Ely Library's Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage displays celebrate the history and contributions of the culturally and geographically diverse AAPI population.
The official Asian Pacific American Heritage Month website sponsored by the U.S. government is an excellent source of information, utilizing a guide with contributions from The Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
You can also celebrate AAPI Heritage any time by checking out the displays below!
See something that interests you? Click the item title to view it in the catalogue. For digitally available items, enter your WSU credentials and enjoy! For physical items, you can place a hold in our catalogue and pick it up at your convenience!
"May is Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month. The Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum join in paying tribute to the generations of Asian and Pacific Islanders who have enriched America's history and are instrumental in its future success." Visit here for more.
And please check out our virtual display of documentaries, fiction, and nonfiction by and about Asian American and Pacific Islander experiences. Many can be accessed online, but if you find print material you are interested in, you can place a hold in our catalogue by clicking on the title, and you will received an email notification when the material is ready for pickup.
Five-part documentary produced by PBS
This series traces the story of Asian Americans, spanning 150 years of immigration, racial politics, and cultural innovation. It is a timely look at the role that Asian Americans have played in defining who we are as a nation.
Breaking Ground
In an era of U.S. expansion, new immigrants arrive from China, India, Japan, the Philippines and beyond. Eventually barred by anti-Asian laws, they become America’s first “undocumented immigrants.”
A Question of Loyalty
An American-born generation straddles their birth country and their familial homelands in Asia. Family loyalties are tested during WWII, when Japanese Americans are held in detention camps and brothers are on opposite sides of the battle.
Good Americans
During the Cold War years, Asian Americans are simultaneously heralded as a Model Minority, and suspected as the perpetual foreigner. It is also a time of ambition, as Asian Americans aspire for the first time to national political office.
Generation Rising
During a time of war and social tumult, a young generation fights for equality in the fields, on campuses and in the culture, and claim a new identity: Asian Americans. The aftermath of the Vietnam War brings new immigrants and refugees.
Breaking Through
At the turn of the millennium, Asian Americans have become the fastest growing population in the U.S. It is a time of tremendous change, as the country tackles urgent debates over immigration, race and economic disparity.
edited by Jonathan H.X. Lee and Christen T. Sasaki
Asian American History: Primary Documents of the Asian American Experience cultivates historical perspective through experiential and reflective learning. Designed to fill a content gap in general introductory books on the subject, this text shares documentary case studies of Asian immigrants struggling for the right to be fully American. These readings illustrate the dynamic, powerful, and divisive socially constructed nature of racial categories, as well as the legacy of colonialism that served as a foundation for the development of racial hierarchies.
Jonathan H.X. Lee holds a Ph.D. in religious studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is an associate professor of Asian American studies at San Francisco State University.
Christen T. Sasaki earned her Ph.D. in history at the University of California, Los Angeles and is an assistant professor of Asian American studies at San Francisco State University. -Amazon
edited by Lynn Fujiwara and Shireen Roshanravan
Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics brings together groundbreaking essays that speak to the relationship between Asian American feminisms, feminist of color work, and transnational feminist scholarship. This collection, featuring work by both senior and rising scholars, considers topics including the politics of visibility, histories of Asian American participation in women of color political formations, accountability for Asian American "settler complicities" and cross-racial solidarities, and Asian American community-based strategies against state violence as shaped by and tied to women of color feminisms. Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics provides a deep conceptual intervention into the theoretical underpinnings of Asian American studies; ethnic studies; women's, gender, and sexual studies; as well as cultural studies in general.
by Devi S. Laskar
When a woman—known only as Mother—moves her family from Atlanta to its wealthy suburbs, she discovers that neither the times nor the people have changed since her childhood in a small Southern town. Despite the intervening decades, Mother is met with the same questions: Where are you from? No, where are you really from? The American–born daughter of Bengali immigrants, she finds that her answer―Here―is never enough.
