Immigration

New Non-Fiction Books
New Book Announcement: “When Friends Come From Afar: The Remarkable Story of Bernie Wong and Chicago’s Chinese American Service League” by Susan Blumberg-Kason
18 September 202418 September 2024
Born in Hong Kong, Bernie Wong moved to the United States in the early 1960s to attend college. A decade later, she cofounded the Chinese American Service League (CASL) to help meet the needs of the city’s isolated Chinese immigrants. Susan Blumberg-Kason draws on extensive interviews to profile the community and social justice organization. Weaving…
Read More New Book Announcement: “When Friends Come From Afar: The Remarkable Story of Bernie Wong and Chicago’s Chinese American Service League” by Susan Blumberg-Kason
Young Readers Reviews
“Everything We Never Had” by Randy Ribay
2 September 2024
In 1930, a Filipino immigrant named Fermin Tobera was shot and killed by white men in Watsonville, California, an all-too-common and mostly unpunished hate crime in the US at a time when they weren’t even labeled as such. Randy Ribay uses this period and this murder as the starting point in his new young adult…
Read More “Everything We Never Had” by Randy Ribay
Young Readers Reviews
“Pearl: A Graphic Novel” by Sherri L Smith, illustrated by Christine Norrie
18 August 2024
Like many stories, Amy’s begins long before she was born. Amy is an “all-American” young woman from Hawaii, but author Sherri L Smith and illustrator Christine Norrie start their graphic novel Pearl in 1886 in Japan, where Amy’s sosōbo (great-grandmother) is a pearl diver from Okinawa.
Read More “Pearl: A Graphic Novel” by Sherri L Smith, illustrated by Christine Norrie
Non-Fiction Excerpts
Excerpt from “Magdaragat: An Anthology of Filipino-Canadian Writing”
9 July 20249 July 2024
Magdaragat is Filipino for “seafarer” or “mariner.” Its dictionary meaning is straightforward enough, and even those with only cursory knowledge of the lands colonially known as “the Philippines” will understand why one would choose that word as the title for an anthology of Filipino diasporic writing. After all, the Philippines is an archipelago of approximately…
Read More Excerpt from “Magdaragat: An Anthology of Filipino-Canadian Writing”
Non-Fiction Excerpts
“Dotted Lines”, an excerpt from Priyanka Mattoo’s “Bird Milk And Mosquito Bones”
7 June 20247 June 2024
If India is a woman’s body, her arms outstretched to hold her billion babies, Kashmir is the unruly forelock above her right temple. Or at least, that’s what I thought as a child, when my Nanaji took out his historical maps, pre-Partition and post- , to show me how we had been carved up. Since…
Read More “Dotted Lines”, an excerpt from Priyanka Mattoo’s “Bird Milk And Mosquito Bones”
Fiction Reviews
“Souls Left Behind” by Fan Wu
1 June 2024
Some 140,000 men were recruited from China during the Great War by the Allied Forces. Their mission was not to fight but to labour on the front lines. In exchange, they would (in theory) receive a salary and decent rations. The unsung heroes of the Chinese Labour Corps, whose contribution to the First World War…
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Fiction Reviews
“Leech and other stories” by Ranjan Adiga
8 May 202429 November 2024
Ranjan Adiga’s debut collection Leech and other stories comprises 10 short stories based around the experiences of Nepalis adapting to new worlds, lands and experiences. The majority relate to migration, both internal, with migrants from rural Nepal traveling to try make it in the capital, or abroad, in search of their dream life in America….
Read More “Leech and other stories” by Ranjan Adiga
Poetry Reviews
“Chinese Fish” by Grace Yee
31 March 202431 March 2024
When Ping arrives to live in New Zealand in the 1960s, the young mother from Hong Kong is expecting “paradise”. On her first night, Ping compares her new home with her homeland.
Read More “Chinese Fish” by Grace Yee
Non-Fiction Reviews
New Book Announcement: “Out of Place: The Lives of Korean Adoptee Immigrants” by SunAh M Laybourn
16 January 202415 January 2024
Since the early 1950s, over 125,000 Korean children have been adopted in the United States, primarily by white families. Korean adoptees figure in twenty-five percent of US transnational adoptions and are the largest group of transracial adoptees currently in adulthood. Despite being legally adopted, Korean adoptees’ position as family members did not automatically ensure legal,…
Read More New Book Announcement: “Out of Place: The Lives of Korean Adoptee Immigrants” by SunAh M Laybourn
Podcast
Podcast with Hugo Wong, author of “America’s Lost Chinese: The Rise and Fall of a Migrant Family Dream”
14 December 202317 December 2023
Like countless other migrants from China, Hugo Wong’s great-grandfathers–Wong Foon Chuck and Leung Hing—travel across the Pacific to make a life for themselves in San Francisco. Unlike many of their peers, they don’t stay, instead traveling south, to Mexico—in part to escape growing anti-Chinese prejudice in the United States.
Read More Podcast with Hugo Wong, author of “America’s Lost Chinese: The Rise and Fall of a Migrant Family Dream”
New Fiction Books
New Book Announcement: “The In-Betweeners” by Khem K Aryal
15 October 202315 October 2023
The stories in Khem K Aryal’s new collection present a deeply human perspective on the travails—and triumphs—of a group of Nepalese immigrants struggling with the consequences of their decision to come to America.
Read More New Book Announcement: “The In-Betweeners” by Khem K Aryal
Non-Fiction Reviews
“America’s Lost Chinese: The Rise and Fall of a Migrant Family Dream” by Hugo Wong
14 October 2023
The railroads, San Francisco Chinatown, the Chinese Exclusion Act, laundries, restaurants: just when you thought there was nothing more to be written about the story of Chinese immigration to America, along comes Hugo Wong with an absorbing account of his families’ history in Mexico. Wong is a scion of two of Mexico’s erstwhile most important…
Read More “America’s Lost Chinese: The Rise and Fall of a Migrant Family Dream” by Hugo Wong
Fiction Reviews
“The Hive and the Honey” by Paul Yoon
6 October 202327 December 2024
Although the stories in Paul Yoon’s latest collection range from northern Vermont and the Costa Brava to the Russian Far East, and chronologically from 17th-century Japan to more less the present day, with stops along the way in Tsarist Russia and the Cold War, they all feature protagonists who are Korean in one way or…
Read More “The Hive and the Honey” by Paul Yoon
Fiction Reviews
“The East Indian” by Brinda Charry
11 June 202311 June 2023
Brinda Charry found inspiration, she writes in her author’s note, for her debut novel The East Indian, from a little known piece of US history. Dating from almost the first days of the English settlement in the early 1600s, servants and laborers from India arrived in colonial Virginia and Maryland via London, having been England…
Read More “The East Indian” by Brinda Charry
Podcast
Podcast with Zeno Sworder, author of “My Strange Shrinking Parents”
30 March 2023
When the two immigrant parents in Zeno Sworder’s latest illustrated book go to the baker asking for a cake for their son, the baker asks for something different instead of money. “Five centimeters should do it,” says the baker. “Your height, of course.”
Read More Podcast with Zeno Sworder, author of “My Strange Shrinking Parents”

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