{"id":5514,"date":"2016-04-05T08:10:54","date_gmt":"2016-04-05T12:10:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=5514"},"modified":"2016-04-21T06:28:48","modified_gmt":"2016-04-21T10:28:48","slug":"asian-immigrants-tales","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=5514","title":{"rendered":"Asian Immigrants&#8217; Tales"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_5515\" style=\"width: 448px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/rogerwagner\/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-5515\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-5515\" class=\"wp-image-5515\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/vweisfeld.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/4535556965_a610bb7fbd_z.jpg?resize=438%2C306\" alt=\"suitcase, Asian\" width=\"438\" height=\"306\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-5515\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">adapted from Roger Wagner, creative commons license<\/p><\/div>\n<p>The recent success of the movie <a href=\"http:\/\/www.vweisfeld.com\/?p=5217\">Brooklyn<\/a> has reminds us of the universality of immigrant stories in American history (even as anti-immigrant, anti-refugee positions characterize the political discourse). While the immigrant experience is a common thread running through our national character, and the experiences of Irish and Italian immigrants relatively well known, each country\u2019s immigrant story is in many ways as unique as the person and family who dons this new cultural garment.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/lithub.com\/from-there-to-here-five-essential-tales-of-immigration\/\">Shawna Yang Ryan<\/a>, writing for <em>LitHub<\/em> (\u201cFrom There to Here: Five Essential Tales of Immigration\u201d) says \u201cImmigration is anything but pedestrian. To displace one\u2019s self in adulthood, to uproot, to leave behind ways of speaking, moving, being that are second nature is a feat of true grit.\u201d She tells of her own mother\u2019s move to the United States from Taiwan after marrying an American GI, which helped inspire her novel <em>Green Island<\/em>. Among the tales from other immigrants that she recommends are:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Carlos Bulosan\u2019s autobiographical <em>America Is in the Heart<\/em>, about the struggles and prejudices faced by Filipino farm workers. They worked in America legally (and, by the way, served in the U.S. military), but, says Ryan, were barred from citizenship. His book has been called a brown-skinned <em>Grapes of Wrath<\/em>.<\/li>\n<li><em>The Namesake<\/em>, a novel by Jhumpa Lahiri, about the Ganguli family\u2019s move from Kolkata (Calcutta) to Massachusetts and the inter-generational rifts that creates. Pulitzer Prize-winner Lahiri has now taken displacement one step further, living part-time in Italy and writing in that language<\/li>\n<li>The \u201cgraceful essays\u201d by Andrew Lam, collected in <em>Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora<\/em>, not only examine what it\u2019s like to come to American, but also the experience of a return visit to Vietnam<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>On this\u00a0 theme, I would add these classic award-winners from my bookshelf:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Anne Fadiman\u2019s non-fiction <em>The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down<\/em>, the tragic consequences for a Hmong family, whose child is afflicted with epilepsy, when their traditional beliefs collide with modern medicine. (National Book Critics Circle Award, 1997)<\/li>\n<li>The unforgettable memoir, <em>The Woman Warrior<\/em>, by Maxine Hong Kingston, relates her \u201cgirlhood among ghosts\u201d\u2014both her female relatives\u2019 ghosts from China and the New World ghosts she encounters: Policeman Ghosts, Social Worker Ghosts, Garbage Ghosts, and Wino Ghosts. (National Book Critics Circle Award, 1976)<\/li>\n<li>Chang-Rae Lee\u2019s <em>Native Speaker<\/em>\u2014one of the early books selected for community-wide reading\u2014about Korean American Henry Park, the \u201cperpetual outsider.\u201d (PEN\/Hemingway award for best first novel, 1996)<\/li>\n<li><em>Asian American Dreams<\/em>, by award-winning journalist Helen Zia describes the transformation of Asian Americans from a small and largely invisible minority to a presence in virtually every facet of American life.<\/li>\n<li>In the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Korean American businesses were especially targeted for destruction, with some 1500 looted and destroyed. <em>Blue Dreams<\/em>, by Nancy Abelmann and John Lie, explores the reasons Koreans were singled out and what happened in the aftermath.<\/li>\n<li>The classic <em>Strangers from a Different Shore<\/em>, by historian Ronald Takaki, lays out the successive waves of Asian immigration in American history, with each nationality\u2019s experience taking place in a different context.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\"><strong>Reader Question:<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p>What favorite books would you recommend that tell the immigrant story?<br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" style=\"width: 120px; height: 240px;\" src=\"\/\/ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/widgets\/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&amp;OneJS=1&amp;Operation=GetAdHtml&amp;MarketPlace=US&amp;source=ss&amp;ref=as_ss_li_til&amp;ad_type=product_link&amp;tracking_id=victoweisf-20&amp;marketplace=amazon&amp;region=US&amp;placement=1101874252&amp;asins=1101874252&amp;linkId=2ab5c997e1ebd789b451800138a7bf05&amp;show_border=true&amp;link_opens_in_new_window=true\" width=\"300\" height=\"150\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The recent success of the movie Brooklyn has reminds us of the universality of immigrant stories in American history (even as anti-immigrant, anti-refugee positions characterize the political discourse). While the immigrant experience is a common thread running through our national &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=5514\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Asian Immigrants' Tales - novels, histories, memoirs, and more: common threads make a varied American tapestry.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[40,266,118,267,104],"tags":[307,89,373,99],"class_list":["post-5514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","category-history","category-memoir","category-non-fiction","category-the-morgue","tag-los-angeles","tag-reading","tag-san-francisco","tag-urban-life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1qW","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5514"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5514\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5519,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5514\/revisions\/5519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}