Regardless of culture, mother-daughter relationships can be fraught and tensions incomprehensibly continue to be passed down generation after generation. Gish Jen addresses her own contentious relationship with her mother in her new novel, Bad Bad Girl, her tenth book and the first she’s devoted to her mother.
Immigration
Through the meddling of her older sister, Janavi, a young woman from Varanasi, India, a city on the Ganges, stumbles into an arranged marriage with Sagar. Sagar is a hydraulic engineer about to emigrate to Custer County, Montana (the “Indian Country” of the title of Shobha Rao’s new novel); he has been hired to remove a dam on the Cotton River.
Mandy Moe Pwint Tu describes herself as “a pile of ginkgo leaves in a trench coat from Yangon, Myanmar”; it perhaps comes as no surprise that she is a poet. She is also one now firmly ensconced in American poetry circles and with an MFA under her belt. Fablemaker is her first full-length collection and includes poems from her earlier chapbooks.
The American expat-in-Asia novel has been done so many times it’s practically its own genre, but the inverse is almost unheard of—until now. Naomi Xu Elegant’s debut novel, Gingko Season, is a witty, humorous and clever story of twenty-five-year-old Penelope Lin, an expat from Beijing who navigates adulthood alongside a diverse cast of friends.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon and what is now celebrated in Vietnam as the unification of the country. Outside of Vietnam, this anniversary is tinted with stories of exile, of loss and trauma, of surviving in a new country and culture, where Vietnamese voices often go unheard. The Cleaving is a collection of conversations between writers and artists of Vietnamese heritage, from those who have been creating for decades to those who have just published their debut novel, in which they share their experiences and reflections on this journey of survival over the last half century.
The increasing number of memoirs and novels set in China over the past couple of decades fall into two broad buckets. A handful of Americans taught English in China and returned to write memoirs around the same time as Chinese immigrants to the US and UK began to find success as fiction writers, both in English and in translation. Daniel Tam-Claiborne’s debut novel, Transplants, combines these two viewpoints: a Chinese-American woman named Liz moves to a small town in Shanxi province to teach English and befriends a local university student named Lin.
A new addition to the catalogue of stories about the Vietnamese diaspora, Khuê Phạm’s Brothers and Ghosts (translated, somewhat unusually, from the original German to English by Charles Hawley and Daryl Lindsey) follows the three intertwining stories of Kiều, a Vietnamese German journalist, her father Minh who arrived in Germany in 1968, and of her uncle Sơn who migrated to America in 1975 the aftermath of the war between North and South Vietnam. Kiều’s father rarely speaks about his past and the family he hardly ever sees, while Kiều herself is often too occupied with her identity as a second-generation immigrant to begin asking questions. Her family’s history and the intergenerational trauma that comes with it becomes an unspoken topic that is only unraveled after the passing of Kiều’s grandmother, which brings the two brothers Minh and Sơn together again in California. Brought together in a single volume, the stories of Kiều, Minh, and Sơn provide a snapshot of the complexity of the Vietnamese diasporic experience, and how families can grow together as well as apart.
Ruth Mandujano López starts her book Steamships across the Pacific with, as seems almost de rigueur now for almost any book about Latin American-Asian relations, with the history of the Manila Galleon, but for her, this is a point of comparison and departure.
Nishant Upadhyay unravels Indian diasporic complicity in its ongoing colonial relationship with Indigenous peoples, lands, and nations in Canada. Upadhyay examines the interwoven and simultaneous areas of dominant Indian caste complicity in processes of settler colonialism, antiblackness, capitalism, brahminical supremacy, Hindu nationalism, and heteropatriarchy.
Bunkong Tuon’s debut novel Koan Khmer is a coming of age story of a young Cambodian immigrant, Samnong Sok, who ultimately finds himself on a writer’s journey, not unlike the author himself.
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