I think I’ve made a good start at what I hope to be able to dub my Summer of Asian American Literature. Even though summer has not yet begun, I have gotten through two novels and hopefully have the momentum to get through several more.
Only recently, I set up alerts to for Asian American literature so Janice Y.K. Lee’s one-year-old novel, The Piano teacher, only caught my eye this year when I saw it on a table at Chapters (bookstore). The beautiful evergreen dress against lily white skin on the …

I suppose I had vaguely noticed that a book had been published in May last year with the catchy title, “I Love Yous are for White People” from promotion on the Angry Asian Man blog but I dismissed it as a cheeky humourous book not worthy of my further attention.
I even downloaded the VisualizAsian podcast interview with Lac Su–author of what I thought was a funny novel, but a published author, nonetheless–and it took 6 months for me to find the podcast again and listen to it! And while I …

I didn’t stagger out my reading so well and in the past three weeks have read two Chinese-North American novels with some superficial similarities that momentarily made my head spin trying to recall which novel I was reading.
I do believe it was Daily Candy that alerted me to Wendy Lee’s Happy Family (it was!) and I was amused how Asian-American fiction made it onto the otherwise annoyingly “witty” site. So I thought it was a chicklit nanny story and perfect for summer reading.
A careful look at the somber cover and …

With last month’s travel*, I managed to blaze through two memoir-like books taking place in times and places I wouldn’t personally know. Yet with my upbringing, the Chinese and Buddhist cultural aspects are somewhat familiar.
I couldn’t quite suspend my disbelief when reading Xinran’s Sky Burial: An Epic Love Story of Tibet. That is, I wasn’t entirely convinced that Xinran met the woman, Shu Wen, who lived for 30 years in Tibet. At one point, Shu Wen, well on the way to having a large and convoluted story, recaps the epic …

I have to finish reading The Eighth Promise before I leave for Halifax.
You see, I borrowed it from the library and it would be costly if it got recalled while I was away. Besides, it’s a fascinating read. ;-)
I was first drawn to the book from the tagline, “An American son’s tribute to his Toisanese mother”. At the mention of 台山, my father’s and his forefathers’ region, I perked up. In a way few writers could, an Americanized writer can compellingly recount the history of Toisan, the region that is …