Mother's simmering anger breaks through one morning, when, during a violent and unfounded police raid on her home, she finally refuses to be complacent. As she lies bleeding from a gunshot wound, her thoughts race from childhood games with her sister and visits to cousins in India, to her time in the newsroom before having her three daughters, to the early days of her relationship with a husband who now spends more time flying business class than at home.
Drawing inspiration from the author's own terrifying experience of a raid on her home, Devi S. Laskar's debut novel explores, in exquisite, lyrical prose, an alternate reality that might have been.
by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer was one of the most widely and highly praised novels of 2015, the winner not only of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, but also the Center for Fiction Debut Novel Prize, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, the ALA Carnegie Medal for Fiction, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and the California Book Award for First Fiction. Nguyen's next fiction book, The Refugees, is a collection of perfectly formed stories written over a period of twenty years, exploring questions of immigration, identity, love, and family.
With the coruscating gaze that informed The Sympathizer, in The Refugees Viet Thanh Nguyen gives voice to lives led between two worlds, the adopted homeland and the country of birth. From a young Vietnamese refugee who suffers profound culture shock when he comes to live with two gay men in San Francisco, to a woman whose husband is suffering from dementia and starts to confuse her for a former lover, to a girl living in Ho Chi Minh City whose older half-sister comes back from America having seemingly accomplished everything she never will, the stories are a captivating testament to the dreams and hardships of immigration. The second piece of fiction by a major new voice in American letters, The Refugees is a beautifully written and sharply observed book about the aspirations of those who leave one country for another, and the relationships and desires for self-fulfillment that define our lives.
by Viet Thanh Nguyen
The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as seven other awards, The Sympathizer is one of the most acclaimed books of the twenty-first century. With the pace and suspense of a thriller and prose that has been compared to Graham Greene and Vladimir Nabokov, The Sympathizer is a sweeping epic of love and betrayal. The narrator, a communist double agent, is a “man of two minds,” a half-French, half-Vietnamese army captain who comes to America after the Fall of Saigon, and while building a new life with other Vietnamese refugees in Los Angeles is secretly reporting back to his communist superiors in Vietnam. The Sympathizer is a blistering exploration of identity and America, a gripping spy novel, and a powerful story of love and friendship. -Amazon
a documentary film produced by Samantha Chan
A filmmaker explores the life of her great-aunt, Jane Chung, an actress who made a career for herself at a time when Asian-Americans faced widespread racism in Hollywood. Working mostly in small parts and as an extra, Jane’s fifty-year career reflects many of the struggles and triumphs of the Asian-Americans working in the entertainment industry. Jane had parts in over fifty films and TV shows including Chinatown, When Harry Met Sally, M*A*S*H and I Love Lucy, but much of her work is uncredited. The filmmaker's journey to uncover Jane’s many film and TV roles brings together voices from multiple generations of her family, as she seeks out those who remember Jane best. Through the story of Jane Chung’s life and career, More Than a Face in the Crowd reveals a larger untold story of Asian-American actors and extras in Hollywood.
by
A stunning graphic memoir recounting actor/author/activist George Takei's childhood imprisoned within American concentration camps during World War II. Experience the forces that shaped an American icon -- and America itself -- in this gripping tale of courage, country, loyalty, and love.
George Takei has captured hearts and minds worldwide with his captivating stage presence and outspoken commitment to equal rights. But long before he braved new frontiers in Star Trek, he woke up as a four-year-old boy to find his own birth country at war with his father's -- and their entire family forced from their home into an uncertain future.
In 1942, at the order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, every person of Japanese descent on the west coast was rounded up and shipped to one of ten "relocation centers," hundreds or thousands of miles from home, where they would be held for years under armed guard.
They Called Us Enemy is Takei's firsthand account of those years behind barbed wire, the joys and terrors of growing up under legalized racism, his mother's hard choices, his father's faith in democracy, and the way those experiences planted the seeds for his astonishing future.
