Download or read book Snow Flower and the Secret Fan Random House Reader s Circle Deluxe Reading Group Edition written by Lisa See and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-12-12 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new deluxe eBook edition of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan features more than fifty additional pages of exclusive, author-approved annotations throughout the text to enrich your reading experience. You can access the eBook annotations with a simple click or tap on your eReader via the convenient links. Access them as you read the novel or as supplemental material after finishing the entire story. There is also Random House Reader’s Circle bonus content, sure to inspire discussion at book clubs everywhere. In Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, #1 New York Times bestselling author Lisa See takes us on a journey back to a captivating era of Chinese history and delves into one of the most mysterious of human relationships: female friendship. In nineteenth-century China, in a remote Hunan county, a girl named Lily, at the tender age of seven, is paired with a laotong, an “old same,” in an emotional match that will last a lifetime. The laotong, Snow Flower, introduces herself by sending Lily a silk fan on which she has written a poem in nu shu, a unique language that Chinese women created in order to communicate in secret, away from the influence of men. As the years pass, Lily and Snow Flower send messages on the fan and compose stories on handkerchiefs, reaching out of isolation to share their hopes, dreams, and accomplishments. Together they endure the agony of footbinding and reflect upon their arranged marriages, their loneliness, and the joys and tragedies of motherhood. The two find solace in their friendship, developing a bond that keeps their spirits alive. But when a misunderstanding arises, their relationship suddenly threatens to tear apart.
Download or read book Snow Flower and the Secret Fan written by Lisa See and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-10-17 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lily is the daughter of a humble farmer, and to her family she is just another expensive mouth to feed. Then the local matchmaker delivers startling news: if Lily's feet are bound properly, they will be flawless. In nineteenth-century China, where a woman's eligibility is judged by the shape and size of her feet, this is extraordinary good luck. Lily now has the power to make a good marriage and change the fortunes of her family. To prepare for her new life, she must undergo the agonies of footbinding, learn nu shu, the famed secret women's writing, and make a very special friend, Snow Flower. But a bitter reversal of fortune is about to change everything.
Download or read book Portrait of a Thief written by Grace D. Li and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2023-04-04 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER An Edgar Award Nominee for Best First Novel Longlisted for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize Named a New York Times Best Crime Novel of 2022 Named A Most Anticipated Book of 2022 by *Marie Claire* *Washington Post* *Vulture* *NBC News* *Buzzfeed* *Veranda* *PopSugar* *Paste* *The Millions* *Bustle* *Crimereads* Goodreads* *Bookbub* *Boston.com* and more! "The thefts are engaging and surprising, and the narrative brims with international intrigue. Li, however, has delivered more than a straight thriller here, especially in the parts that depict the despair Will and his pals feel at being displaced, overlooked, underestimated, and discriminated against. This is as much a novel as a reckoning." —New York Times Book Review Ocean's Eleven meets The Farewell in Portrait of a Thief, a lush, lyrical heist novel inspired by the true story of Chinese art vanishing from Western museums; about diaspora, the colonization of art, and the complexity of the Chinese American identity History is told by the conquerors. Across the Western world, museums display the spoils of war, of conquest, of colonialism: priceless pieces of art looted from other countries, kept even now. Will Chen plans to steal them back. A senior at Harvard, Will fits comfortably in his carefully curated roles: a perfect student, an art history major and sometimes artist, the eldest son who has always been his parents' American Dream. But when a mysterious Chinese benefactor reaches out with an impossible—and illegal—job offer, Will finds himself something else as well: the leader of a heist to steal back five priceless Chinese sculptures, looted from Beijing centuries ago. His crew is every heist archetype one can imagine—or at least, the closest he can get. A con artist: Irene Chen, a public policy major at Duke who can talk her way out of anything. A thief: Daniel Liang, a premed student with steady hands just as capable of lockpicking as suturing. A getaway driver: Lily Wu, an engineering major who races cars in her free time. A hacker: Alex Huang, an MIT dropout turned Silicon Valley software engineer. Each member of his crew has their own complicated relationship with China and the identity they've cultivated as Chinese Americans, but when Will asks, none of them can turn him down. Because if they succeed? They earn fifty million dollars—and a chance to make history. But if they fail, it will mean not just the loss of everything they've dreamed for themselves but yet another thwarted attempt to take back what colonialism has stolen. Equal parts beautiful, thoughtful, and thrilling, Portrait of a Thief is a cultural heist and an examination of Chinese American identity, as well as a necessary critique of the lingering effects of colonialism.
