Your mother, who was a math professor back in China, is now employed by a sushi processing plant near the Holland Tunnel.
Though both make it to college, neither can shake the feeling that she’s undeserving. The skeletons of their stories run parallel, yet each voice and life is its own.
Brendan O’Connor’s Blood Red Lines examines how disparate right-wing groups organized around a shared world view he calls “border fascism.”
Brendan O’Connor’s Blood Red Lines examines how disparate right-wing groups organized around a shared world view he calls “border fascism.”
In her introduction to The Undocumented Americans, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio reveals that some names and physical descriptions have been changed to protect the vulnerable. Or maybe, she adds playfully, they haven’t.
In the context of diaspora, the body is a vessel that knows how to adapt. And what does it carry? Pain, love, and resistance. All those, it carries forward.
Ly Tran’s memoir House of Sticks brings to mind both the story of The Three Little Pigs and the myth of the unassimilated other in Francois Truffaut’s The Wild Child (L’Enfant Sauvage), in its unsentimental yet deeply moving examination of filial bond, displacement, war trauma, and poverty.
When Hirono writes about her childhood, her mother and family, their arrival in Hawaii from Japan, and the poverty, hardship, fear and struggle they faced, “Heart of Fire” is a revelatory, evocative, deeply moving book.
Since the coronavirus pandemic began early last year, news reports and social media feeds have filled with disturbing stories, images and videos of anti-Asian racism and violence. As the country honors Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, it feels more important than ever to highlight some of the unique delights that come with being Asian American.
In his excellent new book, Facing the Mountain, Daniel James Brown tells the story of the men of the 442nd and their families, who “through their actions, laid bare for all the world to see what exactly it means to be an American.” It’s a fascinating account of some of the bravest Americans who ever lived, and a sobering reminder of a dark chapter in American history — years of anti-Asian racism that, as we’re reminded daily, never really went away.
