The father of fibre optics, Narinder Singh Kapany was far more than your typical multi-hyphenate. Inventor, art collector, sculptor, farmer, entrepreneur, teacher, and a successful businessman, Dr Kapany was what Fortune magazine in its 1999 issue called, ‘one of the seven unsung heroes of the 20th century’. An insightful and inspirational life story, this memoir chronicles his 90 remarkable years. Charming, idiosyncratic, and highly engaging, The Man who Bent Light serves up enough variety and...
More Than The Eye Can See: Memoirs Of Gopinath Pillai
by Gopinath Pillai and John Vater
More Than The Eye Can See tells the story of Gopinath Pillai, a Singaporean businessman and diplomat who served as Singapore's Non-Resident Ambassador to Iran (1989-2008) and High Commissioner to Pakistan (1994-2001). Alongside working with prominent members of Singapore's pioneering generation to strengthen the country's manufacturing profile and international trade during the Cold War, he broke into liberalising India as a trailblazing entrepreneur and contributed to the nation's public life a...
Fifth Chinese Daughter (Classics of Asian American Literature)
by Jade Snow Wong
Originally published in 1945 and now reissued with a new introduction by the author, Jade Snow Wong’s story is one of struggle and achievements. These memoirs of the author’s first twenty-four years are thoughtful, informative, and highly entertaining. They not only portray a young woman and her unique family in San Francisco’s Chinatown, but they are rich in the details that light up a world within the world of America. The third-person singular style is rooted in Chinese literary form, reflect...
An award-winning writer retraces her dysfunctional, biracial, globe-trotting family’s journey as she reckons with ethnicity and belonging, diversity and race, and the complexities of life within a multicultural household. “Almost Brown is that rarest of things: a memoir that is both deeply intimate and intellectually ambitious.”—Susan Orlean, author of The Library Book Charlotte Gill’s father is Indian. Her mother is English. They meet in 1960s London when the world is not quite ready for inte...
Gautam Banerjee's curiosity about Singapore was piqued after he came across an article about the city-state in 1968, and as luck would have it, his family moved there in 1971. Although he subsequently spent time studying overseas, qualifying as a chartered accountant and working in one of the major global financial centres, Gautam was still determined to return to Singapore. In a vibrant, multicultural society which prides itself on meritocracy, he found home.Co-authored with his former colleagu...
Grab the controller! Save the World! One of the gaming industry’s leading women describes how gaming can be a force for global good. Play is in our DNA, but gaming has always had a bad rap. Since the first humans carved a game board into the dirt, we’ve been told that playing around isn’t a useful way to spend our time. But gaming is as natural as we are. We game to experiment with ideas and to learn. We play to create new worlds so we can change this one. Gaming pushes us to imagine what more...
Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, a lyrical meditation on family, place, and inheritance Names for Light traverses time and memory to weigh three generations of a family's history against a painful inheritance of postcolonial violence and racism. In spare, lyric paragraphs framed by white space, Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint explores home, belonging, and identity by revisiting the cities in which her parents and grandparents lived. As she makes inquiries into their stories, she intertwines...
This historic memoir by activist Ryousuke Nanasaki recounts his first experiences as a gay man while searching for his soulmate and eventual marriage–the first religiously recognized same-sex wedding in Japanese history. (Manga adaptation also available from Seven Seas.) Ryousuke Nanasaki married his husband in 2016 in the first religiously recognized same-sex wedding in Japanese history. This collection of essays follows Ryousuke’s search for love on the journey to his extraordinary marriage....
An unflinching look at the challenges and misunderstandings mixed-race people face in family spaces and intimate relationships across their varying cultural backgrounds In this emotionally powerful and intellectually provocative blend of memoir, cultural criticism, and theory, scholar and essayist Samira Mehta reflects on many facets of being multiracial. Born to a white American and a South Asian immigrant, Mehta grew up feeling more comfortable with her mother’s family than her father’s—they...
A bicultural child of a Malay mother and an Indian father, Amelia Zachry was different from the get-go, never quite fitting in. In this raw, inspiring memoir, she chronicles the long, winding journey that brought her from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Kentucky, USA - the place she and her family now call home. Amelia was nineteen years old, her future wide open, when a fellow student from her Kuala Lumpur university sexually assaulted her. After that night, she felt sullied - and convinced that wha...
The first memoir about the "reeducation" camps by a Uyghur woman. “I have written what I lived. The atrocious reality.” — Gulbahar Haitiwaji to Paris Match Since 2017, more than one million Uyghurs have been deported from their homes in the Xinjiang region of China to “reeducation camps.” The brutal repression of the Uyghurs, a Turkish-speaking Muslim ethnic group, has been denounced as genocide, and reported widely in media around the world. The Xinjiang Papers, revealed by the New York Time...