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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Accidental Asian'
As a second-generation Chinese-American, Eric Liu has grown up with an awkward relationship to race and ethnic identity. He can follow a conversation in Chinese, although he would have problems if he tried to take part in it; as for the written language, he is functionally illiterate. He would be the first person to question which of his personality traits are "Chinese" or "American," "Asian" or "white," or none of the above, and The Accidental Asian is, in fact, a rigorous self-examination--not merely about the costs and benefits of assimilation, but about whether assimilation should even be viewed in those terms.
Whether he's recalling his adolescent frustration with "Chinese hair" that just wouldn't permit itself to be styled, examining the history of Chinatown, or pondering the mixture of fear and fascination with which China is viewed by Americans, Liu writes with admirable personal intensity. It doesn't matter whether you consider The Accidental Asian to be a memoir or a batch of interconnected essays; once you've read it, you will be forced to consider for yourself what place, if any, race has in America today (but even more so tomorrow). [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Accidental Asian : Notes of a Native Speaker'
As a second-generation Chinese-American, Eric Liu has grown up with an awkward relationship to race and ethnic identity. He can follow a conversation in Chinese, although he would have problems if he tried to take part in it; as for the written language, he is functionally illiterate. He would be the first person to question which of his personality traits are "Chinese" or "American," "Asian" or "white," or none of the above, and The Accidental Asian is, in fact, a rigorous self-examination--not merely about the costs and benefits of assimilation, but about whether assimilation should even be viewed in those terms.
Whether he's recalling his adolescent frustration with "Chinese hair" that just wouldn't permit itself to be styled, examining the history of Chinatown, or pondering the mixture of fear and fascination with which China is viewed by Americans, Liu writes with admirable personal intensity. It doesn't matter whether you consider The Accidental Asian to be a memoir or a batch of interconnected essays; once you've read it, you will be forced to consider for yourself what place, if any, race has in America today (but even more so tomorrow). [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'American Knees'
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Art of Expressing the Human Body'
Beyond his martial arts and acting abilities, Bruce Lee's physical appearance and strength were truly astounding. He achieved this through an intensive and ever-evolving conditioning regime that is being revealed for the first time in this book. Drawing on Lee's own notes, letters, diaries and training logs, bodybuilding expert John Little presents the full extent of Lee's unique training methods including nutrition, aerobics, isometrics, stretching and weight training. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Asian American Sexualities: Dimensions of the Gay and Lesbian Experience'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Barbarians are Coming'
In David Wong Louie's finely crafted, funny, and exceptionally well-written coming-of-age story set in the late '70s, a young Chinese American struggles toward the American dream of affluence, leaving behind his befuddled immigrant parents and their small apartment over their laundry business. The narrator of The Barbarian's Are Coming has been trained at the Culinary Institute of America and is ready to rise to any challenge a capon or a champignon can offer. Newly appointed resident chef of the Richfield Ladies' Club in Connecticut, Sterling Lung ignores his well-coifed employers' urgings that he cook Chinese food for them. His father, on the other hand, who wanted Sterling to become a doctor, takes his revenge by never allowing his son to cook for him. Aging and unwell, he nurses a bittersweet anger at having raised a child who knows almost nothing about his family's culture, who speaks little Chinese, and who prides himself on his ignorance of Chinese cooking. On the one occasion Sterling is allowed to cook in her kitchen, his mother scowls over his shoulder, criticizing every move. "You call yourself a chef?" she prods him.
"Didn't they teach you anything at that school?" She clucks her tongue and goes to the refrigerators and returns with a bottle. "Oyster sauce is always good." The store-bought sauce is against everything I've ever learned about gastronomy. Sauces are the supreme test of a chef's skill. Often, cooking is the sauce. But sauce out of a bottle, some anonymous committee of tongues in a laboratory determining the proper blend of flavors for my palate, my dishes? I read the label: "Oyster extractives, sugar, water, monosodium glutamate, salt, cornstarch, caramel color." Why not ketchup? Why not Drano?In a last bid to set Sterling up in the only way they know how, his parents bring a "picture bride" from China to marry him. At the same moment, a relationship he had assumed was casual suddenly and alarmingly metamorphoses, as his girlfriend announces that she's pregnant.
