Category Archives: Hapa
The Art of Hearing Heartbeats by Jan-Philipp Sendker, translated by Kevin Wiliarty
I think I will forever remember this book, perhaps not so much for the story, but for a single word: a blind young man sitting in the dark with hands running across the pages answers when asked what he’s doing … “Traveling.”
That, I believe, is a perfect literary moment.
But to get the full experience, you should, of course, read the entire debut novel. Long an international bestseller, The Art of Hearing Heartbeats arrives in English translation a whole decade after its native German publication. The title’s arduous journey Stateside as told by author Jan-Philipp Sendker, who was both American and Asian correspondent for the German newsmagazine Stern, is well worth a read.
Heartbeats begins with Julia, a young hapa Burmese American woman from New York, who arrives on the other side of the world in search of news about her father, a wealthy, powerful lawyer who disappeared four years ago without a word to his family. A single, unfinished letter has brought her to this remote Burmese village, to a local teahouse where she is surprised by an older man, U Ba, who seems to know far too much about her, who dares to ask, “‘Do you believe in love?’”
Over the following days, U Ba tells Julia a haunting story about a young boy, Tin Win, who is abandoned by his mother and raised by a caring neighbor. He loses his eyesight, but through his other senses gains a whole new world. Sent to the nearby monastery to study, he meets the young daughter of one of the temple staff, a girl whose crippled legs have never stopped her from living her life fully, whose beautiful heartbeat Tin Win recognizes immediately. The two are fated for eternity, even as their lives take separate paths.
For Julia to reunite with her estranged father, she must come to understand her relationship to this lovers’ tale, and to recognize the many different kinds of love – all true, sincere, lasting – that bind heartbeats together forever.
With Valentine’s Day just looming, this ‘little-novel-that-could-and-did’ is poised to hit bestseller lists sooner than later. The story’s simple (dare I say … blind?!) trust in the everlasting power of love guarantees Heartbeats‘ sweetness will last far longer than the empty calories of even the very best heart-shaped confections.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2012 (United States) Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Translation, Burmese, European, Hapa
State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
Just after finishing Divisadero, I immediately found myself missing Hope Davis’ voice – she who so lullingly narrated Michael Ondaatje’s dream-like bifurcated drama. So what a comforting surprise to click on Ann Patchett‘s Wonder and find Davis’ voice gently streaming out of my headset! Serendipity indeed!
As the daughter of a foreign graduate student father who deserted his Caucasian American wife and hapa child after finishing his degree, Marina Singh’s family situation merits one of the best quips in the book, comparing her personal background to “the stuff of presidential history.” Her separation from her Indian father looms large, forever haunting her unconscious, exacerbated to the point of blood-curdling nightmares especially when she ingests anti-malarial drugs, which she must during her few visits to Calcutta as a young child.
Now in her early 40s, Dr. Singh – a pharmaceutical researcher of mundane anti-cholesterol drugs – is back on the same mind-altering prescription and nightly screaming herself awake (and anyone else within shrieking distance). Her bland boss, Mr. Fox, who also happens to be her noncommittal lover too many years her senior, surprises her with the news that she’s being sent to Brazil, ostensibly in search of further details about her colleague who has reportedly died of a mysterious fever out in the field.
More importantly, Mr. Fox needs a concrete update on the company’s Amazon-based, high-expense-but-not-yet-delivering project on fertility drugs, headed by the legendary Dr. Annick Swenson. Unfortunately, Singh’s aborted OB/GYN career is directly linked to her past relationship with Swenson, which ended almost two decades earlier. Already frought with difficult memories and nightmares before she even embarks, Singh’s journey proves to be a ‘heart of darkness’-like odyssey, both wondrous and shattering, redemptive and damning.
Patchett’s latest title is an uneven mix of soap opera antics (the younger woman falling for her older mentor figure recurs no less than three times, not to mention Dr. Swenson bearing a spooky resemblance to Meredith Grey’s steely mother on Grey’s Anatomy of all shows!), and high cultural aspirations (Heart of Darkness, Lost Horizon, opera). Most disturbingly, I couldn’t shake the undertones of western colonial superiority – that sense of everything outside is crumbling, backward, lacking, literally requiring mind-altering inoculations in order to survive out there. And to make the protagonist so clearly hapa, so distinctly teetering in the middle of two worlds, left me just as unbalanced as to how to ultimately react …
Readers: Adult
Published: 2011 Continue reading
Marisol McDonald Doesn’t Match | Marisol McDonald no combina by Monica Brown, illustrated by Sara Palacios, Spanish translation by Adriana Dominguez
With prolonged bleak skies across the East Coast thanks to Katia, Lee, and incoming Nate (not to mention recovery from Irene), Marisol McDonald is one brilliant, rambunctious, delightful diversion.
