Tag Archives: Anthology
Asian American Plays for a New Generation edited by Josephine Lee, Don Eitel, and R.A. Shiomi
This is not your parents’ (or your grandparents’) Asian American theater. That I can even say that is proof of massive progress. What a difference a few decades makes … you won’t find any Japanese American internees or migrant farm laborers here, no Gold Mountain gold rushers or transcontinental railroad workers (although Charlie Crocker does get a sly mention).
Truly, these are indeed “plays for a new generation” – we’re talking 9/11 in Zaraawar Mistry’s Indian Cowboy, transracial adoption in Kurt Miyashiro, Rick Shiomi, and Sundraya Kase’s Walleye Kid: The Musical, Hong Kong handover in Aurorae Khoo’s Happy Valley, an APA Oscar nomination in Sun Mee Chomet’s Asiamnesia, the voiceless-no-more Hmong in May Lee-Yang’s Sia(b), a new kind of inter-Asian colonialism in Clarence Coo’s Bahala Na (Let It Go), and the over-the-top reclamation of just about every stereotype in Lauren Yee’s Ching Chong Chinaman.
But before you let out that “WOW!” here’s another unprecedented fact about these plays to marvel over, as co-editor Rick Shiomi, the co-founder and artistic director of Minneapolis/St.Paul-based Mu Performing Arts, writes in his “Afterword”: “Mu Performing Arts participated in the development and produced the world premieres of all but one of the plays in this anthology. The question that comes to mind is ‘How on earth did this happen?’”
How, indeed! Really, we’re not talking either coast where most APA theater participants and experts tend to congregate – or at least we think they do. Even Shiomi confesses to his own initial concerns about the (very) few APA artists trying to “survive without an Asian American community” while “buried deep in the hinterland of the Midwest.” And yet, somehow, Shiomi’s Mu Performing Arts, founded in 1992, has grown into the second largest pan-Asian performing arts organization across the country. This marvelous book is irrefutable testimony to its not-so-quiet powerhouse status. The drama continues … hopefully for decades to come.
Tidbit: Come meet Rick Shiomi today at the Library of Congress! Click here for details.
For those of you who missed the event, his fellow panelist Lia Chang shares some of her photographic memories. Click here to view!
Readers: Adult
Published: 2011 Continue reading
Drown by Junot Diaz
Talk about a surprisingly fortuitous bonus: If you get the audible version of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, included in the deal is Junot Diaz‘s debut title, Drown, a collection of 10 mostly-related short stories. That both Diaz titles are read with such fluency by Jonathan Davis melds both together, as if each book is a complementary extension of the other.
If you haven’t discovered either book yet, the audible versions are highly recommended together. The main reason is Yunior, Oscar‘s narrator, who in spite of his near omniscient vantage point in the novel, reveals little about himself beyond his love for Oscar’s sister Lola which is never enough to curb his extracurricular exploits. Instead, Drown is where Yunior’s life gets revealed in snippets: his origins in the Dominican Republic, growing up with a mostly absent father who left for the United States, his adventures (sometimes brutal) with his older brother Rafa (“Ysrael”), the struggles his mother faces trying to raise her two sons abandoned and alone (“Aguantando”).
Meanwhile, in New York, Yunior’s father works numerous dead-end jobs, trying to figure out how to reunite his family, and falls into another marriage, another life (“Negocios”). The family is eventually reunited, adding a little sister for Rafa and Yunior. Yunior is prone to car sickness earning his father’s violent wrath (“Fiesta 1980″), worries about his sexuality (“Drown”), yet knows all the certain love moves for girls of different ethnicities (“How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl or Halfie”). As an adult, he’s mourning the loss of his girlfriend for whom he used to steal spending money at his pool table delivery job (“Edison, NJ), although he thinks he might get over his latest breakup by befriending the model in the apartment below whose lover has recently broken her heart (“Boyfriend”).
Diaz’s stories here, about Yunior or not, are all raw, visceral, and each aching with need. The rejected suffering endured in the Dominican Republic does not necessarily abate with an American address. Material and physical comforts (food, transportation, a home) are not enough for the good life, especially with fractured families that can’t seem to find a way back together, regardless of closing distance. Yunior and Oscar: two overlapping books, two diametric lives, one parallel quest for lasting true love.
