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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 33–48 of 101 results
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Home Sickness
$21.95The characters in these ten stories are longing for escape and attempt to leave home, but inevitably and perhaps ironically find themselves homesick. Chih-Ying Lay, a Montreal-based expatriate from Taiwan familiar with both homesickness and home sickness, probes our desperate need for home, often matched with an equally desperate need to get away from it. Lay’s characters are outsiders, whether queer, indigenous, unloved or lost, and each discovers that home is not the sanctuary it was meant to be. Sometimes, they find a place to call their very own, as if to tell the reader: You can, too.
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Hotline
$21.95A 2023 Canada Reads FinalistLonglisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller PrizeA vivid love letter to the 1980s and one woman’s struggle to overcome the challenges of immigration.It’s 1986, and Muna Heddad is in a bind. She and her son have moved to Montreal, leaving behind a civil war filled with bad memories in Lebanon. She had plans to find work as a French teacher, but no one in Quebec trusts her to teach the language. She needs to start making money, and fast. The only work Muna can find is at a weight-loss center as a hotline operator.All day, she takes calls from people responding to ads seen in magazines or on TV. On the phone, she’s Mona, and she’s quite good at listening. These strangers all have so much to say once someone shows interest in their lives–marriages gone bad, parents dying, isolation, personal inadequacies. Even as her daily life in Canada is filled with invisible barriers at every turn, at the office Muna is privy to her clients’ deepest secrets.Following international acclaim for Niko (2011) and The Bleeds (2018), Dimitri Nasrallah has written a vivid elegy to the 1980s, the years he first moved to Canada, bringing the era’s systemic challenges into the current moment through this deeply endearing portrait of struggle, perseverance, and bonding.
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How Does A Single Blade of Grass Thank the Sun?
$19.95Building on the success of the Journey Prize-shortlisted title story, the stories of How Does a Single Blade of Grass Thank the Sun? present an updated and whimsical new take on what it means to be Canadian. Lau alludes to the personal and political histories of a number of young Asian Canadian characters to explain their unique perspectives of the world, artfully fusing pure delusion and abstract perception with heartbreaking reality.Correspondingly, the book’s title refers to an interview with Chinese basketball star Yao Ming, who when asked about the Shanghai Sharks, the team that shaped his formative sporting years, responded, “How does a single blade of grass thank the sun?” Lau’s stories feature the children and grandchildren of immigrants, transnational adoptees and multiracial adults who came of age in the 1990s–all struggling to find a place in the Western world and using the only language they know to express their hopes, fears and expectations.
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How to Hold a Pebble
$20.95How do we scale up our imagination of the human? How does one live one’s life in the Anthropocene?
How to Hold a Pebble–Jaspreet Singh’s second collection of poems–locates humans in the Anthropocene, while also warning against the danger of a single story. These pages present intimate engagements with memory, place, language, migration; with enchantment, uncanniness, uneven climate change and everyday decolonization; with entangled human/non-human relationships and deep anxieties about essential/non-essential economic activities. The poems explore strategies for survival and action by way of a playful return to the quotidian and its manifold interactions with the global and planetary. Of loss no scale remains no seawall… Between one’s despairs / they will brighten / Hope’s in-built traces.
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Hsin
$21.95Nanci Lee’s debut explores 4th Century Su Hui’s palindrome of longing. Hsin arises from an ancient Chinese ethical philosophy, less a set of moral standards than an appeal to tune.
Heart-mind and nothingness are fair English translations of Hsin, but their tidiness risks losing some of the sharper, wider sides of absence and appetite. As a historical process, according to Hang Thaddeus T’ui-Chieh, Hsin frustrates, “the psychological fragmentation and compartmentalization of the West.”
Born to a Syrian father and a Chinese mother, who gave her up for adoption, Lee explores her origins in a compendium of poem fragments where form embraces the process of its unfolding. These are Koan-like poems, resonant with tones at turns ageless and contemporary; Hsin holds silence in ways that both claim and keep at bay.