“My name is Marisol McDonald, and I don’t match,” the flame-haired, brown-skinned, fearless, Peruvian Scottish American little girl announces. Her brother points out how her clothes clash, but Marisol loves wearing her green polka dots and purple stripes together. She prefers peanut butter and jelly burritos, and she’s proud to speak Spanish, English, and sometimes both at the same time. When her friends can’t agree on playing pirates or playing soccer, Marisol suggests “soccer-playing pirates,” but her friends seems to lack her limitless imagination.
When her buddy Ollie challenges her with “‘Marisol, you couldn’t match if you wanted to!’” Marisol’s response is something akin to ‘bring it on.’ The next day, she dons an all-orange ensemble, plays pirates at recess (grumbling about why pirates can’t play soccer, too), eats her peanut butter and jelly on mushy bread, and even does some “boring” art. Noticing Marisol’s less-than-sparkling-self, her teacher hands Marisol a special note reminding her that she’s “simply marvelous” just the way she is. She also signs her full name: Ms. Tamiko Apple. Hapas unite!
By the time Marisol has skipped home, she’s back to being the uniquely mismatched and marvelous Marisol McDonald …
Award-winning author Monica Brown – whose extended family is Peruvian, Spanish, Scottish, Italian, Jewish, Nicaraguan, Mexican, Chilean, and African! – revels in every child’s individuality, turning her own experiences of being told she and her cousins “don’t match” into this infectiously engaging, empowering celebration. Illustrator Sara Palacios gleefully infuses Marisol with constant movement (her pigtails an indicator of her happiness level), her room filled with creative clutter, her clothing an especially eye-popping reflection of Marisol’s irrepressible energy.
As the kiddies head back to school, Marisol McDonald is a ‘simply marvelous’ book to sneak into their packs … and share with their libraries, as well. That’s not just a hint, that’s an order!
Readers: Children
Published: 2011 Continue reading
Filed under ..Children/Picture Books, .Bilingual, .Fiction, Hapa, Latino/a, South American
The Kimchi Chronicles: Korean Cooking for an American Kitchen by Marja Vongerichten with Julia Turshen, photography by Andrew Baranowski, foreword by Jean-Georges Vongerichten
Confession: in spite of every good intention, I haven’t yet seen the eponymous show for which this book is billed as a “Companion to the Public Television Series.” That said, this gorgeous volume clearly stands alone … and most deliciously so.
The book’s dedication instantly draws you in: “… to my two mothers, one who gave me life and the other who helped me live it.” Marja Vongerichten is a hapa Korean adoptee, who openly, lovingly shares her personal story here.
Born in Korea to a 19-year-old Korean mother and an African American serviceman who abandoned her when she was seven months pregnant, Vongerichten spent the first three years with her birthmother who with “no financial support … faced incredible hardship.” She was “adopted by loving American parents,” who renamed her Marja, “a combination of [their] names Margo and James.” She grew up mostly in northern Virginia, “raised on the typical American diet.”
In college, at age 20, “feeling independent and ready,” she began searching for her birthmother … and miraculously found her living in Brooklyn. Their first reunion, “needless to say, an emotional experience,” was also very much about food: “Although I hadn’t eaten authentic Korean food in almost 2 decades, the meal was strangely familiar; the food I had eaten for the first 3 years of my life had taken root in my subconscious, and reawakening those sensory memories helped me feel connected to my mother.”
For Vongerichten, the culinary reconnection proved magical: “Food was and continues to be a bridge between to my Korean identity and my life in America, especially when I eat and cook with my mother and my extended Korean family, and when I introduce my American family to Korean food.” That American family, of course, includes her renowned chef husband, Jean-Georges Vongerichten who, in the book’s “Foreword,” confesses to “working on putting a hot dog with kimchi relish … on the Menu at the Mercer Kitchen,” and making his own version of “Fast, Hot Kimchi” that gets “tucked underneath a nicely seared piece of fish” at Spice Market. He proudly boasts his chef-son is serving up a dish “with a sauce made of butter and gochujang“ at Perry Street.
Hungry yet? The book is filled with fabulous recipes that run the gamut from the most Korean (kimchi and “Birthday Seaweed Soup”) to inventive fusion (“Grilled Korean Lobster Rolls” and “Korean Baeckoffe” – a Korean spin on a traditional Alsatian dish). Luscious photographs will get you salivating for sure.
