Tells the story of three women--Jung Chang, her mother, and her grandmother--whose lives and fortunes mirror the tumultuous twentieth century in China.
Through family interviews, original photographs, and national records, Beatrice Loftus McKenzie traces the many lives of a resilient multigenerational family whose experiences parallel the complicated relationship between America and China in the twentieth century. In the early 1900s, Charles Wong moved from Guangdong Province to the United States and opened the Nan King Lo Restaurant in Beloit, Wisconsin. Soon after, his wife Yee Shee joined him to build the "Chop House" into a local institutio...
A Globe and Mail Best Book It would take many lifetimes, it was said to me during my first visit, to see all of India. The desperation must have shown on my face to absorb and digest all I possibly could. This was not something I had articulated or resolved; and yet I recall an anxiety as I travelled the length and breadth of the country, senses raw to every new experience, that even in the distraction of a blink I might miss something profoundly significant. I was not born in India, nor were...
In 1957, after advocating reforms in the Communist Party, Fang - just twenty-one years old was dismissed from his position, stripped of his Party membership, and sent to be a farm laborer in a remote village. Over the next two decades, through the years of the Anti-Rightist Movement, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution, Fang several times was denounced and rehabilitated; in the process he saw the pettiness, absurdity, and horror of the regime's excesses. In time his struggle gath...
You Cannot Resist Me When My Hair Is in Braids (Made in Michigan Writers)
by Frances Kai-Hwa Wang
When Gold Rush fever gripped the globe in 1849, thousands of Chinese came through San Francisco to seek fortune. In The Poker Bride, Christopher Corbett uses a legend of one extraordinary woman as a lens into this experience. Before 1849, the Chinese in the United States were little more than curiosities. But as word spread of gold in California, San Francisco's labyrinthine Chinatown sprang up, a city-within-a-city full of exotic foods and strange smells where Chinese women were smuggled into t...
