shore's Chinatown in the U.S. A first generation American, a beneficiary of her immigrant family's struggle to assimilate and survive in America, her memoir is wise, tender, vulnerable, and poignant. The social issues facing new immigrants, from poverty and racism to lack of healthcare and affordable housing, that can make a creative work dense and depressing are revealed through Wong's meditations and recollections, nostalgic, poetic, joyful, and sorrowful. She holds nothing back in narrating her father's wrongheaded and failed attempts to capture the American Dream, her pragmatic mother's will of steel fortified only by her love for her children, and her own journey from girlhood to womanhood as she tries to claim her life. A beautifully written memoir rendered through the lens of poetry by the forgiving soul of a writer, this book is about one family’s arduous immigrant American experience.

This fascinating short story collection is a multi-faceted cut jewel about migrancy and traversing populations--Asians in Asia, Asian immigrants in America, first generation and second generation Asian-Americans in America and Asia. The characters in these stories long for visibility and connection in their host communities and countries. They are out of place everywhere and at home nowhere, as they mourn their losses, try to bury their past,  and seek rest, belonging, and home. The collection is both particular, personal, and political. Stephanie Han narrates the exilic heart searching for meaning and home and the injustices of structural racism that recolonize already historically-colonized people with virtuosity, grace, and intelligence punctuated by wit and vulnerability. This is a spectacular collection of stories about the dispossessed and the privileged, the invisible and the seen, about navigating hostile terrain without being destroyed by it, and about little sparks of unexpected blazing tenderness that take your breath away. This book has an upcoming re-release.

Women deracinated by migration and diminished by exile, and their struggle for purposeful lives in new countries, leveraged only by their desperation and will, abound in novels, memoirs, and biographies.  Music’s Modern Muse is not that story. It chronicles the life of Winnaretta Singer, daughter of American industrialist Isaac Merrit Singer, inventor of the Singer Sewing Machine, whom she worshipped, and a French mother of great beauty who withheld affection from Winnaretta who had not inherited her mother’s looks.  Her father’s death made her a millionaire in her teens—one of the richest women in Europe. But this is no "Nepo Baby” privileged, entitled trust-fund kid story. The American born heiress who spent her childhood in England moved to Paris and made of her life a work of art on her own terms. She scandalized 1800s Belle Epoque Paris with her renegade spirit. But she earned their respect both during her life and after her death for committing her fortune to French arts, sciences, medicine, health, and public housing. A lesbian who married a gay French prince and became a princess, Winnaretta Singer was the quintessential poor little rich girl who defied French society’s conventions and expectations of what a royal should be, made her own path to claim her life, and through her philanthropy, financed some of the world’s most renowned musicians, artists, scientists, inventors, and innovators.