Books
Why East Of Eden’s Lee Is My Favorite Asian American Character in Literature
My favorite pre-Asian American studies, pre-Asian American power, pre-civil rights fictional Asian American character is Lee from East of Eden (1952) by John Steinbeck. East of Eden is a long epic novel. So it’s difficult to try to encapsulate the entire story in a few short sentences. The best I could find was from the Oprah Book Club: “Three generations, two love triangles, one timeless story. East of Eden is an epic novel full of good [...] Continue »
Their Better Halves? Interracial Marriage Among Female Asian American Writers
By Leeland Lee Over the past few decades the canon of the Asian American experience has been built, in large part, from the work of contemporary female writers like Amy Tan, Maxine Hong Kingston and Gish Jen. More recent arrivals to the literary scene such as Jhumpa Lahiri and Lan Samantha Chang have also contributed to molding our modern day perception of Asians living in America.
Racism On The Playground
With April being National Poetry Month, spring is poetry season, and this spring, while reading through Childhood’s Favorites and Fairy Stories, an anthology collected back 1927 in New York, I found this little poem, “Foreign Children” by Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson (of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde fame): FOREIGN CHILDREN Little Indian, Sioux or Crow, Little frosty Eskimo, Little Turk or Japanee, O! don’t you wish that you were me? You have seen the [...] Continue »
Itsy Bitsy Stories: Culturally Diverse Books for Children
Children’s books are all the rage – in my house. We’re always looking for stories that veer away from the traditional Mother Goose rhymes or Brothers Grimm. I ran across this from Asian Week: “The ancient Chinese Zodiac comes to life in the latest release from ItsyBitsyStories: ’123 The Emperor’s Calling, a Story of the Chinese Zodiac.’ This is the latest edition of interactive learning stories series for children ages 2 and up for the iPad. [...] Continue »
VIRAL LIKE SARS: Reddit Makes Dying Friend’s Wish Come True
Sometimes good can come out of the Internet and sometimes, a young man with a terminal illness has his dream come true. Colton Jang, under the user name Kivakid, posted on Reddit searching for an advanced copy of Harry Turtledove’s final book in The War That Came Early for his friend, Nachu Bhatnagar. You see, Nachu has cancer and has less than a year to live. One of his dreams was finish Turtledove’s series but [...] Continue »
Asian American Whiz Kid About to Graduate from UCLA at Age 14
“People need to know you don’t really need to be a genius. You just have to work hard and you can accomplish anything,” says the fourteen year old college graduate, Moshe Kai Cavalin. Words of inspiration from a little guy? It sounds pretty promising to me! Back in 2009, we wrote about how Cavalin graduated in East Los Angeles College with a G.P.A. of 4.0 in Astrophysics at age eleven. Now, he is ready to graduate [...] Continue »
Naruto & Dragonball Now Available On Barnes & Noble Nook
It’s happened. I’m totally hooked on eBooks. I’m one of those book lovers that loves to sniff a new book before I read it, sighs at the sound of a page turning, and adores the solid and personal feel of a book in my hand. With the advent of eBooks, I tried to resist, fancying myself like Yomiko Readman from the anime Read or Die, living in an abandoned office building filled to the brim [...] Continue »
Bonnie Tsui & “The Changing Face of America’s Chinatowns”
Bonnie Tsui’s book The Changing Face of America’s Chinatowns is an analysis of the dynamics of Chinatown’s shifting population of immigrants of various Asian heritage origins, including the ones who are economically enticed to go back to their heritage countries. This book was covered on NPR. In the audio of Chinatown recorded in the NPR covereage, I even heard some Taiwanese/Fujianese spoken, and the book’s topic of study made me reflect on the role of [...] Continue »
“The Brady’s and the Dumb Chinaman” Dime Novel Review
In my research on Chinese Americans in the American Old West for a book series I’m writing, I came across a wonderful resource at Stanford University — digital collection of popular dime novels available online. [Editors Note: The book is also available to download for free as a Google eBook and for sale on Amazon.] Dime novels were basically the cheap pulp fiction popular mini-novels that were widespread in the Old West; they ranged from [...] Continue »
How To Be A Bad Asian: I Love Kung Fu
Life is hard enough as an Asian. Not all of us can get perfect SAT scores, graduate from medical school or trick out a Honda Civic. The pressure to embrace our culture remains but sometimes, we just don’t want to. How To Be A Bad Asian is an ongoing series of personal essays by the 8Asians writers about what sets us apart from the API community, how we deal with the stereotypes that we put [...] Continue »
Missing Chapters in Iris Chang’s “The Chinese in America”
Iris Chang’s book The Chinese in America is one of the very few books that chronicles a major Asian American community, the Chinese Americans. Of course, no one book could fully capture the incredible diversity of the Chinese American category and all the people who populate (or are made to populate) it, but this book definitely does a great job of covering most of that diversity as well as filling a gaping hole in American [...] Continue »
8Days Giveaway: ‘How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe’ by Charles Yu
UPDATE: Congrats to our winners: Stiricide, Danyal Kim, and Keis! This is part of 8Asians’ 2011 “8Days of Giveaways” Celebration. From a “5 Under 35″ winner, comes a razor-sharp, hilarious, and touching story of a son searching for his father . . . through quantum space-time: How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu Every day in Minor Universe 31 people get into time machines and try to change the past. [...] Continue »
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Oct 14: (Seattle, WA) From Fields to Family: Asian Pacific Americans and Food
Mar 1: (Atlanta, GA) The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps, 1942-1946
Apr 26: (New York, NY) June 4, 1989: Media and Mobilization Beyond Tiananmen Square
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May 24: (San Jose, CA) Sake San Jose
May 24: (New York, NY) A Conversation with artists Arthur Ou, Hai Zhang, and Julie Quon in Conjunction with America through a Chinese Lens
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