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I Am Full Moon
$19.95In this lyrical memoir, Lily Hoy Price writes with moving detail about her childhood and adolescence in a large Chinese Canadian family in the Cariboo country of northern British Columbia. The ninth daughter in a family of 12 children, Lily is an observant child who tucks away every image of life in rugged Quesnel during the 1930s for one unforgettable tale after another. She has carefully selected many of her father’s early photographs to illustrate her stories. The celebrated pioneer photographer Chow Dong Hoy left a legacy of more the 1,500 photographs taken after 1909, and created an invaluable record of the cultural diversity of the Cariboo region. With similar sensitivity and the same eye for detail, Lily Hoy Price seamlessly weaves both the innocence and expectations of a young child and the struggles of her parents, who came to Canada during the racially charged days of the imposed $100 head tax.
Filled with love, confusion, family celebrations and family tragedies, these stories open a window on an era long past. Rich with the author’s own insight, the stories are at times sad and humourous, but always thoughtful and interesting. I Am Full Moon creates an intimate portrait of life in an unusual, gifted family and is a significant addition to the historical literature of British Columbia.
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Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei
$14.00Introduction to the Introduction to the Introduction by André Alexis
For me, reading the Introduction was like being caught in a spring shower while waiting for the 41, and running into a library to get out of the rain and, because the rain lasts, wandering the aisles on the fifth floor, taking books from the shelves (Waley’s translations from the Chinese, a work by Roland Barthes, an oversized book about eastern birds…), draping my winter coat on a chair and sitting down to read.
My coat smells of wet coconut matting, and the library is warm, and I fall asleep, my head on the desk, and dream about a strange library filled with impossibly rare and impossibly beautiful works: Waley on birds, Barthes’ translations from the Chinese, an oversized book about rain…
And when I wake, moments later, after what seems like hours, I have the momentary and vivid conviction that, if I listened properly, I could translate water into any language at all.
Pain Not Bread is a collaborative writing group formed in 1990 by Roo Borson, Kim Maltman and Andy Patton. In Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei, they occupy the border created by translation, allusion and echo, and make it into habitable space, a place where the subtle sensitivities of poets from the troubled late Tang Dynasty (Wang Wei, Li Bai, Du Fu, …) blend with our own millennial anxieties. What do poets do in a difficult time? It’s as though Pain Not Bread were talking and drinking with their Tang contemporaries on some old rickety ferry making its way back and forth between English and Chinese, Chinese and English, in the process weaving together a music of supreme nuance and tonal registration, a mode of speaking and feeling which is “undisfigured by sentiment” and yet riddled with its own mortality.
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Kai’s Tea Eggs
$21.95An endearing and beautifully illustrated children’s book about learning to embrace our heritage and celebrating what makes us unique.
Multicultural Day is coming up at school, and Kai is nervous about sharing her family’s Chinese food with her classmates. Kai’s mother is excited about making some special dishes, but Kai doesn’t like feeling different from everyone else.
Upset, she runs off on her own and meets Ming the dragon, who takes her on a magical journey to explore different parts of Chinese culture – especially all the delicious food! With Ming’s help, Kai learns about her family roots and how to celebrate all that makes her unique.
Kai’s Tea Eggs is a charming story for anyone who, like Kai, has felt the frustration of trying to fit in before finally learning to appreciate who they are.
Ages 3 to 7.
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Keepers of the Faith
$24.95Keepers of the Faith is set within a small Muslim sect of India, ruled by an avaricious priesthood that demands absolute submission while enforcing archaic social customs. When a section of the community rebels, it is summarily excommunicated, shunned by friends and family and denied religious rites. The peaceful community is split into two.
The novel follows the fates of two blissful young lovers, Akbar and Rukhsana, in the historic city of Udaipur. When the communal split occurs, their families are on opposite sides; the lovers’ dream of a happy life together is shattered, and they are forced into separate destinies. Akbar, from the rebel group, goes on to become a writer and family man in Mumbai, while Rukhsana gets married to an immigrant engineer from the United States fanatically devoted to the priesthood.
Years later, Akbar’s and Rukhsana’s paths cross again. Much has changed and much has not, and they are presented with soul-destroying choices about the rest of their lives.
