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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 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, [...]
