Merle Oberon attained Hollywood immortality with a nomination for a Best Leading Actress Oscar for her role in the 1935 film The Dark Angel. It was the first time a performer of color had received an acting nomination at the Academy Awards, but because Oberon concealed her South Asian identity throughout her lifetime and “passed” for white, very few people knew it. In Love, Queenie, the first biography in more than forty years of the India-born actress, Mayukh Sen draws on family interviews and...
A NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • The moving story of an undocumented child living in poverty in the richest country in the world—an incandescent debut from an astonishing new talent • A TODAY SHOW #READWITHJENNA PICK In Chinese, the word for America, Mei Guo, translates directly to “beautiful country.” Yet when seven-year-old Qian arrives in New York City in 1994 full of curiosity, she is overwhelmed by crushing fear and scarcity. In China, Qian’s parents were professors; in America,...
This Is One Way to Dance (Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction)
by Sejal Shah
In the linked essays that make up her debut collection, This Is One Way to Dance, Sejal Shah explores culture, language, family, and place. Throughout the collection, Shah reflects on what it means to make oneself visible and legible through writing in a country that struggles with race and maps her identity as an American, South Asian American, writer of color, and feminist. This Is One Way to Dance draws on Shah's ongoing interests in ethnicity and place: the geographic and cultural distances...
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Between 1919 and 1961, pioneering Chinese American actress Anna May Wong established an enduring legacy that encompassed cinema, theater, radio, and American television. Born in Los Angeles, yet with her US citizenship scrutinized due to the Chinese Exclusion Act, Wong—a defiant misfit—innovated nuanced performances to subvert...
Born in a small village in Punjab at the turn of the century, Rai Bahadur Mohan Singh Oberoi began his career in the industry at Shimla's Cecil Hotel on a monthly wage of Rs 50. But he was not destined to remain in that position for long. With a combination of clear-sighted thinking, frugality and sheer hard work, he managed to put together a plan and the finances necessary to acquire his first hotel, Clarkes. That was only the beginning. Decades later, the Oberoi Group has over thirty-one luxur...
Discover one family's fascinating story in this beautiful, sweeping, multigenerational memoir, spanning 19th century south China to modern day Singapore'A captivating, compelling story of history, family loyalty, and personal sacrifice. A fascinating and richly textured multigenerational tale' Charmaine Wilkerson, New York Times bestselling author of Black Cake'I would learn that when families tell stories, what they leave out re-defines what they keep in. With my family, these were not secrets...
An NPR Best Book of 2022 An incredible, deeply reported story of identical twins Isabella and Hà, born in Viêt Nam and raised on opposite sides of the world, each knowing little about the other’s existence until they were reunited as teenagers, against all odds. “Stirring and unforgettable—a breathtaking adoption saga like no other.” —Robert Kolker It was 1998 in Nha Trang, Vi?t Nam, and Liên struggled to care for her newborn twin girls. Hà was taken in by Liên’s sister, and she grew up in a...
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the indie rock sensation known as Japanese Breakfast, an unforgettable memoir about family, food, grief, love, and growing up Korean American—“in losing her mother and cooking to bring her back to life, Zauner became herself” (NPR). • CELEBRATING OVER ONE YEAR ON THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER LIST In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor...
Black Box details the harrowing experience of sexual assault Shiori Ito faced as a young journalist in Japan, as well as the national reckoning that followed. In 2015, Ito charged Noriyuki Yamaguchi, one of Japan’s best-known TV journalists, with rape. But when Ito went to the police after the assault, she was told that her case was a “black box”: it had happened behind closed doors and was therefore unprosecutable. Ito became aware of the alarming amount of black boxes built into legal and in...
Winner of the 2019 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction A beautiful and haunting memoir of kinship and culture rediscovered. Jenny Heijun Wills was born in Korea and adopted as an infant into a white family in small-town Canada. In her late twenties, she reconnected with her first family and returned to Seoul where she spent four months getting to know other adoptees, as well as her Korean mother, father, siblings, and extended family. At the guesthouse for transnational adoptees...
This fascinating autobiography offers not a success story; nor a paean to the resilience of the human spirit; nor a search for identity constrained by class, race, and gender or the other usual suspects; nor a tearjerker that engenders in the Western reader a sense of superiority or schadenfreude. Rather, it is a tale of the joys and hardships of simple living, of an enduring curiosity about the world, of teachers and friends, of marriage and divorce, of Chinese and American societies, of tofu a...
What happens when you land your dream job and everything you've been working toward becomes a complete nightmare? This is Patty Lin's story. She climbed the ladder as an award-winning television writer (often the only Asian person in the room) only to be confronted by discouragement, burnout, and toxicity. Ever since Patty Lin retired from television writing at the ripe age of thirty-eight, people have asked her: “Why would you quit such a cool career?” Especially when they find out she worked...
THE MEMOIR OF WILD WILD COUNTRY'S MA ANAND SHEELAEveryone in the world has an opinion of me! I do not expect them to change. I accept life as it comes!’Irrepressible, honest, bold and charming, very few can claim to have lived life on their own terms as Ma Anand Sheela has. Yet controversy continues to follow her. Whether it is her portrayal in Wild Wild Country or the Osho International Foundation's take on the Netflix series, a wide spectrum of opinions has cloaked for too long the real Sheela...
‘Fascinating…an enticingly interesting read’ - Sayeeda Warsi Born in rural Afghanistan, Shakardokht Jafari became a refugee aged just six, after a harrowing half-year trek to Iran. There, at twelve, she discovered she had been promised in marriage at birth to an older cousin. Resisting no fewer than three arranged marriages, she fought to choose her own husband, education and career, defying convention to study radiation technologies at Tehran University. Returning to Afghanistan after the...
My Teaching and Research Career at U.S. Naval Academy and the Johns Hopkins University (Part Three)
by Chih Wu
En este libro tan util y necesario, que ofrece a los lectores herramientas de autoayuda a traves de su autobiografia, la premiada periodista Mariana Atencio profundiza en lo que hace especial a cada persona y la forma en que podemos convertirnos en una fuerza positiva en un mundo quebrantado.En su experiencia como corresponsal bilingue para NBC News, Fusion y Univision, Mariana desarrollo una perspectiva extraordinaria, forjada ademas por el hecho de haber emigrado de Venezuela a Estados Unidos...
In the course of that decade, great change comes to both writer and country, often at the same time. Minoui settles into daily life - getting to know her devout grandmother for the first time, making friends with local women who help her escape secret dance parties when the morality police arrive, figuring out how to be a journalist in a country that is suspicious of the press and Westerners. Once she finally starts to learn Persian, she begins to see Iran through her grandfather's eyes. And so...