Louie's much-lauded 1991 short-story collection, Pangs of Love, gave hints of his future development. In his first novel, as promised, he shows a narrative ingenuity as remarkable as his cultural insights. --Regina Marler [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Beyond the Narrow Gate: The Journey of Four Chinese Women from the Middle Kingdom to Middle America'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Big Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Chinese-American and Japanese-American Literature'
Includes prose, poetry, songs, excerpts from novels and plays. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Chasing Hepburn : A Memoir of Shanghai, Hollywood, and a Chinese Family's Fight for Freedom'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Child of the Owl'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'China Boy'

› Find signed collectible books: 'China Men'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'China Men'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Chinese Cook Book'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Cook's Family'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Cultural Revolution'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dictee'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dim Sum for Everyone'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Eating Chinese Food Naked: A Novel'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Empress Orchid'
From a master of the historical novel, empress orchid sweeps readers into the heart of the forbidden city to tell the fascinating story of a young concubine who becomes china's last empress. Min introduces the beautiful tzu hsi, known as orchid, and weaves an epic of a country girl who seized power through seduction, murder, and endless intrigue. When china is threatened by enemies, she alone seems capable of holding the country together. In this "absorbing companion piece to her novel becoming madame mao" (new york times), readers and reading groups will once again be transported by min's lavish evocation of the forbidden city in its last days of imperial glory and by her brilliant portrait of a flawed yet utterly compelling woman who survived, and ultimately dominated, a male world [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Every Grain of Rice : A Taste of Our Chinese Childhood in America'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Falling Leaves'
"Riveting. A marvel of memory. Poignant proof of the human will to endure." Amy Tan.
"Brilliant, compelling, and unforgettable. A heart-rending modern day Cinderella story set against the turbulence of 20th century China. Autobiography at its best." Nien Chang, author of Life and Death in Shanghai.
"Charged with emotion...A vivid portrait of the human capacity for meanness, maliceand love." Jung Chang, author of Wild Swans.
"Fascinating and heart-rending stuff...a harrowing story of emotional cruelty." The Times of London
International bestseller.
The emotionally wrenching yet ultimately uplifting memoir of a Chinese woman struggling to win the love and acceptance of her family.
In this compelling memoir that scaled bestseller lists in England, Australia, and Hong Kong, Adeline Yen Mah chronicles her painful childhood growing up in a wealthy yet abusive Chinese family. The unwanted daughter scorned by her family, young Adeline dreamed of freedom and independence, ultimately escaping to the West to launch a successful career in medicine.
When Adeline's mother died giving birth to her, she was deemed bad luck and ostracized by her family. Then her father took a beautiful Eurasian bride and Adeline soon fell victim to the wrath of her stepmother. Treated as a pariah, she was shuttled off to boarding schools, bullied by her siblings, and deprived of the beautiful clothes and things given to the rest of the family.
Moving from Shanghai and Hong Kong to London and the United States, Falling Leaves is an enthralling saga of a prosperous Chinese family set against a background of changing political times and the collision of East and West. Written in haunting prose, it evokes all the suspense and emotional force of a satisfying novel. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Falling Leaves Return to Their Roots: The True Story of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Fifth Book of Peace'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Foreign Bodies'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Homebase'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Honor and Duty'
As one of only two Asians at the U.S. Military Academy in the 1960s, Kai Ting must endure prejudice and preconceptions of his fellow cadets as the specter of Vietnam hangs over West Point. By the author of China Boy. 50,000 first printing. $50,000 ad/promo. BOMC Alt. Tour. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Hunger'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens And the Making of Modern America'
This book traces the origins of the "illegal alien" in American law and society, explaining why and how illegal migration became the central problem in U.S. immigration policy--a process that profoundly shaped ideas and practices about citizenship, race, and state authority in the twentieth century.
Mae Ngai offers a close reading of the legal regime of restriction that commenced in the 1920s--its statutory architecture, judicial genealogies, administrative enforcement, differential treatment of European and non-European migrants, and long-term effects. In well-drawn historical portraits, Ngai peoples her study with the Filipinos, Mexicans, Japanese, and Chinese who comprised, variously, illegal aliens, alien citizens, colonial subjects, and imported contract workers. She shows that immigration restriction, particularly national-origin and numerical quotas, re-mapped the nation both by creating new categories of racial difference and by emphasizing as never before the nation's contiguous land borders and their patrol. This yielded the "illegal alien," a new legal and political subject whose inclusion in the nation was a social reality but a legal impossibility--a subject without rights and excluded from citizenship. Questions of fundamental legal status created new challenges for liberal democratic society and have directly informed the politics of multiculturalism and national belonging in our time.