As exquisite a cookbook as this certainly is, read it for the delectable, satisfying, heart-warming, belly-filling memoir that it also most definitely is. Vongerichten’s journey is indeed remarkable … one gratifying dish at a time.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2011 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Nonfiction, Hapa, Korean, Korean American
World and Town by Gish Jen
Hattie Kong’s email inbox is full of desperate pleas from various relatives to please send back her parents’ bones to the family plot in Qufu, China. Because her American missionary mother and her Confucius-descended Chinese father found their final rest in Iowa, the remaining Kong family members are convinced that all manner of unfortunate events – from anorexia to useless boyfriends to even a four-wheel-drive vehicle getting stuck – are a direct result of her parents’ afterlife estrangement from their Kong ancestors, never mind that Hattie’s late mother is actually reposed in her hometown. “‘Hogwash,’” continues to be Hattie’s reply.
At 68, Hattie is mostly alone. Born and raised in China, she landed in the U.S. as a teenager and stayed. She recently lost her husband and best friend, one after the other; her one son lives in Hong Kong, while she lives with her dogs in upstate New York. She’s retired from her biology teaching job, she has a few friends whom she meets to walk and eat. She paints although not necessarily well.
When a Cambodian family arrives with a trailer – thanks to a local church group – just beyond her backyard, Hattie takes cookies and delivers their kitchen drawer (which only Hattie seemed to notice when it fell out during the move). Hattie’s rescue mission is just beginning. The traumatized parents and the older son are survivors of Cambodia’s Killing Fields; their American-born daughter Sophy has a troubled past all her own.
As Hattie adjusts her daily routines to accommodate her new neighbors, Hattie’s heart relives old challenges when her first love, Carter, appears in town. Suddenly her controlled, well-regulated life is anything but … and she must fight old friends, electronic intrusions, God Squad, and even her own ‘Hattie-is-batty’-doubts to somehow regain her crumbling balance.
In spite of moments of clever buoyancy, Gish Jen‘s fourth novel (six years after The Love Wife) seems much … well … heavier than her others. Hattie’s self-absorption, too often mixed with self-pity, becomes weighty baggage over the almost-400 pages. As I was plodding through the final chapters, my mother proudly, even gleefully announced (on the Fourth of July, of all days), that she had finally finished Jen’s debut, Typical American, with delighted enjoyment. Shockingly, that book is already two decades old … and I must admit, I found myself longing for those whimsical, exasperated, hysterical days of Jen’s ‘typical’ youth …
Readers: Adult
Published: 2010 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, Cambodian, Cambodian American, Chinese, Chinese American, Hapa
Landing by Emma Donoghue
Had I not been so enthralled with Room, I don’t know if I would have discovered Emma Donoghue‘s many other titles, but I’ve definitely been enjoying reading newly discovered authors’ works backwards.
Take a look at the cover and you can probably guess what Landing is about. Yup, it’s a love story. But with Donoghue at the helm, you have to expect some unconventionality at the very least.
So the hand on the left belongs to Síle (pronounced Sheila) O’Shaughnessy of Dublin, Ireland, and the right to Jude Turner of Ireland, Ontario. Síle may be Irish-born and bred, but with an Indian mother, she’s not quite Irish enough for some people. At 39, she’s spent many years as a worldly flight attendant, staying well-connected via her “gizmo,” enjoying a rather glamorous city life when she’s on the ground. At 25, Jude – also a hybrid mix, of a Canadian father and an English mother – is a technophobic Luddite, runs a small village’s tiny museum, and has never had the need or desire to travel very far.
The two meet on a plane over a dead body (!) … Síle working, Jude hoping to survive her inaugural flight (another !). How much more memorable can love at first sight be? In spite of thousands of miles, die-hard habits, missing mothers, past and present lovers, doubting friends, Síle and Jude slowly work their lives together.
Interwoven with the pitter-patter inducing love story is a mindful look at immigration (“emigration sounded noble and tragic, immigration grubby and grasping”), from peripatetic parents criss-crossing the globe to their stay-at-home progeny facing re-invention and relocation. Falling in love outside your comfort zone means borders change, populations shift, cultures adapt, racism threatens, and strangers can become family.
Just a final thought … perhaps Donoghue writes part of her own immigration story here: Like Síle, Donoghue is Dublin-born, and now lives with her partner and their children in … London, Ontario. Love can land you anywhere …
Readers: Adult
Published: 2007 Continue reading
Dogtag Summer by Elizabeth Partridge
I admit it: more than a few pages now have drying leftover droplets. Elizabeth Partridge, whose last title was the multi-award-winning Marching for Freedom, sure knows how to make a jaded old reader go sniff, sniff.