Readers: Adult
Published: 1996 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Audio, .Fiction, .Short Stories, Carribbean American
An Empty Room: Stories by Mu Xin, translated by Toming Jun Liu
With 20-plus books published in Taiwan and China, writer/painter Mu finally makes his English debut with a collection of 13 stories he chose from three previous titles. The result is, in a word, uneven.
Standouts outshine the less than memorable, perhaps making the latter seem that much more lackluster in comparison. “The Moment When Childhood Vanished” is a koan-like reminder of bewildering loss, “Xia Mingzhu: A Bright Pearl” challenges family bonds, “Eighteen Passengers on a Bus” shockingly pushes the boundaries of patience, and “Halo” captures the holy in humanity. The highlight is “Fong Fong No. 4,” which, in a few controlled pages, translates half a century of China’s tumultuous, wrenching past through the metamorphosis (in four phases) of a young girl’s life into middle-aged womanhood.
Verdict: Although recent notable collections such as Ha Jin’s A Good Fall, Paul Yoon’s Once the Shore, and Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders might prove more consistent, readers who appreciate spare, elliptical stories that last long after the final page will find considerable satisfaction here.
Review: “Short Stories,” Library Journal, June 1, 2011
Readers: Adult
Published: 2011 (United States) Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Short Stories, .Translation, Chinese
Dear Zari: Hidden Stories from Women of Afghanistan by Zarghuna Kargar
“‘I hope other people – particularly women – listen to these stories and become kinder to their own sex,’” a woman laments, her life made unbearable by her female in-laws who condemn her because she literally flushed away the evidence of her virginal blood.
“‘I don’t understand why God allows men who don’t care about women and girls to have families,’” reveals a woman whose life has been “pointless, empty” since she was married off at 14 to a 40-year-old drug addict-abuser as punishment for falling in love with the boy she grew up with in the same home.
“Girls are kept like dolls in the corner of the house. If they are sent to school they are taught to see this as a big favour; if they are given the same food as their brothers they have the best parents, and if they are bought new clothes they have the best family,” says the author, the most privileged of the women whose lives are captured here in this wrenching collection, having enjoyed the relative freedom of a western life, and yet still judged by the standards of her family’s traditional Afghan upbringing.
Dear Zari is the Afghan equivalent to Xinran’s acclaimed international bestseller, The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices. Like Xinran (who offers her personal support of the book on its back cover!), Zarghuna Kargar is London-based, and met many of her subjects because of a radio show; in Kargar’s case, she worked on the influential BBC World Service program, “Afghan Women’s Hour,” for several years until the UK government ended its funding in January 2010. “Dear Zari …” these women began their stories … and from them and their often shattering experiences, Kargar found the courage to share her own which she weaves through the lives of the women who bravely speak here.
Reading these chapters is a disturbing experience, especially knowing these stories are now – post 9/11, post-Taliban, 21st century. Most of the men here are, in a word, inhuman: if they are not violent pedophiles enslaving child brides, or giving away sisters and daughters to pay off their debts, then they’re discarding innocent girls for not bleeding on the wedding night, or, in one of the worst stories, a once-loving husband coldly abandons a young wife who lost a leg during a tragic bombing.
Shockingly, worse than the men are the women: the mothers trapped by their own abusive husbands, the mothers-in-law wielding the only kind of power they have, the sisters-in-law staking their territories – their cruelties have no limits. Only the final three of the 13 total provide glimmers of hope, albeit muted: a successful home business, living life as a man, and choosing one’s own partner allow at least three women to escape horrific fates. Their inclusion holds necessary promise for Afghan women of an equitable life free of repression, denial, and erasure.
Kargar, working with journalist Naomi Goldsmith, is a heartfelt, caring moderator, although perhaps a better champion than a writer. That said, the stories themselves are more important than their exposition in providing unforgettable testimony by women too often lost and forgotten, especially following the “State of the World’s Mothers 2011″-report released by Save the Children earlier this month that revealed Afghanistan is the worst place in the world to be a mother.
