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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 81–96 of 138 results
Phantompains
$20.00Therese Estacion survived a rare infection that nearly killed her, but not without losing both her legs below the knees, several fingers, and reproductive organs. Phantompains is a visceral, imaginative collection exploring disability, grief and life by interweaving stark memories with dreamlike surrealism.
Taking inspiration from Filipino horror and folk tales, Estacion incorporates some Visayan language into her work, telling stories of mermen, gnomes, and ogres that haunt childhood stories of the Philippines and, then, imaginings in her hospital room, where she spent months recovering after her operations.
Estacion says she wrote these poems out of necessity: an essential task to deal with the trauma of hospitalization and what followed. Now, they are demonstrations of the power of our imaginations to provide catharsis, preserve memory, rebel and even to find self-love.
Picture Bride
$22.95Following the India-China war of 1962, the Chinese Indians (the Hakka), fearing suspicion and hostility, begin to emigrate. Twenty-year-old Jillian Wu leaves Calcutta to marry a man she has never met–Peter Chou, also a Hakka–with much anticipation, only to discover that he is gay. Forced by her husband to keep up the charade of a “normal” marriage, and pressured by her in-laws to have a child, she flees back to Calcutta, only to be disowned by her conservative family. A moving story with political overtones, set during a period of changing times and changing values.
Prairie Ostrich
$19.95Winner, Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers
Not every story has a happy ending.Since her brother’s death, eight-year-old Egg Murakami has been living day-to-day on the family ostrich farm near Bittercreek, discovering life to be an ever-perplexing condition. Mama Murakami has curled up inside a bottle, and Papa has exiled himself to the barn with the birds. Big sister Kathy tells stories to Egg so that the world might not seem so awful.
The Murakami family is not happy. But in the hands of Tamai Kobayashi, their story becomes a drama of rare insight and virtuosity. Weighing physical, cultural, and emotional isolation against the backdrop of schoolyard battles and adult mysteries, Kobayashi paints a compelling portrait of a feisty and endearing outsider.
As Kathy’s final year in high school counts down to an uncertain future, the indomitable Egg sits quiet witness to her unravelling family as she tries to find her place in a bewildering world.
Precedented Parroting
$21.95Opening with an exit, the poems in Precedented Parroting accept no assumptions. With the determination and curiosity of a problem-solving crow, this expansive debut plumbs personal archives and traverses the natural world, endeavouring to shake the tight cage of stereotypes, Asian and avian. Praised as “lively and intelligent” and “lyrically delicious,” Barbara Tran’s poetry offers us both the keen eye and grace of a hawk, “red-tailed gliding / on time.”
Primal Sketches
$17.95Fueled by our perpetual need to find meaning and purpose in our lives, Primal Sketches is a book that considers how our actions profoundly effect the lives of fellow humans as well as the natural world around us. How our desire to connect, care, and empathize, are constantly interrupted by feelings of insecurity and growing anxiety of our uncertain future in a world that is continually bombarded by global conflicts and environmental crises. However, our determination to carry on provides glimpses of hope amid brutal and unthinkable actions and these bright, tender moments reveal our capacity to learn, understand, and love–the essence of our humanity.
Quiet Night Think
$21.95“Quiet Night Think is a stunning work.” — Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing
“One function of the poet at any time is to discover by his own thought and feeling what seems to him to be poetry at that time,” writes Wallace Stevens. In Quiet Night Think, award-winning poet Gillian Sze expresses her own definition.
During the remarkable period of early parenthood, Sze’s new maternal role urges her to contemplate her own origins, both familial and artistic. Comprised of six personal essays, poems, and a concluding long poem, Quiet Night Think takes its title from a direct translation of an eighth-century Chinese poem by Li Bai, the subject of the opening essay. Sze’s memory of reading Li Bai’s poem as a child marks the beginning of an unshakable encounter with poetry. What follows is an intimate anatomization of her particular entanglement with languages and cultures.
In her most generically diverse book yet, Sze moves between poetry and prose, mother and writer, the lyrical and the autobiographical, all the while inviting readers to meditate with her on questions of emergence and transformation: What are you trying to be? Where does a word break off? What calls to us throughout the night?
Reel Asian
$29.95Founded in 1997 by producer Anita Lee and journalist Andrew Sun, the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival is a unique showcase of contemporary Asian cinema and work from the Asian diaspora. The festival fosters the exchange of cultural and artistic ideals between East and West, provides a public forum for homegrown Asian media artists and their work and fuels the growing appreciation for Asian cinema in Canada.
In Reel Asian: Asian Canada on Screen, contributors, many of them filmmakers, examine East and Southeast Asian Canadian contributions to independent film and video. From artist-run centres, theories of hyphenation, distribution networks and gay and lesbian cinema to F-words, new media technologies and sweet n’ sour controversies, Reel Asian: Asian Canada on Screen presents a multi-faceted picture of independent Asian film in Canada. The collection highlights the screen as a site forthe reflection, projection and reimagination of identities and communities, and explores the idea that ‘Asian Canada’ is less a demographic category than it is a term of art.