What does it mean to be American? Who gets to decide? When the world is against you, what can one person do? To answer these questions, George Takei joins co-writers Justin Eisinger & Steven Scott and artist Harmony Becker for the journey of a lifetime.
by Mary-Kim Arnold
Litany for the Long Moment is an assemblage of concise and poetic responses to unanswerable questions grounded in memory's combining powers, and in the pronouncements and obscurities of the personal archive and public document. It is a work that seeks to retrieve impossible-to-access reality, which extends through and beyond the singular experiences of poverty and diaspora of the author's early Korean life and unforeseeable future trauma in the American world of the new mother. Arnold's deft employment of commonplace items, such as a graph of the Hangul alphabet or the Korean television program questionnaire, which she uses as a compositional prompt throughout the essay, guides the reader through a terrain of never-settled fact, difficult desire, and obscurity of persons and histories that animate her excursion into zones of personal and philosophical doubt.
by Kai Cheng Thom
This extraordinary poetry collection journeys to the place where forgotten ancestors live and monstrous women roam—and where the distinctions between body, land, and language are lost. In these fierce yet tender narrative poems, Thom draws from both memory and mythology to create new maps of gender, race, sexuality, and violence. Descended from the traditions of oral storytelling, spoken word, and queer punk, Thom's debut collection is evocative and unforgettable. -Amazon
by Sharmila Sen
At the age of 12, Sharmila Sen emigrated from India to the U.S. The year was 1982, and everywhere she turned, she was asked to self-report her race: on INS forms, at the doctor's office, in middle school. Never identifying with a race in the India of her childhood, she rejects her new "not quite" designation: not quite white, not quite black, not quite Asian, and spends much of her life attempting to blend into American whiteness. But after her teen years trying to assimilate, watching shows like General Hospital and The Jeffersons, dancing to Duran Duran and Prince, and perfecting the art of Jell-O no-bake desserts, she is forced to reckon with the hard questions: What does it mean to be white, why does whiteness retain the magic cloak of invisibility while other colors are made hypervisible, and how much does whiteness figure into Americanness?
On the heels of the breakout success of his film "Crazy Rich Asians," director Jon M. Chu reflects on what drives him to create -- and makes a resounding case for the power of connection and on-screen representation.
by Chen Chen
In this ferocious and tender debut, Chen Chen investigates inherited forms of love and family--the strained relationship between a mother and son, the cost of necessary goodbyes--all from Asian American, immigrant, and queer perspectives. Holding all accountable, this collection fully embraces the loss, grief, and abundant joy that come with charting one's own path in identity, life, and love.
by Mengchu Ling
Slapping the Table in Amazement is the unabridged English translation of the famous story collection Pai'an jingqi by Ling Mengchu (1580–1644), originally published in 1628. The forty lively stories gathered here present a broad picture of traditional Chinese society and include characters from all social levels. We learn of their joys and sorrows, their views about life and death, and their visions of the underworld and the supernatural.
Ling was a connoisseur of popular literature and a seminal figure in the development of Chinese literature in the vernacular, which paved the way for the late-imperial Chinese novel. Slapping the Table in Amazement includes translations of verse and prologue stories as well as marginal and interlinear comments
edited by David Der-wei Wang and Carlos Rojas
Writing Taiwan is the first volume in English to examine the entire span of modern Taiwan literature, from the first decades of the twentieth century to the present. In this collection, leading literary scholars based in Taiwan and the United States consider prominent Taiwanese authors and works in genres including poetry, travel writing, and realist, modernist, and postmodern fiction. The diversity of Taiwan literature is signaled by the range of authors treated, including Yang Chichang, who studied Japanese literature in Tokyo in the early 1930s and wrote all of his own poetry and fiction in Japanese; Li Yongping, an ethnic Chinese born in Malaysia and educated in Taiwan and the United States; and Liu Daren, who was born in mainland China and effectively exiled from Taiwan in the 1970s on account of his political activism.