A US pub date doesn’t seem to have been announced, but UK copies are available from international booksellers. For those of us with such lucky access, Dear Zari should surely be required reading at the very least, and a challenge to initiate sustainable change at the most hopeful.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2011 (UK) Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Memoir, .Nonfiction, Afghan, British
Japan As Viewed by 17 Creators produced by Fanfare/Ponent Mon, translated by Shizuka Shimoyama, Elizabeth Tiernan, and Vanessa Champion
Here’s an uncommon venue for an East/West cultural exchange: manga across borders! Under the auspices of the French Institutes and Alliances in Japan, 10 French-speaking “comic creators” and seven Japanese manga artists wrote 16 chapters (two French creators worked together) inspired by their experiences visiting or living in various cities throughout the country.
Not surprisingly, as with Japan‘s companion title, Korea As Viewed by 13 Creators, this collection is uneven, ranging from the nostalgic, bittersweet, gorgeously rendered childhood memory of lost chances in Jiro Taniguchi’s “Summer Sky,” to a strangely insulting conversation between two friends condemning French ex-pats first, then Japanese customs and what they think are Japanese-specific characteristics in Joann Sfar’s “Waterloo’s Tokyo.”
The most standout chapter is not so much for its literary achievement, but contextual timing: Fabrice Neaud’s “The City of Trees” is a travelogue of the artist’s visit to Sendai (!). As he wanders the shopping centers, beaches, temples, and city streets, the immediate reaction is a realization that his detailed drawings are now historical remnants of places past, given the recent destruction of the coastal town by the devastating tsunami in March.
Other noteworthy chapters include Taiyo Matsumoto’s ”Kankichi,” about a young boy ostracized because he wants nothing more than to draw, who eventually saves his village with his artistic prowess, and Étienne Davodeau’s closing “Sapporo Fiction,” in which a Japanese fisherman goes to visit his “twin brother” for their 60th birthday and meets a French comic artist along his journey who uses his pictures in lieu of foreign words to communicate.
Readers might do better just reading single-author works, perhaps those of Jiro Taniguchi or Taiyo Matsumoto, for example. Both manga artists from this collection are highly recommended. That said, for newbies unfamiliar with any comic artists, this collection could certainly be a useful introduction which might lead to the next manga title. The more manga, the merrier always!
Readers: Young Adult, Adult
Published: 2006 (United States) Continue reading
The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Following up two unforgettable novels that earned her a MacArthur Fellows Program “Genius” Award (which comes with a no-strings-attached $500,000 “stipend” over five years!) in 2008 was surely going to be hard work.
Last year, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie debuted her first short story collection … here’s the irony: given her spectacular personal literary history, to not compare these 12 short stories to her two novels (Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun), at least for me, proved impossible. And ultimately, Adichie is much more the accomplished novelist than she is a short story writer. Still, that’s not to say that these stories are inferior in any way; some, in fact, are haunting gems.
The collection opens with one of the 12′s best, “Cell One,” about a pampered young man who steals from his own parents, whose dissolute lifestyle eventually lands him in jail, his changing development observed and narrated by his knowing younger sister. Other standouts include “A Private Experience,” in which two very different women – one a young Isbo Christian medical student, the other an older Hausa Muslim mother – climb into a shop window desperately seeking refuge during a ethnically-motivated massacre, “Ghosts,” in which an elder professor meets a colleague who he thought was long dead, and ”Jumping Monkey Hill,” in which a young Nigerian woman writer participates in a writing workshop run by a renowned academic who embodies all the colonial entitlement and appropriation of the overprivileged white man.
Unlike in her novels, Adichie is no longer grounded in her native Nigeria in her short fiction. She examines and confronts stories of Nigerian locals at home, as well as Nigerians abroad, both established immigrants and recent arrivals. Most of Adichie’s peripatetic characters are women; many are overwhelmed by their dislocation: a wife and her children living in the U.S. while her husband philanders at home, a young wife via arrangement whose doctor-husband has surely misled her, a woman reunited with her husband who barely recognizes the gentle student she married, and a young woman who escapes the advances of her so-called “uncle” and eventually falls in love with a foreign stranger.
In spite of the undeniable strength of Adichie’s stories, her novels embody the greater power. With that earlier proof of assured achievement, her readers will undoubtedly anticipate more lauded work to come.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2010 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Audio, .Fiction, .Short Stories, African, African American
Korea As Viewed by 12 Creators produced by Fanfare/Ponent Mon, translated by Vanessa Champion, Andy Milanesio, Andrés Moon
The idea is fascinating; so obviously simple yet undeniably clever. Six French graphic book artists were sent to Korea to be “completely immersed.” Six Korean manwha artists were also asked to participate. All 12 were given “complete carte blanche” to convey their individual views of Korea. The year was 2006, marking the 120th anniversary of Franco-Korean diplomatic relations.