Ngai's analysis is based on extensive archival research, including previously unstudied records of the U.S. Border Patrol and Immigration and Naturalization Service. Contributing to American history, legal history, and ethnic studies, Impossible Subjects is a major reconsideration of U.S. immigration in the twentieth century.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'In Full Bloom'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Longtime Californ': A Documentary Study of an American Chinatown'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Lost Garden'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Lost in Translation'
Nicole Mones doesn't waste any time getting to the heart of the matter in her first novel, Lost in Translation. Within the first 10 pages we discover that protagonist Alice Mannegan, an interpreter based in Beijing, has a yen for sex with Chinese men. By the time we reach page 20, we've learned that Alice is in full flight from her father, a racist U.S. congressman, and about to start working for Adam Spencer, an American archeologist on the hunt for the missing bones of one of the century's biggest scientific finds: Peking man. Having set the stage, Mones steps back and lets her characters do the work as she proceeds to spin a tale that is part mystery, part love story, and part cultural exchange. Alice and Spencer travel to a remote region of China, accompanied by Dr. Lin Shiyang, with whom Alice falls in love. Mones spends a fair amount of time on the team's search for the bones, whose mysterious disappearance during the Second World War has never been explained, but her main focus is less on finding Peking man than on exposing the skeletons in her main characters' closets. As Alice, Spencer, and Dr. Lin move forward in their quest, they are forced to reckon with their pasts. Each, it seems, has an ulterior reason for being where they are and doing what they do, and it is in the subtle play of personalities, motivations, and misunderstandings that Lost in Translation finds its rhythm.
The key to the novel's success is Mones's in-depth knowledge of China's culture, history, and politics. The question of cultural identity is at the core of her tale, and she skillfully weaves various aspects of Chinese life--from ancestor worship to the Cultural Revolution--into the personal relationships of her characters. By novel's end, readers have discovered a great deal about archeology, China, and most especially about the unmapped territories of memory, desire, and identity. Lost in Translation is a fine first novel, the first salvo of a promising literary career. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'M. Butterfly'
Based on a true story that stunned the world, M. Butterfly opens in the cramped prison cell where diplomat Rene Gallimard is being held captive by the French governmentand by his own illusions. In the darkness of his cell he recalls a time when desire seemed to give him wings. A time when Song Liling, the beautiful Chinese diva, touched him with a love as vivid, as seductiveand as elusiveas a butterfly.
How could he have known, then, that his ideal woman was, in fact, a spy for the Chinese governmentand a man disguised as a woman? In a series of flashbacks, the diplomat relives the twenty-year affair from the temptation to the seduction, from its consummation to the scandal that ultimately consumed them both. But in the end, there remains only one truth: Whether or not Gallimard's passion was a flight of fancy, it sparked the most vigorous emotions of his life.
Only in real life could love become so unreal. And only in such a dramatic tour de force do we learn how a fantasy can become a man's mistressas well as his jailer. M. Butterfly is one of the most compelling, explosive, and slyly humorous dramas ever to light the Broadway stage, a work of unrivaled brilliance, illuminating the conflict between men and women, the differences between East and West, racial stereotypesand the shadows we cast around our most cherished illusions.
M. Butterfly remains one of the most influential romantic plays of contemporary literature, and in 1993 was made into a film by David Cronenberg starring Jeremy Irons and John Lone.
› Find signed collectible books: 'Millicent Min, Girl Genius'
Millicent Min is having a bad summer. Her fellow high school students hate her for setting the curve. Her fellow 11-year-olds hate her for going to high school. And her mother has arranged for her to tutor Stanford Wong, the poster boy for Chinese geekdom. But then Millie meets Emily. Emily doesn't know Millicent's IQ score. She actually thinks Millie is cool. And if Millie can hide her awards, ignore her grandmother's advice, swear her parents to silence, blackmail Stanford, and keep all her lies straight, she just might make her first friend. What's it gong to take? Sheer genius. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Mona in the Promised Land'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Moon Cakes'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee: Observations on Not Fitting in'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'No Physical Evidence: A Courtroom Novel'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Ocean of Words'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'On Gold Mountain'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Pangs of Love: And Other Stories'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Pangs of Love'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Ribbons'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Rice Cakes and Paper Dragons'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Rice Room: Growing Up Chinese-American-From Number Two Son to Rock'N'Roll'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Ruby Lu, Brave and True'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Ruby Lu, Empress of Everything'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Stanford Wong Flunks Big-Time'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Surviving on the Gold Mountain: A History of Chinese American Women and Their Lives'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Tiger's Tail'

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Troublemaker and Other Saints'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Typical American'
A Chinese American's tale of boom and bust and the changes that take their toll. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Unsubmissive Women: Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Waiting'
"Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu." Like a fairy tale, Ha Jin's masterful novel of love and politics begins with a formula--and like a fairy tale, Waiting uses its slight, deceptively simple framework to encompass a wide range of truths about the human heart. Lin Kong is a Chinese army doctor trapped in an arranged marriage that embarrasses and repels him. (Shuyu has country ways, a withered face, and most humiliating of all, bound feet.) Nevertheless, he's content with his tidy military life, at least until he falls in love with Manna, a nurse at his hospital. Regulations forbid an army officer to divorce without his wife's consent--until 18 years have passed, that is, after which he is free to marry again. So, year after year Lin asks his wife for his freedom, and year after year he returns from the provincial courthouse: still married, still unable to consummate his relationship with Manna. Nothing feeds love like obstacles placed in its way--right? But Jin's novel answers the question of what might have happened to Romeo and Juliet had their romance been stretched out for several decades. In the initial confusion of his chaste love affair, Lin longs for the peace and quiet of his "old rut." Then killing time becomes its own kind of rut, and in the end, he is forced to conclude that he "waited eighteen years just for the sake of waiting."