Because the island of Taiwan spent the first half of the century as a colony of Japan and the second half in an umbilical relationship to China, its literature challenges basic assumptions about what constitutes a “national literature.” Several contributors directly address the methodological and epistemological issues involved in writing about “Taiwan literature.” Other contributors investigate the cultural and political grounds from which specific genres and literary movements emerged. Still others explore themes of history and memory in Taiwan literature and tropes of space and geography, looking at representations of boundaries as well as the boundary-crossing global flows of commodities and capital. Like Taiwan’s history, modern Taiwan literature is rife with conflicting legacies and impulses. Writing Taiwan reveals a sense of its richness and diversity to English-language readers.
a documentary film produced by Wichita Films
The United States entered WWII. More than 110,000 citizens of Japanese origin were rounded up and dispatched to camps until the end of the war. Hollywood was quick to react with films from OBJECTIVE BURMA to THE BRIDGE ON RIVER KWAI and THE STORY OF GI JOE to KNOW YOUR ENEMY: JAPAN. Already in 1941 Warner, who was manipulating public opinion in favor of entering the war, had released DIVE BOMBER with Errol Flynn. It showed very clearly that America was threatened from the Pacific region. In almost all of these films, the enemy is vilified, we see particularly ugly Japanese in THE FIGHTING SEABEE. With the arrival of the Cold War, the enemy image had to change quickly and Hollywood obliged; this is well explained in Naoko Shibusawa's The Geisha Ally. This program features interviews with film critic Joseph McBride, Reel Inequality author Nancy Wang Yuen, Japanese film history specialist Dan Akira, and more.
by Esther Kim Lee
In 1965, the first Asian American theatre company, the East West players, was founded by a group of actors who wanted to find better opportunities in the acting industry. Forty years later, Asian American theatre is one of the fastest-growing theatre sectors with over thirty active theatre companies and numerous award-winning artists such as Frank Chin, Jessica Hagedorn, Ping Chong, David Henry Hwang, Philip Kan Gotanda, Velina Hasu, and B.D. Wong. Based on over seventy interviews, the book surveys the history of Asian American theatre from 1965 to 2005 with focus on actors, playwrights, companies, audiences, and communities. Emphasizing historical contexts, Esther Kim Lee examines how issues of cultural nationalism, interculturalism, and identity politics affect a racially defined theatre. Addressing issues ranging from actor's activism to Asian diaspora, the book documents how Asian American theatre has become an indispensable part of American culture.
edited by Hortense Gerardo
The Asian American Playwright Collective anthology of new works features seven short plays by award-winning playwrights based in Boston, Massachusetts. The collection features plays by Christina R Chan & Pata Suyemoto, Hortense Gerardo, Greg Lam, Michael Lin, Takeo Rivera, Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro, and Livian Yeh.
by Chay Yew
Banned in his native Singapore, Chay Yew has been hailed as “a promising new voice in American theater” by Time magazine. With these two powerful, provocative plays, Yew first brought his startling and poetic voice to stages across America and abroad, exploring the battlegrounds, both internal and external, where matters of the heart conflict with barriers of race and sexuality. Porcelain is an examination of a young man’s crime of passion. Triply scorned — as an Asian, a homosexual, and now a murderer — 19-year-old John Lee has confessed to shooting his lover in a public lavatory in London. A winner of the London Fringe Award for Best Play, Porcelain dissects the crime through a prism of conflicting voices: newscasts, flashbacks, and John’s own recollections to a prison psychiatrist. A Language of Their Own is a lyrical and dramatic meditation on the nature of desire and sexuality as four men — three Asian and one white — come together and drift apart in a series of interconnected stories. A critical and popular success at New York’s Public Theater, it won both the George and Elisabeth Marton Playwriting Award and the GLAAD Media Award for Best Play.
edited by Miles Xian Liu
In the late nineteenth century, Asian American drama made its debut with the spotlight firmly on the lives and struggles of Asians in North America, rather than on the cultures and traditions of the Asian homeland. Today, Asian American playwrights continue to challenge the limitations of established theatrical conventions and direct popular attention toward issues and experiences that might otherwise be ignored or marginalized. While Asian American literature came into full bloom in the last 25 years, Asian American drama has yet to receive the kind of critical attention it warrants. This reference book serves as a versatile vehicle for exploring the field of Asian American drama from its recorded conception to its present stage.
