Patron saints of nothing
When seventeen-year-old Jay Reguero learns his Filipino cousin and former best friend, Jun, was murdered as part of President Duterte's war on drugs, he flies to the Philippines to learn more.
When seventeen-year-old Jay Reguero learns his Filipino cousin and former best friend, Jun, was murdered as part of President Duterte's war on drugs, he flies to the Philippines to learn more.
"The iconic author of the bestselling phenomenon Crazy Rich Asians returns with a glittering tale of love and longing as a young woman finds herself torn between two worlds--the WASP establishment of her father's family and George Zao, a man she is desperately trying to avoid falling in love with"--
Recent immigrants from China and desperate for work and money, ten-year-old Mia Tang's parents take a job managing a rundown motel in Southern California, even though the owner, Mr. Yao is a nasty skinflint who exploits them; while her mother (who was anengineer in China) does the cleaning, Mia works the front desk and tries to cope with demanding customers and other recent immigrants--not to mention being only one of two Chinese in her fifth grade class, the other being Mr. Yao's son, Jason.
"Beautiful Country is the real deal. Heartrending, unvarnished, and powerfully courageous, this account of growing up undocumented in America will never leave you."--Gish Jen, author of The Resisters Ba Ba told me this and I in turn carried it in my heart: so long as we didn't stake claim to what wasn't ours--the things, our rooms, America, this beautiful country--we would be okay. An incandescent and heartrending memoir about Qian Julie Wang's five years living undocumented after immigrating with her parents from China to New York City in 1994. In Chinese the word for the United States, Mei Guo, translates directly to "beautiful country," but when seven-year-old Qian is plucked from her warm and happy childhood surrounded by extended family in China, she finds a world of crushing fear and poverty instead. Unable to speak English at first, Qian is isolated and disregarded, put into special education classes because she doesn't speak the language and humiliated by teachers and classmates when she struggles to pay attention because of hunger or exhaustion. She encounters racism, and people of other races, for the first time, shocked at where her family fits in comparison to their status as educated elites in China. After school she works shifts alongside her mother in Chinatown sweatshops. There is so much about Qian's new home that doesn't make sense, but the rules of survival are drilled into her head: If you see a policeman, you must run in the other direction. If anyone asks--or even if they don't--you tell them you were born here. Do as you're told or we could be separated forever. Understanding impliclity the toll this has taken on her parents, Qian tries desperately to cheer them up and mediate their increasingly heated arguments, certain that if she is good enough, she can hold the family together. In remarkable, unsentimental prose Wang channels her childhood perspective, illuminating the cruelty and indignity of America's immigration system, while also crafting a narrative of resilience from her family's small moments of joy: their first slice of pizza, "shopping days" when the family would unearth unlikely treasures in Brooklyn's trash, and the necessary escape she found in books at the local library. Searing and unforgettable, Beautiful Country is an essential book about the cost of making a home in a hostile land from an astonishing new talent"--
"Real life isn't a fairytale. But Tié̂n still enjoys reading his favorite stories with his parents from the books he borrows from the local library. It's hard enough trying to communicate with your parents as a kid, but for Tié̂n, he doesn't even have the right words because his parents are struggling with their English. Is there a Vietnamese word for what he's going through? Is there a way to tell them he's gay?"--
"Like many six-year-olds, Mira Jacob's half-Jewish, half-Indian son, Z, has questions about everything. At first they are innocuous enough, but as tensions from the 2016 election spread from the media into his own family, they become much, much more complicated. Trying to answer him honestly, Mira has to think back to where she's gotten her own answers: her most formative conversations about race, color, sexuality, and, of course, love. Written with humor and vulnerability, this deeply relatable graphic memoir is a love letter to the art of conversation--and to the hope that hovers in our most difficult questions"--
A boy and his grandfather cross a language and cultural barrier using their shared love of art, storytelling, and fantasy.
High school seniors Bảo and Linh, whose feuding families own competing Vietnamese restaurants, conceal their budding romance, as well as Linh's desire to become an artist.
A young Asian girl notices that her eyes look different from her peers but by drawing from the strength of the powerful women in her life, she recognizes her own beauty and discovers a path to self-love and empowerment.
"Nineteen eighties Detroit was a volatile place to live, but above the fray stood a safe haven: Chung's Cantonese Cuisine, where anyone--from the city's first Black mayor to the local drag queens, from a big-time Hollywood star to elderly Jewish couples--could sit down for a warm, home-cooked meal. Here was where, beneath a bright-red awning and surrounded by his multigenerational family, filmmaker and activist Curtis Chin came of age; where he learned to embrace his identity as a gay ABC, or American-born Chinese; where he navigated the city's spiraling misfortunes; and where--between helpings of almond boneless chicken, sweet-and-sour pork, and some of his own, less-savory culinary concoctions--he realized just how much he had to offer to the world, to his beloved family, and to himself. Served up by the cofounder of the Asian American Writers' Workshop and structured around the very menu that graced the tables of Chung's, Everything I learned, I learned in a Chinese restaurant is both a memoir and an invitation: to step inside one boy's childhood oasis, scoot into a vinyl booth, and grow up with him--and perhaps even share something off the secret menu"--Provided by publisher.