Alas, the final product proves mixed, but perhaps that isn’t too surprising given the number of artists and the diversity of backgrounds and experiences.
The clear frontrunner is Lee Doo-Ho’s “Solgeo’s Tree,” a masterpiece of near-wordless perspective, both visually and literally: a painter creates a “marvelous painting” of a tree, but after his huge hands cradle a tiny still bird, he destroys his own work with the final pronouncement that “There is nothing more valuable than a life.”
The pine tree also looms tall in Lee Hae-Jae’s “The Pine Tree,” which shows a large, scattered family reuniting to mourn the death of the patriarch, poignantly narrated by a nephew whose memories give history to the family and their changing homeland. Vanyda’s “Oh Pilsung Korea!” is a cultural discovery romp for a pair of young hapa French Korean siblings as they make their first trip to their father’s estranged homeland. Guillaume Bouzard’s “Operation Zidane” comically depicts an over-the-top zany plot involving the French president and tiny pests in a mad dash to win the World Cup at any cost!
Other chapters vary – some are better than okay, some are hardly memorable, too many seem lost in translation (original languages are French, Italian, and Korean all rendered into English, although sometimes more clumsily than not), while a couple border on culturally insensitive at best. That said, the collection will definitely pique your curiosity, and hopefully encourage you to search out full-length works by some of the artists. Any excuse to read more manga and manwha always welcome!
Readers: Young Adult, Adult
Published: 2010 (United States) Continue reading
Lost & Found by Shaun Tan
The literati around the world have surely got the memo that 2011 is Shaun Tan‘s year. Every few weeks, he seems to be back in the news with new accolades (all well-deserved, I must add … yes, I got the memo of his genius, too!).
Not too many weeks ago, Australia-based Tan won the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film for The Lost Thing (available on iTunes for you techno-savvy), which he co-directed, based on his own story of the same name. Then came the very recent news that Tan won the 2011 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award; the coveted literature prize (known as “The World’s Largest Children’s Literature Award”) also comes with five million Swedish krona, something along the lines of $801,000!! WOW!
Lucky for us, we can delight in his latest title as our reward for being loyal groupies: Lost & Found is actually THREE books in one. The Red Tree shows how unexpected surprises can turn despair into hopeful joy; The Lost Thing captures a magical encounter that teaches the proper care and feeding of lost things; and The Rabbits somberly questions the irreversible consequences of colonialism.
Tan’s minutely detailed, whimsically playful, utterly unique art is again something to behold. As in his previous sensational titles, The Arrival and Tales from Outer Suburbia, Tan’s boundless imagination creates beckoning new worlds, just familiar enough to curiously venture in, yet so incomparably surreal and invitingly extraordinary to want to visit again and again. His versatile stories are multi-layered morality tales for all ages, gently suggestive and deeply lingering.
Explore his latest: three strokes of genius in one volume. Talk about rich rewards!
Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult, Adult
Published: 2011 Continue reading
One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature edited by Zohra Saed and Sahar Muradi, foreword by Mir Tamim Ansary
The title of this diverse anthology is taken from the opening line of Afghan fairy tales, not unlike ‘once upon a time.’ In this case, afsanah, seesanah – one story, thirty stories – “acknowledge[s] the significance that storytelling has had in our lives, its impact on our memories as Afghan Americans,” write the two editors Zohra Saed and Sahar Muradi. Serendipitously, a few weeks before picking up Story, I experienced the stupendous three-part theater marathon, The Great Game: Afghanistan, which with its 150-plus years of Afghan history culled into some 11 hours, surely enriched my reading of this collection.
Comprised of poems, short fiction, essays, excerpts from two blogs, and rich appendices (including a “Themes Index” and “Chronology of Afghan American History” – bet you didn’t know that dance legend Robert Joffrey was hapa Afghan American, or that an Afghan American invented the cooking method that became “Minute Rice”!), Story gathers the work of one of America’s newest ethnic groups. Afghan Americans number “just several hundred thousand people distributed across the country in scattered pockets, a community born of disaster halfway around the planet: in the last decades of the twentieth century, a revolution, an invasion from the north, a civil war, and finally a descent into chaos, utter chaos, which drove millions of refugees out of Afghanistan,” explains Mir Tamim Ansary in his “Foreword.”
