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Reads for Asian Heritage Month
May is Asian Heritage Month, and the perfect chance to check out new and new-to-you books by Asian-Canadian writers.
All Books in this Collection
Showing 1–16 of 128 resultsSorted by latest
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The Breakwater
$24.95One morning in Toronto, Cathy Matsumoto’s father, Yasuo, calls to announce he intends to visit a dying cousin in Victoria.
Cathy’s never heard of this mysterious relative before, but she begrudgingly agrees to plan a cross-country family trip. It’s only in British Columbia that Cathy learns this “cousin” is actually Yas’s younger brother, Stum, who’s been languishing in psychiatric care for decades, abandoned, ever since Yas committed him to Essondale Asylum before World War Two, inadvertently sparing Stum from the atrocities of the Japanese Canadian internment camps.
Yas tries to fend off probing questions from his daughter, but revisiting old haunts stirs up memories of the brothers’ boyhood rivalry and coming-of-age near Victoria’s Chinatown, when Yas’s steely resolve to hold their fractured family together clashed against Stum’s troublesome turn toward a life of gambling, crime, and consorting with prostitutes.
In this stirring multigenerational saga, two brothers, both old men not far from death, must at last confront long-buried family secrets — and their lingering effects on subsequent generations.
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Tales of the Mountains and the Sea
$22.95Genre-bending and tinged with myth and folklore, these haunting debut stories centre young women at significant points in Lebanese history.
A teenage girl mourns the death of her grandmother, only to feel her grandmother’s spirit possessing her in a way that seems malicious. A family, struggling to make ends meet, receives an unexpected visitor, who has an awful proposal that may be impossible to refuse. A young girl worries that her brother is falling in with the wrong crowd, as civil war breaks out on the streets around them.
The five stories in Tales of the Mountains and the Sea trace pivotal movements in modern Lebanese history and the effects they have on women. As she centres women and the choices that they make, Dania Idriss deftly weaves together history and folktales in a way that is both evocative and chilling. The Tales of the Mountains and the Sea is a startling and astonishing debut that navigates the intricate nuances of human experience, cultural identity, family history, and the lasting impacts of war.
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Hide and Sikh
$20.00In 2018, Sunny Dhillon resigned as a journalist with The Globe and Mail. His blog post announcing his departure went unexpectedly viral. It was a decision that had been long brewing and Dhillon posted the piece with the hope that it would lead to “meaningful reflection on the lack of diversity in Canadian journalism and the problems therein.” But he was not optimistic.
In this sharply funny memoir, shaped as a series of letters to his daughter, Dhillon explains why he was not hopeful. From his earliest memories, his experience of being Canadian was shaped by race, and as a child he’d often found himself confused by what he should do when the fact he was “different” was raised. His first reaction was to hide – from his skin colour, from his native tongue and even from his name. Until he realized he didn’t feel the need to hide anymore, that he didn’t want to hide anymore. With warmth, honesty and lots of humour, Dhillon shares his journey so that his daughter will not have to struggle through the lessons he took too long to learn, so that she will know who she is and be proud.
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November, November
$19.95Written across the span of four Novembers, this collection delivers a send-off to “loved poets” who are no longer with us.
Dedicated as letters and long epistolary lyrics to those who are missing a loved one, November, November acknowledges poetry’s “palpitating vulnerable form,” and how sometimes a poem might be the only comfort that resides between silence and grief.
Isabella Wang’s second collection began as a tribute to the late Phyllis Webb, and was completed in the aftermath of Wang’s cancer diagnosis. The poems respond directly to Webb’s work and collapse the fine landscapes separating death and Wang’s own mortality. Over the course of treatment and “days [when] we don’t get to rewrite the history of our bodies,” the pace of Wang’s poetry slows down in the complicated recovery from cancer. Entering the cloudless silver of November days, her words tell a story of loss and illness, and her poems linger in the cold air, visible.
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Homecoming
$18.95“Wasn’t I enough to cross an ocean?”
Three generations of Filipina women converge across time and continents as they attempt to bridge the emotional and physical distances that have kept them apart. Sisters Tess and Vicky are inseparable as children, climbing mango trees and sharing dreams in their small Philippine barangay. But when Tess leaves for Canada, their world fractures, leaving Vicky to shoulder the weight of familial responsibilities. More than thirty years later, a funeral brings Vicky to Vancouver to reunite with Tess and her daughter, Ana. Together, the women grapple with the unspoken tensions of the past, hoping to reconcile—but is it too late?