Included are alphabetically arranged entries for 52 Asian American dramatists of origins from India, Pakistan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Japan, Korea, and China. Each entry includes relevant biographical information that contextualizes the works of a playwright, an interpretive description of selected plays that spotlights recurring themes and plots, a summary of the playwright's critical reception, and a bibliography of primary and secondary works. The entries are written by expert contributors and reflect the ethnic diversity of the Asian American community. The volume closes with a selected, general bibliography, which includes anthologies, scholarly studies, and periodicals. -Amazon
An unnamed narrator returns to her ancestral home in an environmentally depleted harbor city with a baby in her care. She has escaped from what she calls "the breach"--the collapse of the climate-controlled domed city where she grew up. From a thread about the narrator's childhood, we learn that the breach was caused by the hysterical growth of the genetically-modified trees in the domed city, a growth which is spreading over the earth. From a thread about the history of the harbor city, we learn of an ancient war that was fought there. In the thread which follows the narrative present, there is a storm which floods the harbor city. The narrator's mother disappears and the baby falls ill. The narrator then journeys to city's river to preform the funeral rites for her mother and cure the baby. At the river, the three narrative threads come together.
by Celeste Ng
“Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.” So begins this exquisite novel about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee, and her parents are determined that she will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue. But when Lydia’s body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together is destroyed, tumbling them into chaos. A profoundly moving story of family, secrets, and longing, Everything I Never Told You is both a gripping page-turner and a sensitive family portrait, uncovering the ways in which mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and husbands and wives struggle, all their lives, to understand one another.
by Celeste Ng
From the bestselling author of Everything I Never Told You, a riveting novel that traces the intertwined fates of the picture-perfect Richardson family and the enigmatic mother and daughter who upend their lives.
In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is planned—from the layout of the winding roads, to the colors of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules.
Enter Mia Warren—an enigmatic artist and single mother—who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenaged daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the mother-daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past and a disregard for the status quo that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community.
When old family friends of the Richardsons attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town—and puts Mia and Elena on opposing sides. Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Elena is determined to uncover the secrets in Mia’s past. But her obsession will come at unexpected and devastating costs.
Little Fires Everywhere explores the weight of secrets, the nature of art and identity, and the ferocious pull of motherhood—and the danger of believing that following the rules can avert disaster. -Amazon
an episode of Now Read This, produced by NewsHour Productions
Celeste Ng, author of "Little Fires Everywhere," and Maxine Hong Kingston, author of "The Woman Warrior," join Jeffrey Brown to answer reader questions about our August pick for the NewsHour-New York Times book club, Now Read This. Ng selected "The Woman Warrior," which was published by Kingston in 1976.
by Maxine Hong Kingston
In her award-winning book The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston created an entirely new form—an exhilarating blend of autobiography and mythology, of world and self, of hot rage and cool analysis. First published in 1976, it has become a classic in its innovative portrayal of multiple and intersecting identities—immigrant, female, Chinese, American.
