Immigration

New Book Announcements | New Non-Fiction Books | Sponsored content
New Book Announcement: “Giving Back: Filipino America and the Politics of Diaspora Giving” by L Joyce Zapanta Mariano
24 February 2021
Many Filipino Americans feel obligated to give charitably to their families, their communities, or social development projects and organizations back home. Their contributions provide relief to poor or vulnerable Filipinos, and address the forces that maintain poverty, vulnerability, and exploitative relationships in the Philippines. This philanthropy is a result of both economic globalization and the…
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Fiction Reviews
“Skyfall” by Saba Karim Khan
12 February 2021
Once home to the cultured, artistic world of courtesans, Heera Mandi is now a crumbling red-light district in Lahore. Raina is a young tour guide committed to fighting the injustice and violence now endemic there. But she’s part of the world she’s fighting: her mother Jahaan-e-Rumi works there; her father, Sherji, manages her mother’s career…
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Fiction Reviews
“The Bad Muslim Discount” by Syed Masood
10 February 202110 February 2021
Syed Masood’s The Bad Muslim Discount is named after the rationale the capricious landlord gives for allowing one of the main characters to live there; they meet in that run-down building nearly halfway through the novel, after they are propelled to life in the US. Surprisingly, it is not a love story, but rather gathers…
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Fiction Reviews
“The Black-Marketer’s Daughter” by Suman Mallick
30 December 2020
Zuleikha had an aptitude for the piano during her childhood in Lahore, but her black-marketer father could only afford an electronic Casio keyboard. Years later, her dream of owning her own proper piano comes about upon leaving Pakistan for an arranged marriage to Iskander, a US citizen and resident of Irving, Texas. So begins Suman…
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Non-Fiction Reviews
“The Diary of Dukesang Wong: A Voice from Gold Mountain”
9 December 202011 December 2020
“I’d kill a Chinaman as quick as I would an Indian and I’d kill an Indian as quick as I would a dog.” This chilling remark, recorded in a police report, was made in 1884 by a man who had taken part in the lynching of Louie Sam, a fourteen-year old indigenous boy from the…
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Non-Fiction Reviews
“Cina Timor: Baba, Hakka, and Cantonese in the Making of Timor-Leste” by Douglas Kammen and Jonathan Chen
30 November 202030 November 2020
Timor-Leste has been just about the most geographically and politically remote corner of East Asia, a distant second to Macau in Portugal’s one-time East Asian possessions, diminutive compared to the Dutch East Indies and later Indonesia. And the Chinese community there, as far as the Chinese diaspora goes, one of the less substantial. Perhaps for…
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New Book Announcements | New Non-Fiction Books | Sponsored content
New Book Announcement: “The Refugee Aesthetic: Reimagining Southeast Asian America” by Timothy K August
8 November 2020
The refugee is conventionally considered a powerless figure, eagerly cast aside by both migrant and host communities. In his book, The Refugee Aesthetic, Timothy August investigates how and why a number of Southeast Asian American artists and writers have recently embraced the figure of the refugee as a particularly transformative position.
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New Book Announcements | New Non-Fiction Books | Sponsored content
New Book Announcement: “Graphic Migrations: Precarity and Gender in India and the Diaspora” by Kavita Daiya
29 October 2020
In Graphic Migrations: Precarity and Gender in India and the Diaspora, Kavita Daiya provides a literary and cultural archive of refugee stories and experiences to respond to the question “What is created?” after decolonization and the 1947 Partition of India.
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Non-Fiction Reviews | Reviews
“One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965” by Jia Lynn Yang
11 June 202021 June 2020
The country is made up almost entirely of immigrants, yet the United States goes through decades-long bouts of antipathy toward them. Journalist Jia Lynn Yang’s family emigrated to the United States from Taiwan in 1976; it wasn’t until much later that she learned her family had benefited from a US policy only a decade old…
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Fiction Reviews | Reviews
“Members Only” by Sameer Pandya
8 June 202015 June 2020
Raj Bhatt is a professor of anthropology at a university in California and father of two young sons. Raj’s wife, Eva, grew up in the town where they live and had been a member of an exclusive members’ only tennis club as a child. So when Raj and Eva marry, they naturally join the Tennis…
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Fiction Reviews | Reviews
“How Much of These Hills is Gold” by C Pam Zhang
20 April 2020
As anti-Chinese prejudice rears its ugly head in the United States, more palpably and consequentially than it has in living memory, it is worth remembering that Chinese have been in America for generations. C Pam Zhang’s debut novel of Chinese immigrants who came for the railroads and the gold rush, How Much of These Hills…
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Fiction Reviews | Reviews
“Eat a Bowl of Tea” by Louis Chu
11 April 202012 April 2020
As Asian-American writers are increasingly considered mainstream, populate “best books” and “books to watch” lists, and receive acclaim from both critics and the general public, there has been a rediscovery of works of some of the early pioneers. Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea, just re-released by University of Washington Press as part of…
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Non-Fiction Reviews | Reviews
“A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves: One Family and Migration in the 21st Century” by Jason DeParle
22 January 202010 June 2020
The Philippine economy has, relative to both its history and many other parts of the world, seen something of a recent boom. Yet although the poverty rate has plunged by about a third in the three years to 2018, Filipinos leaving their country for a future abroad still abound. Longtime New York Times reporter Jason…
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Reviews | Young Readers Reviews
“Paper Son: The Inspiring Story of Tyrus Wong, Immigrant and Artist” by Julie Leung
15 January 2020
As a child growing up in Atlanta, author Julie Leung didn’t have the opportunity to read about inspiring Chinese-Americans and, specifically, Chinese-American artists. When she learned about Tyrus Wong, the artist who created the style in the Walt Disney film Bambi, through his New York Times obituary, Leung decided to write his story in the…
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Non-Fiction Reviews | Reviews
“The Chinese Lady: Afong Moy in Early America” by Nancy E Davis
31 August 20198 September 2019
It requires an inventive streak to write extensively of a person whose known biography might only fill a few pages. This is the long shot taken in The Chinese Lady: Afong Moy in Early America, by historian Nancy E Davis, who refers to her as “the first Chinese woman to arrive in America.”
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