Weaving seamlessly between dreams and memories, Kamila Sediego’s Homecoming tenderly navigates the ripple effects of immigration on those who leave, those who stay, and the generations that follow. A rich tapestry of culture, language, humour, and food, this soaring and heartbreaking drama reminds us that even across great distances, some bonds can never be broken.
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The Unravelling of Ou
$21.95Moving on is hard. Even harder when it’s from a make-believe friend—someone, or in this instance, some thing—who’s been your strongest source of support. On what should be one of the happiest days ever, the day her granddaughter is born, Minoo is faced with a terrible choice: make a clean break from her constant companion, a sock puppet named Ecology Paul, or lose her daughter and granddaughter, and maybe all of the people she loves. On an emotional drive home from the hospital, Ecology Paul shares the story of how Minoo got to this point, recalling Minoo’s early teenage pregnancy in Iran, her exile to Canada, her questions about her sexuality, and how a ragtag sock puppet came to her when she desperately needed to be seen. Full of imagination, whimsy and heart, The Unravelling of Ou follows Minoo’s struggles to justify the puppet’s existence and eventually, untangle herself from her dependence on it and reconnect with the people she loves.
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Slice the Water
$26.00Longlisted, Canada Reads
Born on the lush island nation of Mahana, Fred lives under the tyrannical rule of a book-burning king. Under the king’s rule, Mahanians are controlled by a military dictatorship and threatened with forced starvation, while people with disabilities are exiled. After Fred’s father suddenly disappears, Fred joins an underground movement of dissenters and becomes an unwitting global icon in the fight for Mahanian freedom. When he is recruited and relocated by an organization that appears sympathetic to Fred’s cause, he arrives in a seemingly peaceful foreign nation, where the impact of social media and technology creates a new, stranger struggle.
A dystopian thriller, a work of speculative fiction, and a coming-of-age story, Wong’s novel thrums with biting bursts of staccato-like prose — a fitting accompaniment to a fascinating exploration of contrasting political systems. As Fred unpeels layers of truth and sees beyond the optics of altruism and the illusion of choice, Slice the Water unpacks the myriad amplifying impacts of technology, addiction, and complacency.
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Grande Prairie With an E
$19.99Following the success of Straight Outta Busan, Stefano returns with more cartoons from his hit web comic series Modern Asian Family. This second collection of short cartoons from Stefano Jun chronicles his experiences as a Korean immigrant in Western Canada. Having moved to Canada as an 8 year old with no knowledge of English, Stefano encounters culture shock, family love, friendship, and ultimately finding a place for himself in the vast country he has called home for 20 years now.
These slice of life stories are a keenly observed insight into the experience of growing up in an unfamiliar place. Full of emotion, humour and surprise, Modern Asian Family: Grande Prairie with an E is a delight to read.
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SUBTEXT
SUBTEXT refracts the language of identity formation. It collages the echoes of diasporic and colonial histories through poetry, drama, autobiography, and archival uncovering. Divided into four parts, SUBTEXT peers into the imperceptible psychic strata created by intergenerational trauma, confronting the challenge of finding one’s place in a sensorium of concealed realities and obscured memories. Dwelling in the bubbling froth of dreamwork, these poems take a multifaceted approach to questions of diaspora and selfhood, incorporating visual and textual elements that dialogue with one another and ask readers to negotiate the unsteady shoals of identity and history.
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Jelly, Baby
$24.95In this revelatory collection of lyrical and poetic essays, Therese Estacion explores vital themes relating to her life as a disabled person.
Defying genre and constraint, Estacion conveys how ableism has impacted her disposition and self-esteem. She also confronts her own internalized ableism and unpacks how she has come to terms with disability in all its complexity.
Jelly, Baby fearlessly uncovers the trauma, grief, and rage inherent to the struggle to accept one’s own vulnerability and reach a place of love. Inspired by Estacion’s psychotherapy training, this book is a tender examination of some of the most vulnerable aspects of the self, and a head-on challenge of self-loathing. The result is a beautiful and astute meditation on ableism and a transformative journey deep into the psyche.
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Worldly Girls
$24.95Tamara Jong’s powerful memoir documents the slow unravelling of her connection to her faith and the tragic history of her fractured family, shining a light into the dark corners of memory that have haunted her well into adulthood.