As a girl, Kingston lives in two confounding worlds: the California to which her parents have immigrated and the China of her mother’s “talk stories.” The fierce and wily women warriors of her mother’s tales clash jarringly with the harsh reality of female oppression out of which they come. Kingston’s sense of self emerges in the mystifying gaps in these stories, which she learns to fill with stories of her own. A warrior of words, she forges fractured myths and memories into an incandescent whole, achieving a new understanding of her family’s past and her own present. -Amazon
by Eleanor Ty
Eleanor Ty's bold exploration of literature, plays, and film reveals how young Asian Americans and Asian Canadians have struggled with the ethos of self-sacrifice preached by their parents. This new generation's narratives focus on protagonists disenchanted with their daily lives. Many are depressed. Some are haunted by childhood memories of war, trauma, and refugee camps. Rejecting an obsession with professional status and money, they seek fulfillment by prioritizing relationships, personal growth, and cultural success. As Ty shows, these storytellers have done more than reject a narrowly defined road to happiness. They have rejected neoliberal capitalism itself. In so doing, they demand that the rest of us reconsider our outmoded ideas about the so-called model minority.
by Ocean Vuong
In his haunting and fearless debut, Ocean Vuong walks a tightrope of historic and personal violences, creating an interrogation of the American body as a borderless space of both failure and triumph. At once vulnerable and redemptive, dreamlike and visceral, compassionate and unforgiving, these poems seek a myriad existence without forgetting the prerequisite of self-preservation in a world bent on extinguishing its othered voices. Vuong's poems show, through breath, cadence, and unrepentant enthrallment, that a gentle palm on a chest can calm the most necessary of hungers. -Amazon
by Ocean Vuong
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.
With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years. -Amazon
documentary series produced by PBS
Restaurateur, Fresh off the Boat author and television host Eddie Huang guides us through his unique path to the American Dream. Through the eyes of a first-generation Asian American, the former t-shirt hustler turned business mogul tracks the influence of his family and the cultural significance of food that led to his ultimate success.
by Wesley Yang
One of the most acclaimed essayists of his generation, Wesley Yang writes about race and sex without the jargon, formulas, and polite lies that bore us all. His powerful debut, The Souls of Yellow Folk, does more than collect a decade’s worth of cult-reputation essays―it corrals new American herds of pickup artists, school shooters, mandarin zombies, and immigrant strivers, and exposes them to scrutiny, empathy, and polemical force.
In his celebrated and prescient essay “The Face of Seung-Hui Cho,” Yang explores the deranged logic of the Virginia Tech shooter. In his National Magazine Award–winning “Paper Tigers,” he explores the intersection of Asian values and the American dream, and the inner torment of the child exposed to “tiger mother” parenting. And in his close reading of New York Magazine’s popular Sex Diaries, he was among the first critics to take seriously today’s Internet-mediated dating lives.
Yang catches these ugly trends early because he has felt at various times implicated in them, and he does not exempt himself from his radical honesty. His essays retain the thrill of discovery, the wary eye of the first explorer, and the rueful admission of the first exposed.
by Larissa Lai
In this visionary novel by Larissa Lai—her first in sixteen years—a community of parthenogenic women, sent into exile by the male-dominated Salt Water City, goes to war against disease, technology, and powerful men that threaten them with extinction.
Kirilow is a doctor apprentice whose lover Peristrophe is a “starfish,” a woman who can regenerate her own limbs and organs, which she uses to help her clone sisters whose organs are failing. When a denizen from Salt Water City suffering from a mysterious flu comes into their midst, Peristrophe becomes infected and dies, prompting Kirilow to travel to Salt Water City, where the flu is now a pandemic, to find a new starfish who will help save her sisters. There, Kirilow meets Kora, a girl-woman desperate to save her family from the epidemic. Kora has everything Kirilow is looking for, except the will to abandon her own family. But before Kirilow can convince her, both are kidnapped by a group of powerful men to serve as test subjects for a new technology that can cure the mind of the body.
Bold, beautiful, and wildly imaginative, The Tiger Flu is at once a female hero’s saga, a cyberpunk thriller, and a convention-breaking cautionary tale—a striking metaphor for our complicated times.
by Sandhya Menon
Dimple Shah has it all figured out. With graduation behind her, she’s more than ready for a break from her family, from Mamma’s inexplicable obsession with her finding the “Ideal Indian Husband.” Ugh. Dimple knows they must respect her principles on some level, though. If they truly believed she needed a husband right now, they wouldn’t have paid for her to attend a summer program for aspiring web developers…right?