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Letters From Johnny
$20.00Winner of BEST CRIME NOVELLA at The Crime Writers of Canada Awards of Excellence 2022
Set in Toronto 1970, just as the FLQ crisis emerges to shake an innocent country, eleven year old Johnny Wong uncovers an underbelly to his tight, downtown neighbourhood. He shares a room with his Chinese immigrant mother in an enclave with American draft dodgers and new Canadians. He is befriended by Rollie, one of the draft dodgers who takes on a fatherly and writing mentor role. Johnny’s mother is threatened by the “children’s warfare society.” A neighbour is found murdered. He suspects the feline loving Catwoman next door and tries to break into her house. Ultimately he is betrayed but he must act to save his family. He discovers a distant kinship with Jean, the son of one of the hostages kidnapped by the FLQ who have sent Canada into a crisis. As his world spins out of control, his only solace are letters to Dave Keon, who “as Captain of the Toronto Maple Leafs, can be trusted.”
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Love Cake
$20.95Winner of the Lambda Literary Award, Lesbian Poetry, 2012
Honourable Mention, San Francisco Book Festival, Poetry, 2012In Love Cake, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explores how queer people of colour resist and transform violence through love and desire. Refusing to forget the traumas of post 9/11 Islamophobia, and Sri Lanka’s civil war, Love Cake documents the persistence of survival and beauty. It maps the complicated, luscious joy of reclaiming the body and sexuality after abuse, examines a family history of violence with compassion, and celebrates the beautiful resistance of queer people of colour in love and home-making.
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Love in a Time of Technology
$20.95Shortlisted for the Guyana Prize, Best Book of Poetry, 2014
Whether in the heart of downtown Toronto, a bookstore in Boston, the courtyard of the Taj Mahal–through the portals of cyberspace–on the banks of a Tampa river, or a journey through time to Georgetown, an old colonial capital, love circumscribes everything. But this book is no wide-eyed outpouring; it probes and questions concepts and beliefs, pokes fun at age, companions taken for granted, and the realization that, like a mannequin in a Manhattan storefront, love is “faceless and, almost, raceless.” If love circumscribes everything, these poems show that everything–economics, politics, ambitions and exiles–also circumscribes love.
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Magdaragat
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Miah
$22.95“‘Half century under Japan then half century under Kuomintang . . . too much,’ my mother would sigh and shake her head.”
Miah means “fate” in Taiwanese. Spanning much of the twentieth century, these linked, subtly understated stories trace the destinies of simple folk from the brutal Japanese occupation of the early twentieth century through to the “White Terror” of the exiled Chinese Mainlanders and the Kuomintang, and finally to modern Taiwan and Canada.
In the powerfully gripping “Miah,” a woman from Vancouver accompanies her mother to Taiwan for her grandmother Ah Mah’s funeral. There she discovers the tragic story of Fifth Uncle, who was hounded by Kuomintang forces until he took pesticides and died . . . In “The Colonel and Mrs Wang” a Mainlander officer and his Taiwanese-raised son confront each other over politics. One day, the son is betrayed to the authorities. Who was the anonymous informer? . . . In the touching story “Lysander,” a modern day Taiwanese boy is sent to Vancouver for his education. A diamond cannot be polished without friction, he has been taught. He must bear the hardship in an alien teenage culture where he tries to desperately cope and eventually loses himself.
Miah is a rare look at Taiwanese and modern Canadian life, historical, and personal, and completely honest.
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Migration Songs
$16.95Joan is on the brink. Cough drop addict, school bus driver, mixed race daughter of a Maoist English father and Chinese-Canadian mother, Joan struggles for meaning after a friend’s death reveals a secret life. Migration Songs is a lost letter from your past, an intimate experience full of humour and grace.
“A strong debut from a new hopeful voice.”—The Coast
“Quon writes with a great deal of humour, and she spins a good yarn.”—Quill & Quire
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Mirrors and Windows
$25.00Over the years Anna Yin has had the honour to translate more than 50 poets’ works. With more and more people growing interested in translation and bilingual poetry, it is time to publish these translations in book form. I hope this serves as a good resource, and will further stimulate wider and stronger interest and conversation for cross-cultural exchange. As Maya Angelou said: “I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.” I hope this contribution will open more of these homes.