With clear-eyed honesty and written in sparse yet searing prose, Jong collects the fragments of her unconventional childhood, with her busy schedule of Jehovah’s Witness meetings, Bible study, and door-to-door ministering. She also details her emotionally distant father and alcoholic mother’s tumultuous marriage, her deep yearnings to become a mother after the loss of her own, and her struggles with mental health.
After corporate and spiritual burnout, and a suicide attempt at the age of thirty-two, Jong comes to understand that the strict religion she had long believed would protect her prevented her from pursuing her true sense of self. In a story that traverses a wide range of potent themes—including addiction, estrangement, grief, infertility, and forgiveness—the ultimate message of Worldly Girls is one of hope as Jong finds her own path to healing and belonging.
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Where the Jasmine Blooms
$24.00Yasmine enters Lebanon escaping a messy divorce and seeking the family, culture, and connection that her Palestinian mother hid during their life in Toronto. It’s 2006, and she’s meeting her cousin Reem for the first time after connecting over social media. Reem teaches Arabic and lives in a refugee camp with her mother and sister. Her brother Ahmed lived there too until he went to Syria for work and then disappeared. When Yasmine receives a package of mysterious letters suggesting her father might still be alive, the cousins embark on a discovery of political secrets no one in the family wants them to know.
Complicating her questions about identity, belonging, and healing even further, Yasmine runs into Ziyad — an old flame who’s incidentally taking Reem’s class. Though the cousins’ lives could not be more different, Yasmine and Reem must learn from each other as they navigate abusive relationships, grief, displacement, and war.
Set amid the arid glamour of Lebanon’s beaches and urban landscapes, Where the Jasmine Blooms is at once a political historical thriller and a Muslim feminist love story. Turn-of-the-century Arab politics feature prominently, echoing loudly even twenty years later.
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The Long Burnout
$19.95The Long Burnout is the poetic chronicle of a doctor’s burnout, beginning with and continuing past the Covid-19 pandemic. Of course, burnout is a primary concern facing the medical profession today, and probably all of society. The anxiety created by the virus and its endless variants was amplified by difficulties in caring for people, preexisting pressures, and ever-worsening resource scarcities. And, when things seemed darkest, the author suffered the loss of his father, which added grieving to the ordeal. However, a slow process of recovery began thereafter, thanks to a supportive family, exercise and healthy habits, the catharsis of writing, and the tincture of time. These poems express a year of suffering and healing playing out among existential contexts, our place in a world which we are degrading, and a universe we still can’t understand. If only we could reverse our own civilization’s long burnout to achieve a respectful state of equilibrium with our surroundings: homeostasis, biologically, or the Buddhist idea of Oneness with the world.
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Revolutions
$18.95Revolutions sifts through the grains of Muslim daughterhood to reveal two metaphorical circles inextricably overlapping: shame and pleasure. In an extended conversation with Mona Hatoum’s artwork + and –, Revolutions asks how young Arab women – who live in homes and communities where actions are surveilled and categorized as 3aib or not 3aib, shameful or acceptable – make and unmake their identities. Working between a Palestinian and Iraqi poetics drawing from artists like Mahmoud Darwish and Naseer Shamma and a feminist Canadian poetics inspired by Erín Moure, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Nicole Brossard, Revolutions spirals and collapses as we turn and re-turn around its circles.
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Tamil Terrains
$23.00What happens when a two-thousand-year-old language rooted in a classical poetics of land moves, along with some of its peoples, through colonial and postcolonial upheaval, war, and forced or voluntary migrations?
Questioning traditional concepts of time, place, labour, love, purity, and gender, this prismatic collection of poems, translations, transcreations draws connections between ancient Sangam landscapes and migrant labour songs; classical Tamil love poems and the wounded memories of colonial plantation workers and undocumented refugees.
Building community with each other, Tamil translators living on Indigenous terrains in North America reflect on the violence of settler colonialism, descendants of Tamil indentured labourers in Malaysia and Singapore confront erasures inflicted upon them, and those rooted in Tamil’s traditional homelands encounter the intimacies and distances of a migrant tongue.
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Straight Outta Busan
$19.99A collection of short cartoons from Stefano Jun chronicling his experiences growing up a Korean immigrant in Western Canada. Having moved to Canada as an 8 year old with no knowledge of English, Stefano encounters culture shock, family love, friendship, and ultimately finding a place for himself in the vast country he has called home for 20 years now.
These slice of life stories are a keenly observed insight into the experience of growing up in an unfamiliar place. Full of emotion, humour and surprise, Modern Asian Family: Straight Outta Busan is a delight to read.