Rishi Patel is a hopeless romantic. So when his parents tell him that his future wife will be attending the same summer program as him—wherein he’ll have to woo her—he’s totally on board. Because as silly as it sounds to most people in his life, Rishi wants to be arranged, believes in the power of tradition, stability, and being a part of something much bigger than himself.
The Shahs and Patels didn’t mean to start turning the wheels on this “suggested arrangement” so early in their children’s lives, but when they noticed them both gravitate toward the same summer program, they figured, Why not?
Dimple and Rishi may think they have each other figured out. But when opposites clash, love works hard to prove itself in the most unexpected ways.
by Xuan Juliana Wang
Xuan Juliana Wang's remarkable debut introduces us to the new and changing face of Chinese youth. From fuerdai (second-generation rich kids) to a glass-swallowing qigong grandmaster, her dazzling, formally inventive stories upend the immigrant narrative to reveal a new experience of belonging: of young people testing the limits of who they are, in a world as vast and varied as their ambitions.
In stories of love, family, and friendship, here are the voices, faces and stories of a new generation never before captured between the pages in fiction. What sets them apart is Juliana Wang’s surprising imagination, able to capture the innermost thoughts of her characters with astonishing empathy, as well as the contradictions of the modern immigrant experience in a way that feels almost universal. Home Remedies is, in the words of Alexander Chee, “the arrival of an urgent and necessary literary voice we’ve been needing, waiting for maybe, without knowing.” -Amazon
by YZ Chin
In these stories, characters navigate fate via deft sleights of hand: A grandfather gambles on the monsoon rains; a consort finds herself a new assignment; a religious man struggles to keep his demons at bay. Central to the book is Isabella Sin, a small-town girl―and frustrated writer―transformed into a prisoner of conscience in Malaysia’s most notorious detention camp.
Winner of the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize, YZ Chin’s debut reexamines the relationship between the global and the intimate. Against a backdrop of globalization, individuals buck at what seems inevitable―seeking to stake out space for the inner motivations that shift, but still persist, in the face of changing and challenging circumstances. -Amazon
documentary film produced by PBS
The Registry profiles veterans of World War II who served in the Military Intelligence Service –a secret unit of mostly Japanese Americans – U.S. citizens who went into combat with the U.S. Army against the Japanese enemy in the Pacific. These veterans want to make sure their legacy lives on through the M.I.S. registry where all of their names have been recorded.
documentary series produced by American Public Television
Stories of Japanese-American Incarceration - Part 1
In 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 that cleared the way for the incarceration of Japanese Americans in U.S. confinement camps. Men, women, and children of Japanese ancestry were evicted from the West Coast of the United States and held in sites across the country.
Stories of Japanese-American Incarceration - Part 2
For more than 75 years, the story of Japanese Incarceration has been an untold chapter of American history. This documentary follows the politics of the country as WWII erupted — how American citizens of Japanese descent were affected, what their thoughts were in the face of Pearl Harbor and the declaration of war with Japan, Germany and Italy.
documentary film produced by PBS
On May 6th, 1882—on the eve of the greatest wave of immigration in American history—President Chester A. Arthur signed into law a unique piece of federal legislation. Called the Chinese Exclusion Act, it singled out as never before a specific race and nationality for exclusion, making it illegal for Chinese workers to come to America, and for Chinese nationals already here ever to become citizens of the United States. It is a deeply American story about immigration and national identity, civil rights and human justice; about how we define who can be an American, and what being an American means. The film examines the economic, cultural, social, legal, racial and political dimensions of the law; the forces and events that gave rise to it; and the effect it had, and continues to have, on American culture and identity. The Chinese Exclusion Act explores in riveting detail this little known, yet deeply resonant and revealing episode in American history—one that sheds enormous light on key aspects of the history of American civil liberties, immigration, and culture—during one of the most formative periods of U.S. history.
