“Koan Khmer” by Bunkong Tuon
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.
Excerpt from “When Friends Come From Afar: The Remarkable Story of Bernie Wong and Chicago’s Chinese American Service League” by Susan Blumberg-Kason
Bernie Wong was born in Hong Kong in 1943, but her story begins in South America. Her mother, Virginia Chia, was born and raised in Huacho, Peru, to a father named Carlos Chia, who had come from China to run a shipping business in South America, and a mother named Cristina Salinas who was half-Chinese…
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
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…
“Everything We Never Had” by Randy Ribay
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…
“Pearl: A Graphic Novel” by Sherri L Smith, illustrated by Christine Norrie
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.
Excerpt from “Magdaragat: An Anthology of Filipino-Canadian Writing”
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…
“Dotted Lines”, an excerpt from Priyanka Mattoo’s “Bird Milk And Mosquito Bones”
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…
“Souls Left Behind” by Fan Wu
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…
“Leech and other stories” by Ranjan Adiga
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….
“Chinese Fish” by Grace Yee
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.
New Book Announcement: “Out of Place: The Lives of Korean Adoptee Immigrants” by SunAh M Laybourn
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,…
Podcast with Hugo Wong, author of “America’s Lost Chinese: The Rise and Fall of a Migrant Family Dream”
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.
New Book Announcement: “The In-Betweeners” by Khem K Aryal
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.
“America’s Lost Chinese: The Rise and Fall of a Migrant Family Dream” by Hugo Wong
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…
“The Hive and the Honey” by Paul Yoon
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…