Download or read book Four Aunties and a Wedding written by Jesse Q. Sutanto and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-03-29 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The aunties are back, fiercer than ever and ready to handle any catastrophe—even the mafia—in this delightful and hilarious sequel by Jesse Q. Sutanto, author of Dial A for Aunties. Meddy Chan has been to countless weddings, but she never imagined how her own would turn out. Now the day has arrived, and she can't wait to marry her college sweetheart, Nathan. Instead of having Ma and the aunts cater to her wedding, Meddy wants them to enjoy the day as guests. As a compromise, they find the perfect wedding vendors: a Chinese-Indonesian family-run company just like theirs. Meddy is hesitant at first, but she hits it off right away with the wedding photographer, Staphanie, who reminds Meddy of herself, down to the unfortunately misspelled name. Meddy realizes that is where their similarities end, however, when she overhears Staphanie talking about taking out a target. Horrified, Meddy can’t believe Staphanie and her family aren’t just like her own, they are The Family—actual mafia, and they're using Meddy's wedding as a chance to conduct shady business. Her aunties and mother won’t let Meddy’s wedding ceremony become a murder scene—over their dead bodies—and will do whatever it takes to save her special day, even if it means taking on the mafia.
Download or read book Our Stories written by South Asian American Digital Archive and published by South Asian American Digital Archive. This book was released on 2021-08-17 with total page 767 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “. . . to suddenly discover yourself existing . . . .” Our Stories: An Introduction to South Asian America is an anthology rooted in community. Bringing together the voices of sixty-four authors—including a wide range of scholars, artists, journalists, and community members—Our Stories weaves together the myriad histories, experiences, perspectives, and identities that make up the South Asian American community. This volume consists of ten chapters that explore both the history of South Asian America, spanning from the 1780s through the present day, and various aspects of the South Asian American experience, from civic engagement to family. Each chapter offers stories of struggle, resistance, inspiration, and joy that disrupt dominant narratives that have erased South Asian Americans’ role in U.S. history and made restrictions on our belonging. By combining these narratives, Our Stories illustrates the diversity, vibrancy, and power of the South Asian American community.
Download or read book Inscrutable Belongings written by Stephen Hong Sohn and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-17 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inscrutable Belongings brings together formalist and contextual modes of critique to consider narrative strategies that emerge in queer Asian North American literature. Stephen Hong Sohn provides extended readings of fictions involving queer Asian North American storytellers, looking to texts including Russell Leong's "Camouflage," Lydia Kwa's Pulse, Alexander Chee's Edinburgh, Nina Revoyr's Wingshooters, and Noël Alumit's Letters to Montgomery Clift. Despite many antagonistic forces, these works' protagonists achieve a revolutionary form of narrative centrality through the defiant act of speaking out, recounting their "survival plots," and enduring to the very last page. These feats are made possible through their construction of alternative social structures Sohn calls "inscrutable belongings." Collectively, the texts that Sohn examines bring to mind foundational struggles for queer Asian North Americans (and other socially marginalized groups) and confront a broad range of issues, including interracial desire, the AIDS/HIV epidemic, transnational mobility, and postcolonial trauma. In these texts, Asian North American queer people are often excluded from normative family structures and must contend with multiple histories of oppression, erasure, and physical violence, involving homophobia, racism, and social death. Sohn's work makes clear that for such writers and their imagined communities, questions of survival, kinship, and narrative development are more than representational—they are directly tied to lived experience.
Download or read book Virtual Lotus written by Teri Shaffer Yamada and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This winning collection of short stories poignantly illustrates contemporary life in Southeast Asia
Download or read book Red is Not the Only Color written by Patricia Angela Sieber and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2001 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As urban China has undergone a rapid transformation, same-sex relations have emerged as a significant, if previously neglected, touchstone for the exploration of the meaning of social change. The short fiction in this volume highlights tensions between tradition and modernization, family and state, art and commerce, love and sex.
Download or read book Contemporary Chinese Fiction by Su Tong and Yu Hua written by Hua Li and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-02-18 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book explores the coming-of-age fiction of two of the most critically acclaimed and frequently translated contemporary Chinese authors, Yu Hua and Su Tong; it is the first in-depth book-length treatise in English about the contemporary Chinese Bildungsroman. Although various individual contemporary Chinese novelists and individual works of Chinese fiction have previously been discussed under the rubric of the Bildungsroman, none of these efforts has approached the level of comprehensive and comparative analysis that this book brings to the genre and its social contexts in contemporary China. This book will pique the interests not only of scholars and students of Chinese and comparative literature, but also of historians and social scientists with an interest in the region.
