BY CYNTHIA MEIJIA-GIUDICI I have a very strong tie to the Filipino community of Seattle. My father, Tiburcio, was a FCS councilman in the late ‘60’s and my mother was Mrs. Filipino Community of Seattle queen, 1969-1970 and FCS Mother of the Year, 2003. I mention these ties to the community because I am proud [...]
BY LUCIA ENRIQUEZ In the course of a summer that I spent in a lot of airports, the short story collection “In the Company of Strangers” by Michelle Cruz Skinner proved to be the ideal companion. The 16 stories read quickly but make their impact slowly and with uncanny perplexity that befit the hurry-up-and-wait rhythm [...]
BY MARILYN MCENTYRE Married to her favorite classmate in her final year of medical school, Michelle Au finds herself pregnant a year into residency — one of the most physically demanding stages in a doctor’s life. She and her husband, also a newly minted MD, sometimes go for days on different shifts, arranging brief visits [...]
BY ADAM ROSENBECK Japan has been called a land of contradictions. Both isolated and integrated, aggressive and refined, old and new. Perhaps it is no surprise then that the country’s contemporary art, a reflection of these qualities, may appear bewildering. Their subjects, compositions, and themes often have no parallels in Western art. In “See/Saw,” Ivan [...]
In her bestselling novel, “Shanghai Girls,” published two years ago to wide acclaim, Lisa See chronicled the lives of two sisters, Pearl Chin and her younger sister, May, and their privileged life in pre-World War II Shanghai, then known as the Paris of Asia. Pearl, the alluring older sister, and May, her docile sibling, made [...]
BY TRACEY FUGAMI It’s August in Sea-Tac, Wash., and the sun blazes and heats the water in my blue kiddy-pool. On our back patio, I’m splashing and frolicking, the smell of plastic and water from the hose wafts through the air. My inner tube is my best friend. Soon the sun will disappear behind the [...]
BY LEONARD RIFAS Some of the most-circulated Japanese words in American popular culture have been linked to military suicide: hara-kiri, kamikaze pilots and banzai charges. Shigeru Mizuki’s “Onwards Towards Our Noble Deaths” tells a “90 percent fact” story about how his buddies died in World War II suicide attacks. (The cartoonist survived because at the [...]
In his introduction to this collection of Hmong American writing, Burlee Vang gives us an idea of why this book is a particularly important one. Given that Hmong history and culture has been passed down mainly through “oral stories, oral poetry, textile art, and the playing of various bamboo instruments,” this anthology heralds the inception [...]
Part investigative journalism and part political commentary, Amitava Kumar’s latest book “A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb,” is a thought-provoking, incisive, and intelligent look at America’s war on terror and its linkages to terrorism in India. As two of the world’s largest democracies, both the United States and India [...]
BY APRIL DE NONNO Can you tell the truth in the words of your oppressor? Will his language become the voice of your memories? Will his history be your own? These questions circulate like currents of air through Myung Mi Kim’s five poetry collections, beginning in 1991 with “Under Flag.” Book by book, she has [...]
SEATTLE – A time traveler seeking a glimpse of the International District’s past would do no better than to take its measure through the eyes of its Asian-Pacific Islander American storytellers. A good place to begin is the Panama Hotel. The historic local landmark figures prominently in Jamie Ford’s debut novel, “Hotel on the Corner [...]
BY TAMIKO NIMURA When I was in college, my Japanese American culture club wrote and performed skits based on the narratives of the hibakusha, the survivors of the atomic bombings in Japan. These skits asked us to inhabit — even perfunctorily, even tangentially — the bodies and the experiences of the hibakusha. Images of black [...]
“Voices of the Second Wave: Chinese Americans in Seattle” is a collection of 35 interviews of Chinese immigrants of the “lost generation” who settled or lived in the Seattle area. This “second wave” refers to Mandarin-speaking Chinese who came to America between 1934 and 1968, many as college students to escape the Japanese invasion or [...]
There aren’t many Nisei writers who have achieved literary success of the kind that gets them attention from more mainstream critics. One of the few is Wakako Yamauchi (disclosure: she is a friend of mine) and her plays and writings have been produced and praised for their sensitivity, for their portrayal of life in the [...]
It looks the same today as it did almost a century ago, like the abandoned set of an old Western movie, with two story buildings and wooden sidewalks. This is tiny Locke, located in the Sacramento Delta in California. Founded in 1915, it has the unique distinction of being the only town in the US [...]
BY LILY WOO Fujimini Island is a unique place to its animal inhabitants. Excitement fills the island as the animals make preparations for the Moon Festival. This is a cute story in which animals personify many emotions ranging from jealousy, arrogance, anger, remorse, and happiness. The lessons exemplified by the story include demonstrating the power [...]
There was a time in the 1980s/90s when tape recording was available on the cheap to consumers. Anyone with a tape deck would have the power to record mixed-tapes. You’d be able to record from the radio or other professionally recorded tapes or vinyl records. A certain type of sonic craft came about from this [...]
BY NAN MA “How many lives can we live? How many can we steal back and piece together?” asks Janie, the protagonist of award-winning author Madeleine Thien’s new novel “Dogs at the Perimeter.” In this captivating narrative, Thien deftly weaves together the past and the present, the personal and the historical, official narratives and folklore, [...]