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on December 25, 1979 looms large as the catalyst for many of the writers’ immigration memories included here. So too, of course, does 9/11 which changed for many the concept of what it means to be ‘American’; ironically, 9/11 eventually opened the door for 1.5-and second-generation Afghan Americans to return to their ancestral homeland to visit, reunite with family, to work, to even help rebuild the war-torn country.
Personal standouts include Yasmine Delawari Johnson’s “The Girl with the Green Eyes,” a poignant comparison of Johnson’s own life to a life she might have lived as she identifies with Sharbatgul, the National Geographic cover girl with the legendary piercing eyes; Khalida Sethi’s “My Mother,” in which she asks questions of her mother that Sethi answers through her own experiences that reflect her growing admiration and gratitude for her immigrant mother’s sacrifice and dedication; Sahar Muradi’s “The Things They Wait For,” which follows the quiet life of her displaced elderly grandparents; and Waheeda Samady’s “The Cab Driver’s Daughter,” which proudly honors her gentle father who bears no resemblance to the stereotypical labels of an “oppressor.”
While the contents of the collection are somewhat uneven and overall not yet mature, its absolute significance in the development in Afghan American literature cannot be diminished. With the exception of perhaps Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns) – whose work is not included, although referenced several times – who seems to have entered the literary canon fully formed, the writers here are still in the midst of finding their voices while their journeys are driven by challenging self-identification and transformative exploration.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2010 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Nonfiction, .Poetry, .Short Stories, Afghan American
Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters by Barack Obama, illustrated by Loren Long
Yes, President Obama’s first picture book is, of course, a gorgeous gift to his two young daughters. But it’s also quite a legacy for every child anywhere as it reminds us that a child’s potential is virtually unlimited in what he or she can grow up to be.
In telling his daughters the story of America, Daddy Obama includes the lives of 13 American heroes who used their gifts to change the world … from the creative young girl who grew up to be artist Georgia O’Keeffe who “helped us see big beauty in what is small,” to the brave boy who became baseball legend Jackie Robinson “and showed us all how to turn fear to respect and respect to love,” to a kind little girl who became Nobel Peace Prize winner Jane Addams who “taught adults and invited children to play and laugh and let their spirits grow wide,” to an inspiring boy who grew up to be activist Cesar Chavez who “showed farmworkers their own power when they felt they had none.”
The good Prez’s illustrator, Loren Long, cleverly captures the transformation from young child to hero … on the left side of each double-page spread is a growing audience of kiddies, while the right side shows the grown-up hero those children become. Long never misses an opportunity to infuse a moment of humor – check out young George Washington in red breeches holding a glinting ax behind his back, looking up at his own grown self inspiring his tattered troops through a harsh winter landscape.
Obama’s thoughtful book is a love letter to all Americans: “People of all races, religions, and beliefs. People … giving us the courage to lift one another up, and keep up the fight, to work and build upon all that is good in our nation.” He reminds his daughters (and the rest of us, ahem!) that all these diverse Americans “are all a part of you … that you are one of them … that you are the future.”
So of course no book is ever safe from critics, although I have to wonder if Obama’s detractors actually read all 40 pages here. The mud is flying around, especially over Obama’s choice to include Sitting Bull. A Fox News headline started out as “Obama Praises Indian Chief Who Killed U.S. General” but later backed down to “Obama Praises Indian Chief Who Defeated U.S. General.” Uhm … most leaders do everything they can to protect their people, especially when their nation is being violently invaded and eventually stolen.
The other criticism repeatedly popping up is that Obama took all those cushy White House hours (and taxpayers’ funding) to sit around and write this book. The accompanying press release sent with the title is clearly ready with a disclaimer (!): “The book was acquired and the manuscript completed prior to the President’s taking office in January 2009.”
But enough squabbling! Go read the actual book with your own children this Thanksgiving … sharing this love letter will surely fill you with gratitude.
Readers: All
Published: 2010 Continue reading
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