On the last day of seventh grade, best friends Tracy and Stargazer look forward to an unplanned summer. Their one goal – Stargazer’s “brain wave” – is to build a Viking funeral ship. How fitting that this turns out to be the summer of Tracy’s ghosts.
After five years of her American life, loved and nurtured by her adoptive parents, Tracy’s Vietnamese past encroaches, memories that take her from here to there. Her protective grandmother who raised her and her absent but adored mother who worked to support them in an American army base are back to remind her of her final months in her native, war-torn homeland. There she was con lai, meaning “half-blood,” her American GI father’s genes imprinted in her light hair and round eyes. Here she is asked if she speaks English, “Looking at me like they were trying to remember if they’d seen people like me in some National Geographic article.”
While searching for tools in her father’s workshop with Stargazer to build his ship, the two find an army ammunition box with a U.S. military dogtag inside. They’re caught by Tracy’s father, cold and angry at their curiosity. Not only have they broken the lock on the carefully hidden ammo box, but Tracy’s father is suddenly forced to confront his own memories and nightmares from his own tour of duty in Vietnam.
As more of Tracy’s frightening past returns, the more her father withdraws into his own unfinished traumas. Her mother can only look on helplessly, frightened by their silence. Delicately, gently … but so very painfully, father and daughter must somehow find a way to bring past to present, and re-entwine their futures back together as a family.
Partridge is a masterful storyteller, weaving in just enough history, war gore, and hippie politics to underscore how the victims of war are not just the body bags shipped home. At book’s end, she includes a detailed appendix in Q&A format that further explores historical context, psychological consequences such as PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), the leftover hapa children fathered by U.S. military men disparagingly referred to as con lai or bui doi (literally, “children of the dust”), the anti-war movement, dogtags, the post-war adoption of Vietnamese orphans, and more.
And Partridge’s final message? In spite of collateral damage (and Partridge doesn’t shy away and offer perfect endings), families – of all backgrounds, ethnicities, and beliefs – can emerge and grow, even out of the death and destruction of war.
Tidbit: In Partridge’s acknowledgements, she includes a dear friend (shrinking the world once again), Deann Borshay Liem, who made the phenomenal transracial adoption films, First Person Plural and In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee. As I get a small mention in the credits for First Person (totally undeserved, but so gave me that ‘gawwww’ feeling of gratitude), I’m feeling a wee bit included, too.
Readers: Middle Grade
Published: 2011 Continue reading
Filed under ..Middle Grade Readers, .Fiction, Hapa, Vietnamese American
Tall Story by Candy Gourlay
As we head into the holiday weekend, here’s a debut novel to help you celebrate … Tall Story is as multi-layered as its clever title, filled with adventure, magic realism, a dual family saga thousands of miles apart, not to mention one heck of a basketball game!
Andi and Bernardo are half-siblings who at first couldn’t be more unlike. Andi is tiny, “barely a teenager” at 13, lives in London with her Filipino mother and her British father, and dreams of playing point guard on her school basketball team. She’s met her older brother just once. Bernardo is 16, has lived his entire life in a small village in the Philippines where he was raised by an aunt and uncle. Mum Mary Ann, suddenly widowed with an infant, moved to London to take the one job that might help pay off the “gazillions” she owed in hospital bills. Her intention was to send for Bernardo as soon as she was settled, but life didn’t work out that way … while she waited 16 years for Bernardo’s immigration papers, she married Andi’s father and had Andi, but visited as often as she could.
Now Bernardo is finally reunited with his family in London. And Andi had no clue that her big brother would turn out to be 8 feet TALL. The medical term for his condition is Gigantism, but Bernardo has grown up with enchanted legends and frightening curses that explain his height otherwise … and he’s plagued by guilt for leaving his Filipino family and friends behind. The initial reunion isn’t exactly easy, and Andi can’t help but be disappointed that her Velcro-suited, socks-with-size-22-sandals-garbed big brother is so different from what she had expected, wished for, dreamed about …
Told in alternating chapters by both siblings, Tall Story is one of those heart-thumping, sigh-inducing tales that will infuse you with just the right glowing satisfaction as you turn that final page. From crumbling ceilings to magic stones to rabid dogs to sleeping giants to a surprising rogue teacher willing to break a few rules, Candy Gourlay has definitely concocted one remarkable tall story that just might make you believe in magic. Slam dunk ahead!
Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult
Published: 2011 Continue reading
Filed under ..Middle Grade Readers, .Fiction, British, Filipino/a, Hapa
Orchards by Holly Thompson, illustrations by Grady McFerrin
Holly Thompson‘s novel-in-verse begins with a jarring slam: “One week after / you stuffed a coil of rope / into your backpack / and walked uphill into / Osgoods’ orchard / where blooms were still closed fists // my father looked up summer airfares to Tokyo.”
Kanako Goldberg’s eighth-grade classmate Ruth is dead from suicide. In spite of Kana’s protestations of “it wasn’t my fault / I didn’t do anything!” her parents decide to send her to Japan to “reflect / in the presence of your ancestors.” Although Kana wasn’t the one whose vicious note was found in Ruth’s pocket, Kana and her friends know they could have been kinder, gentler, more inclusive. Indeed, none of them did anything … when they could have, when they should have.
To give her distanced thinking space, Kana is sent to a Japanese seaside village to stay with her mother’s family, to experience her Japanese heritage, rediscover her extended relatives, and work on the family citrus farm where she learns to cultivate mikan, a uniquely Japanese fruit of the orange family. This orchard is where Kana’s mother grew up, before she married Kana’s Jewish American father, and moved thousands of miles away.
Far away from home, Kana is seemingly insulated from the tragedy, and yet aching thoughts of could-have-been, should-have-been relentlessly pervade Kana’s thoughts. Just as she is beginning to strengthen her fragile self, tragedy strikes again, and Kana must somehow find the strength to understand and survive.
Thompson’s sparse pages speak volumes, from Kana’s complicit guilt, to her forced-to-be-wise-attempts to understand (“as though / we’re dressed up / in oversized adult clothing”), to her astute, gorgeous response to help her friends and classmates to heal … and live. Thompson confronts every-parent’s-nightmare-come-true with breathtaking clarity; Orchards is both a wake-up call and a haunting elegy. It’s not easy to read, but it’s undoubtedly a must-read.
Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult
Published: 2011 Continue reading
Filed under ..Middle Grade Readers, ..Young Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Poetry, Hapa, Japanese, Japanese American
Ladder to the Moon by Maya Soetoro-Ng, illustrated by Yuyi Morales
“More than anything, I wished that my mother and my daughter could have known and loved each other,” Maya Soetoro-Ng writes in her “Author’s Note,” mourning her late mother (anthropologist S. Ann Dunham), who died a decade before her granddaughter Suhaila was born. Through the infinite magic of words and the gorgeous imagination of Yuyi Morales‘ illustrations, Soetoro-Ng “unite[s] grandmother and grandchild through a story in which my mother could meet one of her granddaughters and share the moon with her.”
Inspired by Georgia O’Keefe’s painting of the same name, Ladder to the Moon is an exquisite, multi-generational journey of love and hope. “‘What was Grandma Annie like?’” Suhaila asks. “‘Full, soft, and curious. Your grandma would wrap her arms around the whole world if she could,” Mama assures her. Suhaila continues to wonder that night, and “as though in answer … a golden ladder appeared on the edge of the sill.” Grandma Annie emerges to take the curious Suhaila by the hand, and climb the beckoning ladder.
Nestled together into the moon, Suhaila and Grandma Annie share a smile until “they too knew each other completely. Sometimes a smile is strong enough to do that.” Suhaila watches as Annie guides the children lost in tragedies (a “fifty-foot wave” and “two tall towers that trembled”) to safety. Annie promises the children “‘We’ll work together,’” in order to “build bridges and buildings and bonds between people.”
Suhaila witnesses the power of prayer, the people below united in spite of all their different faiths into “hope’s massive stream.” The more she sees, the harder she listens, and the deeper she feels her grandmother’s love; with every new experience she shares with Annie, Suhaila “knew more than she had known before.” Soon enough, Suhaila herself learns how to heal.
Suhaila’s magical journey ends with a “snuggle and a smooch” before she tumbles back to bed, returning as a young harbinger of Grandma Annie’s healing wisdom. ”Come. Tell me everything,” Mama gently greets her traveling daughter. And thus the story can begin anew…
Soetoro-Ng and Morales offer a wondrous tale of how each of us – even the youngest children – can “plant seeds in soft soil,” both literally and figuratively, as we nourish and heal one other. Together, with renewed love and hope, the earth can become a safe harbor for us all.
Readers: Children
Published: 2011 Continue reading
Filed under ..Children/Picture Books, .Fiction, Hapa, Indonesian American
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