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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 17–32 of 103 results
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Daruma Days
$14.95Set in the internment camps of the British Columbia interior during World War II, Terry Watada’s Daruma Days captures the Japanese Canadian experience of imprisonment. Watada draws on the accounts of people who lived through the camps, often speaking with the voices of the issei and nisei, to portray the camps as haunted by demonic forces, the inhabitants caught between two worlds: the cultures of Japan and Canada.
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Denison Avenue
$32.95Shortlisted for 2024 Canada ReadsFinalist for the 2024 Carnegie Medals for Excellence through the American Library AssociationA moving story told in visual art and fiction about gentrification, aging in place, grief, and vulnerable Chinese Canadian eldersBringing together ink artwork and fiction, Denison Avenue by Daniel Innes (illustrations) and Christina Wong (text) follows the elderly Wong Cho Sum, who, living in Toronto’s gentrifying Chinatown–Kensington Market, begins to collect bottles and cans after the sudden loss of her husband as a way to fill her days and keep grief and loneliness at bay. In her long walks around the city, Cho Sum meets new friends, confronts classism and racism, and learns how to build a life as a widow in a neighborhood that is being destroyed and rebuilt, leaving elders like her behind.A poignant meditation on loss, aging, gentrification, and the barriers that Chinese Canadian seniors experience in big cities, Denison Avenue beautifully combines visual art, fiction, and the endangered Toisan dialect to create a book that is truly unforgettable.
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Diamond Grill
$19.95This story of family and identity, migration and integration, culture and self-discovery is told through family history, memory, and the occasional recipe. Diamond Grill is a rich banquet where Salisbury Steak shares a menu with chicken fried rice, bird’s nest soup sets the stage for Christmas plum pudding; where racism simmers behind the shiny clean surface of the action in the cafe. An exciting new edition of Fred Wah’s best-selling bio-fiction, on the 10th anniversary of its original publication, with added text and an all new afterword by the author.
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Disappearing Moon Cafe
$20.95Disappearing Moon Cafe was a stunning debut novel that has become a Canadian literary classic. An unflinchingly honest portrait of a Chinese Canadian family that pulses with life and moral tensions, this family saga takes the reader from the wilderness in nineteenth-century British Columbia to late twentieth-century Hong Kong, to Vancouver’s Chinatown.
Intricate and lyrical, suspenseful and emotionally rich, it is a riveting story of four generations of women whose lives are haunted by the secrets and lies of their ancestors but also by the racial divides and discrimination that shaped the lives of the first generation of Chinese immigrants to Canada.
Each character, intimately drawn through Lee’s richness of imagery and language, must navigate a world that remains inexorably “double”: Chinese and Canadian. About buried bones and secrets, unrequited desires and misbegotten love, murder and scandal, failure and success, the plot reveals a compelling microcosm of the history of race and gender relations in this country.
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Divide and Rule
$17.95In Divide and Rule, Walid Bitar delivers a sequence of dramatic monologues, variations on the theme of power, each in rhymed quatrains. Though the pieces grow out of Bitar’s personal experiences over the last decade, both in North America and the Middle East, he is not primarily a confessional writer. His work might be called cubist, the perspectives constantly shifting, point followed by counterpoint, subtle phrase by savage outburst. Bitar’s enigmatic speakers are partially rational creatures, have some need to explain, and may succeed in partially explaining, but, in the end, communication and subterfuge are inseparable – must, so to speak, co-exist.
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Festival of All Souls
$18.95Festival of All Souls explores the experience of an Asian woman born in Canada. Although neither fully rooted in one or the other, the influence of two different cultures allows heritage, gender and values to nonetheless, enrich a personal vision. The title refers to an Asian ceremony whereby families visit ancestral gravesites in the spring to pay their respects to the departed. During this observance of tribute and commemoration, time is also provided for contemplation and the acknowledgement of renewal that is in harmony with the season. The poetry in this collection is guided by, and ultimately expands upon themes inspired by this ritual: cycles of fullness and loss, expressions of visible and hidden energy, as well as navigations through public and private space. A definition of soul widens to include within our human capacity–plants, animals, minerals, and even weather. Whether leaves pause on the rim of a jade plant bowl, a starling understands Cantonese, or waves lunge like white dragons across Lake Ontario, an invitation is extended to celebrate the diversity of being in this world.
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Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars
$16.95At once a love letter and challenge to the traditional transgender memoir, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars is a playful, surrealist dance through queer coming of age.
A haunted young girl (who happens to be a kung-fu expert and pathological liar) runsaway from an oppressive city, where the sky is always grey, in search of love and sisterhood–and finds herself in a magical place known only as the Street of Miracles.There, she is quickly adopted into a vigilante gang of glamorous warrior femmes called the Lipstick Lacerators, whose mission is to scour the Street of violent men and avenge murdered trans women everywhere. But when disaster strikes, can our intrepid heroine find the truth within herself in order to protect her new family and heal her broken heart?
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Flesh, Tongue
$20.95In this brilliant and provocative first collection, Yaya Yao confronts her inherited fragmented self and her hunger for a home, using scraps of personal and communal memory to bridge languages, worldviews, and physical distance from her ancestral homeland. Bits of Cantonese, Mandarin, Hokkien, and Shanghainese are translated and altered to explore the dynamics between language and identity. In this collection, Yaya Yao has created a unique and authentic voice.