There's a political allegory here, of course, but it grows naturally from these characters' hearts. Neither Lin nor Manna is especially ideological, and the tumultuous events occurring around them go mostly unnoticed. They meet during a forced military march, and have their first tender moment during an opera about a naval battle. (While the audience shouts, "Down with Japanese Imperialism!" the couple holds hands and gazes dreamily into each other's eyes.) When Lin is in Goose Village one summer, a mutual acquaintance rapes Manna; years later, the rapist appears on a TV report titled "To Get Rich Is Glorious," after having made thousands in construction. Jin resists hammering ideological ironies like these home, but totalitarianism's effects on Lin are clear:
Let me tell you what really happened, the voice said. All those years you waited torpidly, like a sleepwalker, pulled and pushed about by others' opinions, by external pressure, by your illusions, by the official rules you internalized. You were misled by your own frustration and passivity, believing that what you were not allowed to have was what your heart was destined to embrace.Ha Jin himself served in the People's Liberation Army, and in fact left his native country for the U.S. only in 1985. That a non-native speaker can produce English of such translucence and power is truly remarkable--but really, his prose is the least of the miracles here. Improbably, Jin makes an unconsummated 18-year love affair loom as urgent as political terror or war, while history-changing events gain the immediacy of a domestic dilemma. Gracefully phrased, impeccably paced, Waiting is the kind of realist novel you thought was no longer being written. --Mary Park [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Who's Irish?'
Nobody writes about the immigrant experience like Gish Jen. What sets her apart from other ethnic writers is the wide-angle lens she turns not only on her own Chinese American ethnic group, but on Jewish Americans, African Americans, Irish Americans, and just about any other hyphenate you'd care to name. Though her tales are filtered through an Asian experience, they are, at heart, the quintessential American story of immigration, assimilation, and occasional tensions with other ethnic communities. The title story, for example, is a neat variation on a time-worn theme: mothers and daughters. The narrator is an elderly Chinese woman whose thoroughly assimilated daughter, Natalie, has married into an Irish American family. Natalie is successful; her husband, John, is not. Natalie's mother comments early on:
I always thought Irish people are like Chinese people, work so hard on the railroad, but now I know why the Chinese beat the Irish. Of course, not all Irish are like the Shea family, of course not. My daughter tell me I should not say Irish this, Irish that.The narrator has other thoughts on the Irish question as well, including the connection between national diet and world view: "Plain boiled food, plain boiled thinking," she says of John, then adds that "because I grew up with black bean sauce and hoisin sauce and garlic sauce, I always feel something is missing when my son-in-law talk." But it soon becomes apparent that the problems between the narrator and her daughter's family are less cultural than generational, and in the end the mother forms a surprising alliance.
Jen comes at the question of identity from another angle in "Duncan in China," in which a second-generation Chinese American man returns to Mainland China to teach English. Here she manages to delicately suggest the enormity of the differences between the very American Duncan and his Chinese students, coworkers, and relatives. And in "Birthmates" she places her computer programmer protagonist, Art Woo, in close proximity to the low-income, mostly black residents of a welfare hotel that he's accidentally checked into. Class, race, gender, and job security all figure into this brilliant, subtle story that looks at the dark side of the American dream and finds that failure comes in all colors. These eight stories are sharply written, filled with humor, pathos, and more than a few surprising twists and turns. Quite simply, Who's Irish? is a delight. --Alix Wilber [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Winged Seed: A Remembrance'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White'
Yellow by Frank H. Wu is an eclectic, incisive investigation-cum-meditation that, though focusing on Asian Americans, recasts the United States' ongoing debate about racial identity in all forms. Wu suggests that the widespread stereotyping of Asian Americans, while "superficially positive," is inherently damaging. Mixing personal anecdotes, current events, academic studies, and court cases, Wu not only debunks the myth of a "model minority" but also makes discomfiting observations about attitudes toward affirmative action, what he calls "rational" discrimination, mixed marriages, racial profiling, and the "false divisions" of integration versus pluralism and assimilation versus multiculturalism. Though its conclusions are unremarkable, Yellow is thought provoking. The book's strength--besides its clarity and thoughtfulness--is a lack of tendentiousness. Wu prefers to suggest, not posit; muse, not shout; and ask questions, not necessarily answer them. --H. O'Billovitch [via]
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