Download or read book British Asian Fiction written by Neil Murphy and published by Cambria Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this outstanding collection of essays, editors Neil Murphy and Wai-chew Sim seek not so much to demarcate the field of British Asian fiction, but to offer due acknowledgment of the artistic merit of the works of selected authors and simultaneously register their cultural significance. This volume demonstrates in situ the virtues of commentary that engages in a substantial manner with formal and aesthetic considerations, even as it implicates the discourses of alterity that dominate contemporary cultural criticism. Additionally, the essays delineate the complex subject positions explored by authors and texts, and focus on the way writers negotiate the exigencies of their location within and between different social formations. If it is the case that British literature can no longer be discussed in monocultural terms because of the impact of the writers under consideration, it is also the case that the diverse trans-cultural positions they explore are often less specified than proclaimed. Addressing difference, commensurability, and form-related notions of "truth-content," these essays enlarge our understanding of the range of British (and affiliated) identities, as well as the cultural contexts from which they arose. Working as academics and critics from Singapore, a useful vantage point, Murphy and Sim have extended the parameters of "British Asian" to include, not just writers from South Asia as is traditionally the case, but writers whose parents, or who themselves, have migrated to Britain from other regions of Asia, for example, Japan, Hong Kong, and Malaysia. This initiative has made it possible for professors Murphy and Sim to bring together, first, an interestingly varied group of authors, among them those who came to prominence in the 1980s--Salman Rushdie, Timothy Mo, Kazuo Ishiguro---as well as their younger contemporaries--Meera Syal, Romesh Gunesekera, Monica Ali, Hari Kunzru, Ooi Yang-May; and, second, a broad and diverse range of novels that span Timothy Mo's Sour Sweet (1982) and Tariq Ali's A Sultan in Palermo (2005), the fourth volume in his Islam quintet.
Download or read book A Fine Balance written by Rohinton Mistry and published by McClelland & Stewart. This book was released on 2010-10-29 with total page 834 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry’s stunning internationally acclaimed bestseller, is set in mid-1970s India. It tells the story of four unlikely people whose lives come together during a time of political turmoil soon after the government declares a “State of Internal Emergency.” Through days of bleakness and hope, their circumstances – and their fates – become inextricably linked in ways no one could have foreseen. Mistry’s prose is alive with enduring images and a cast of unforgettable characters. Written with compassion, humour, and insight, A Fine Balance is a vivid, richly textured, and powerful novel written by one of the most gifted writers of our time.
Download or read book Too Asian Not Asian Enough written by Khavita Bhanot and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2011-10-06 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A foodie revenge for a broken marriage; a nosy grandmother takes spying on her neighbours too far; a woman teacher is groomed by an artistic man and his clever son; a brutally short haircut makes a woman reassess her life; a gang-related attack comes back to haunt the perpetrator; a woman revisits the grave of her sister-in-law in Kenya . . . But also: a Roman soldier's lover; a frightened traveller in Jerusalem; a collector of hair in a European country; a teacher in New York is drawn to a girl and her East Asian composer boyfriend; a gay man is swindled during a whirlwind affair; an argument at a coke-fuelled party; three men disappointed at an upmarket sex club; an artist unwittingly precipitates the downfall of David Beckham . . .
Download or read book The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction written by William C. Hedberg and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic Chinese novel The Water Margin (Shuihu zhuan) tells the story of a band of outlaws in twelfth-century China and their insurrection against the corrupt imperial court. Imported into Japan in the early seventeenth century, it became a ubiquitous source of inspiration for translations, adaptations, parodies, and illustrated woodblock prints. There is no work of Chinese fiction more important to both the development of early modern Japanese literature and the Japanese imagination of China than The Water Margin. In The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction, William C. Hedberg investigates the reception of The Water Margin in a variety of early modern and modern Japanese contexts, from eighteenth-century Confucian scholarship and literary exegesis to early twentieth-century colonial ethnography. He examines the ways Japanese interest in Chinese texts contributed to new ideas about literary canons and national character. By constructing an account of Japanese literature through the lens of The Water Margin’s literary afterlives, Hedberg offers an alternative history of East Asian textual culture: one that focuses on the transregional dimensions of Japanese literary history and helps us rethink the definition and boundaries of Japanese literature itself.
