In the early 1960s, travel-writer Simon Gandolfi drove a VW from England to Goa where he rented a bungalow on the beach at Calangute. And it was on Calangute beach that Gandolfi met and loved Vanessa and explored with her much of the subcontinent. The 2008 terrorist attack on the Taj Hotel in Mumbai prompted Gandolfi to re-explore the subcontinent on a small motorcycle. Collecting a Honda 125 from the factory outside Delhi, he rode for six months and 12,000 kilometres. He rediscovers the rented...
A young girl forced to work in a Queens sweatshop calls child services on her mother in this powerful debut memoir about labor and self-worth that traces a Chinese immigrant's journey to an American future. As a teen, Anna Qu is sent by her mother to work in her family's garment factory in Queens. At home, she is treated as a maid and suffers punishment for doing her homework at night. Her mother wants to teach her a lesson: she is Chinese, not American, and such is their tough path in their ne...
AN AREA OF DARKNESS is V.S. Naipaul's semi-autobiographical account - at once painful and hilarious, always concerned - of his first visit to India, the land of his forbears. From the moment of his inauspicious arrival in Prohibition-dry Bombay, bearing whisky and cheap brandy, he began to experience a sense of cultural estrangement from the subcontinent. It became for him a land of myths, an area of darkness closing up behind him as he travelled . . . The experience was not a pleasant one, bu...
Tell My Sister Where I Am and Other Stories
by Hanhtiet Le and Barbara Penner
Everywhere you look, for heaven's sake, there are ladies. Never mind for heaven's sake, this is heaven. It is the Garden of Eden, where you are allowed to eat all the apples you want. The air itself is sexy. Never mind meanderings on hill tribes and Buddhist temple architecture, or burble about meditation and mantras, and dire warnings about 'prostitutes' and 'the sex industry'. Because that is why you have come here. You are a man with ample leisure time and money in your pocket, and you are he...
Here's a story. On the U.S.-occupied island of Okinawa, an American soldier falls in love with a beautiful Japanese woman. He saves her from a life of grinding poverty. They settle in the States, to live out the suburban American Dream with their child. Here's another version. The U.S. military has occupied Okinawa since World War Two, after slaughtering a third of the island's population; the beautiful Japanese woman lives in poverty and marries the soldier as a way to escape. Here's a thir...
Simon Gjeroe became a father in China and suddenly had to deal with serious questions: Can you live with your wife if she has not showered for a month? Can you take your wife seriously if she starts wearing X-ray aprons? Do you really have to eat the placenta? In this extraordinary memoir, Simon answers all those questions and many more, highlighting the weird and wonderful world of cross-cultural marriage and parenthood in the Middle Kingdom. Made in China is a humorous narrative that reveals...
'A deeply researched, hugely empathic biography.' HELEN O'HARA'Sure to enthral anyone fascinated by audacious, before-their-time women.' KAREN ABBOTT'This superbly detailed book does Wong's story proper justice.' BOB STANLEY'A must read, for anyone who loves pop culture or cares about representation in Hollywood.' PHIL YUSet against the glittering backdrop of Los Angeles in the gin-soaked Jazz Age and the rise of Hollywood, this debut book celebrates Anna May Wong, the first Asian American movie...
INSTANT TORONTO STAR BESTSELLER The prize-winning and bestselling author of Two Trees Make a Forest turns to the lives of plants entangled in our human world to explore belonging, displacement, identity, and the truths of our shared future A seed slips beyond a garden wall. A tree is planted on a precarious border. A shrub is stolen from its culture and its land. What happens when these plants leave their original homes and put down roots elsewhere? The themes in these fourteen essays become...
Imprisoned Apart (Scott and Laurie Oki Series in Asian American Studies (Paperback))
by Louis Fiset
“Please don’t cry,” wrote Iwao Matsushita to his wife Hanaye, telling her he was to be interned for the duration of the war. He was imprisoned in Fort Missoula, Montana, and she was incarcerated at the Minidoka Relocation Center in southwestern Idaho. Their separation would continue for more than two years.Imprisoned Apart is the poignant story of a young teacher and his bride who came to Seattle from Japan in 1919 so that he might study English language and literature, and who stayed to make a...
Princess, poet, pacifist ... and World War II spy. The enigmatic, indefinable Noor Inayat Khan was an unlikely recruit to the SOE as an undercover wireless operator. How did she face off fascism with such courage and resilience and evade capture longer than any of her counterparts? Noor's moving and inspirational story takes us across borders and time into a shadowy world of espionage, as British officer Vera Atkins and Gestapo Major Hans Kieffer trade secrets to uncover the woman behind the cod...
Finalist for the 2024 Forest of Reading Evergreen Book Award Named a Best Book of 2023 by the Globe and Mail and Apple Books Canada A TODAY Show Recommended Read This beautifully intimate memoir-in-pieces uses one woman's life-long love affair with pop culture as a revelatory lens to explore family, identity, belonging, grief, and the power of female rage. For most of Jen Sookfong Lee's life, pop culture was an escape from family tragedy and a means of fitting in with the larger culture aroun...
Spanning almost a hundred years, this rich and evocative true story recounts the lives of three generations of remarkable Chinese women. Their extraordinary journey takes us from the brutal poverty of village life in mainland China, to newly prosperous 1930s Hong Kong and finally to the UK. Their lives were as dramatic as the times they lived through.A love of food and a talent for cooking pulled each generation through the most devastating of upheavals. Helen Tse's grandmother, Lily Kwok, was f...
In 1975, during the fall of Saigon, Phuc Tran immigrates to America along with his family. By sheer chance they land in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a small town where the Trans struggle to assimilate into their new life. In this coming-of-age memoir told through the themes of great books such as The Metamorphosis, The Scarlet Letter, The Iliad, and more, Tran navigates the push and pull of finding and accepting himself despite the challenges of immigration, feelings of isolation, teenage rebellion,...