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Four Sufferings, The
$20.95Shiku hakku in Japanese means to endure, an expression that originates in Buddhism. This collection links Terry Watada’s past and present while acknowledging the fundamental suffering of human existence–in birth, aging, illness, and death–and the suffering endured in daily living–common frustrations, desire, separation. But at the same time it celebrates love, and in the end seeks an enlightened state of acceptance. Rise above life’s hardships and rejoice in the state of life is the overall theme of this collection.
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From the Shoreline
$20.00Steffi Tad-y’s debut collection brings forward diasporic experience as it intersects with mental illness. Family history and work lyrics occur against a tonal backdrop of the carceral. Yet Tad-y brings a tenderness to these fraught circumstances, finding beauty in detail and repetitive acts of love, in part due to the use of a multiplicity of forms that render a surplus of affect into beautiful images. Though danger properly exists in Tad-y’s world, her poetry takes its own advice in “Writer’s Archive”: “Look. Enough. Each full stop unspooling / the cardinal & bluebird privacy of things.”
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Gambatte
$32.95”Gambatte” means do your best and never give up, and that spirit is at the heart of David Tsubouchi’s life story. This memoir of the former Ontario cabinet minister begins as his family strives for acceptance amid the imprisonment of Canadians of Japanese descent and the confiscation of their property, possessions, and businesses by the Mackenzie King Liberal government in 1941. Despite growing up on the outside looking in, Tsubouchi never felt disadvantaged because he had a good family and was taught to persevere. Gambatte outlines his unusual career path from actor to dedicated law school student/lumber yard worker to politician. Tsubouchi was the first person of Japanese descent elected in Canada as a municipal politician and, as an MPP, to serve as a cabinet minister. His story also reveals an insider’s perspective of Mike Harris’s “Common Sense Revolution.”
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Game of 100 Ghosts, The
$20.95Inspired by an old Japanese parlour game of the Edo period (1603-1868), The Game of 100 Ghosts is a lyrical tribute to the poet’s friends and relations who recently departed their lives. In the game, participants gather in the dark at night and sit around 100 lit candles. Each player tells a ghost story, after which a candle is snuffed out. The last candle ends the spiritual evocation, which the participants hope will summon a supernatural being. This wonderful collection then evokes the spirits of lost friends and relations while paying tribute to a tradition.
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Ghost Face
$19.95‘Greg is clearly a poet of great vision and clarity. His voice is extremely confident and strong, with each poem well-crafted and lean… If you enjoy the work of Sarah Howe or Ocean Vuong, I would recommend this book with no hesitation.’ Stuart Buck, author of Become Something Frail
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Grappling Hook
$19.95Taking its title from Tomas Tranströmer, Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiangs Grappling Hook sifts the debris of the twenty-first century for insights into identity, desire, and the everyday struggles inherent to motherhood. In doing so, she presents vivid portraits of the joys and perils of marriage, the evolving fight for social justice in a world divided by inequity, and the uncertain future thatss left for children of the digital age. Grappling Hook is an impressive display of Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiangs considerable poetic gifts, and a love letter to those who are making meaningful change in unprecedented times.
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Harem, The
$22.95“I imagine a crowd of bottle blonde, husky voiced, fishnet-wearing hookers lounging on my couch. They sniff their coke and chat loudly about their Johns.”
How far would you go to be free?
Humorous, though tinged with a sense of the tragic, at times risqué, and utterly contemporary, The Harem is a fast-paced novel about young Asian women and their quest for freedom.
Farina has only one dream: to be free and move away from Peckville, a Muslim ghetto in a large city. She is eager to escape the clutches of her strict parents who will not let her drink, party or have any kind of contact with males. As soon as she turns eighteen, she sets her dream in motion and gets her own apartment. The only problem is that her minimum-wage job leaves her feeling anything but liberated. How can she resist when her ambitious best friend Sabrina proposes an infallible business idea? How harmful can running as escort agency really be? Will she finally be freed by her increasing wealth and independence, or will she remain enslaved by her increasing guilt?
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Help! I’m Alive
$22.95A powerfully emotional story of four people touched by a teen’s death, award-winning author Gurjinder Basran’s Help! I’m Alive is a clear-eyed exploration of meaningful connection in the modern era
After video footage of Jay’s death is shared on social media, a suburban Vancouver community is left to try to make sense of what happened to Jay and whether his death was an accident or a suicide.
Help! I’m Alive explores the aftermath through the eyes of four people all suddenly confronted with who they have been and how they should be in the wake of such loss. Jay’s former best friend, Ash, wonders what happened to their friendship and questions the relationships he has now; Winona, Jay’s troubled girlfriend struggles with guilt and abandonment; Anik, Ash’s older brother, is on a search for the meaning of life but hasn’t left his basement apartment in months; and Pavan, Ash and Anik’s mother, finds Jay’s death lays bare all her personal and maternal anxieties.
Unflinching but life-affirming, Help! I’m Alive is a Gen Z and Gen X coming-to-terms story about loneliness and connection, love and suffering, and the moments that bring us together and drive us apart.