Download or read book David Tung Can t Have a Girlfriend Until He Gets Into an Ivy League College written by Ed Lin and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "You're not allowed to have a girlfriend until college," my mother warned. "And you'd better get into an Ivy League school " David Tung Can't Get a Girlfriend until He Gets into an Ivy League College is the first official young adult novel from Ed Lin, author of the acclaimed novels Waylaid and This Is a Bust. Humorous and socially complex, the book tells the story of an Asian American New Jersey high-school student as he navigates multiple social circles as well as parental pressures to get As and conform to cultural norms and expectations. Amid these pressures from outside is the fear he will die alone, whether he gets into Harvard or not. Exploring class tensions (for example, regular school in an upscale, Asian-majority suburb versus weekend Chinese school in working-class Chinatown) and contemporary social neuroses, David Tung Can't Get a Girlfriend is an already hotly anticipated book from an author whose debut novel, Waylaid, established him as a pioneering, provocative, welcome new voice in young adult fiction. Ed Lin, a journalist by training, is the author of several award-winning books, including: Waylaid, his literary debut; the Robert Chow crime series, set in 1970s Manhattan Chinatown (This Is a Bust, Snakes Can't Run and One Red Bastard); and the Taipei Night Market crime series (Ghost Month, Incensed and 99 Ways to Die). Lin is the first author to win three Asian American Literary Awards. He lives in New York with his wife, actress Cindy Cheung.
Download or read book Pachinko National Book Award Finalist written by Min Jin Lee and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2017-02-07 with total page 604 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Top Ten Book of the Year and National Book Award finalist, Pachinko is an "extraordinary epic" of four generations of a poor Korean immigrant family as they fight to control their destiny in 20th-century Japan (San Francisco Chronicle). NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2017 * A USA TODAY TOP TEN OF 2017 * JULY PICK FOR THE PBS NEWSHOUR-NEW YORK TIMES BOOK CLUB NOW READ THIS * FINALIST FOR THE 2018DAYTON LITERARY PEACE PRIZE* WINNER OF THE MEDICI BOOK CLUB PRIZE Roxane Gay's Favorite Book of 2017, Washington Post NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * #1 BOSTON GLOBE BESTSELLER * USA TODAY BESTSELLER * WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER * WASHINGTON POST BESTSELLER "There could only be a few winners, and a lot of losers. And yet we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones." In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant--and that her lover is married--she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son's powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations. Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From bustling street markets to the halls of Japan's finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Lee's complex and passionate characters--strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisis--survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history. *Includes reading group guide*
Download or read book Contemporary Diasporic South Asian Women s Fiction written by Ruvani Ranasinha and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-05-28 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first comparative analysis of a new generation of diasporic Anglophone South Asian women novelists including Kiran Desai, Tahmima Anam, Monica Ali, Kamila Shamsie and Jhumpa Lahiri from a feminist perspective. It charts the significant changes these writers have produced in postcolonial and contemporary women’s fiction since the late 1990s. Paying careful attention to the authors’ distinct subcontinental backgrounds of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka – as well as India - this study destabilises the central place given to fiction focused on India. It broadens the customary focus on diasporic writers’ metropolitan contexts, illuminates how these transnational, female-authored literary texts challenge national assumptions and considers the ways in which this new configuration of transnational, feminist writers produces a postcolonial feminist discourse, which differs from Anglo-American feminism.
Download or read book Bound Feet Western Dress written by Pang-Mei Chang and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2011-04-27 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A harrowing dual memoir that braids the story of a Chinese-American woman’s search for identity with the dramatic tale of her great-aunt, who was born at the turn of the century in tradition-bound China and went on to become Vice President of China’s first women’s bank. "In China, a woman is nothing." Thus begins the saga of a woman born at the turn of the century to a well-to-do, highly respected Chinese family, a woman who continually defied the expectations of her family and the traditions of her culture. Growing up in the perilous years between the fall of the last emperor and the Communist Revolution, Chang Yu-i's life is marked by a series of rebellions: her refusal as a child to let her mother bind her feet, her scandalous divorce, and her rise to Vice President of China's first women's bank in her later years. In the alternating voices of two generations, this literary debut brings together a deeply textured portrait of a woman's life in China with the very American story of Yu-i's brilliant and assimilated grandniece, struggling with her own search for identity and belonging. Written in pitch-perfect prose and alive with detail, Bound Feet and Western Dress is the story of independent women struggling to emerge from centuries of customs and duty.