Reel Asian brings together creators of award-winning features and acclaimed experimental shorts; critics, curators, artists and activists; enemy aliens, impersonators, ex-pats and ‘Food Jammers’ to explore how history and culture have played out onscreen. Whether calling geopolitical and generic categories into question or finding new ways of unleashing the magic of the cinematic image, the anthology showcases the ways in which Asian Canadians are making their distinctive mark on screens from the multiplex to the iPod, across Canada and beyond.
Co-published with the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival, this is the first anthology of its kind, and includes a substantial selection of images and stills, as well as a resources section providing detailed artist and distribution information.
Contributors include Nobu Adilman, Jason Anderson, Leon Aureus, Cameron Bailey, Romeo Candido, Lily Cho, Nicole Chung, David Eng, Ann Marie Fleming, Richard Fung, Monika Kin Gagnon, Colin Geddes, Kwoi Gin, Mike Hoolboom, Alice Ming Wai Jim, Cheuk Kwan, Julia Kwan, Anita Lee, Helen Lee, Karin Lee, Keith Lock, Pamila Matharu, Christine Miguel, Tan Hoang Nguyen, Midi Onodera, Mieko Ouchi, Alice Shih, Mina Shum, Mary Stephen, Ho Tam, Loretta Todd, Khanhthuan Tran, Phil Tsui, Paul Wong, Su-Anne Yeo, Iris Yudai and Wayne Yung.
‘[The Reel Asian Festival] strikes the best balance between cutting edge and community. Strong programming and deep roots attract a super-hyphenated tribe.’
– NOW Magazine
Remembering Taiyaki
$24.95
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.
Salt in My Life
$20.95In her latest collection of poetry, Lien Chao covers a wider terrain of forms and styles to include symphonic lyrics, reflective travelogues, and multimedia-poetic stage performance. Sound and vision blend across the collection with a sense of textual fluidity, connecting her physical and emotional journeys as she strives for inner peace. Salt in My Life is a spiritual quest carried out through the creation of poetry.
Saturn Peach
$20.00In Saturn Peach, Lily Wang establishes a distinctive voice that is part heartbreak and part wise witness chronicling the strangeness of a technologized world. When asked to describe her book, Wang answered in her quintessential way, “There are things I never want to know but always know. Every day I live with them. Every day I live. I am like a young fruit. Like a peach, common, not the popular kind but oblate, saturn. I live and inside me this pale fruit, yellow and white. I take bites out of myself and share them with you. Maybe you taste like me. Maybe you hold this fruit and become a tree.” If ever there were a book that disarmingly – and seemingly effortlessly – encouraged its reader to become a metaphor, then Saturn Peach is it.
Scarborough
$19.95SHORTLISTED FOR CANADA READS 2022
NOW A MOTION PICTURE directed by Shasha Nakhai and Rich Williamson; screenplay by Catherine Hernandez
Trillium Book Award and City of Toronto Book Award finalist; Edmund White Debut Fiction Award finalist; A Globe 100, National Post and Quill and Quire Best Book of the Year
Scarborough is a low-income, culturally diverse neighbourhood east of Toronto, the fourth largest city in North America; like many inner-city communities, it suffers under the weight of poverty, drugs, crime, and urban blight. Scarborough the novel employs a multitude of voices to tell the story of a tight-knit neighbourhood under fire: among them, Victor, a black artist harassed by the police; Winsum, a West Indian restaurant owner struggling to keep it together; and Hina, a Muslim school worker who witnesses first-hand the impact of poverty on education.
And then there are the three kids who work to rise above a system that consistently fails them: Bing, a gay Filipino boy who lives under the shadow of his father’s mental illness; Sylvie, Bing’s best friend, a Native girl whose family struggles to find a permanent home to live in; and Laura, whose history of neglect by her mother is destined to repeat itself with her father.
Scarborough offers a raw yet empathetic glimpse into a troubled community that locates its dignity in unexpected places: a neighbourhood that refuses to be undone.
Seeking Spirit
$22.95In her memoir Seeking Spirit: A Vietnamese (Non)Buddhist Memoir, Linda Trinh says she had everything she thought an immigrant woman should want: motherhood, career, and security. Yet she felt empty. Growing up in Winnipeg, Linda helped her mom make offerings to their ancestors and cleaned her late dad’s altar. These were her mother’s beliefs, but was Buddhism Linda’s belief? In her late-twenties, Linda sought answers in Egypt and China and prayed during corporate downsizing, seeking meaning in contemporary life. Via a collection of essays, she plays with form and structure to show the interconnection of life events, trauma, and spiritual practice, to move from being a passive believer to an active seeker.
Slant
$16.95Sharp, accessible and witty, Slant offers a fresh exploration of issues of race, sexuality, and life in the global village. The collection alternates between three main themes of childhood and family in the Chinese diaspora; gay sexuality, community and rites-of-passage; and voyages literal and metaphorical. Slant asks “how do we belong?” and answers in a voice that is compelling and unique.
Small Beauty
Coping with the death of her cousin, Mei abandons her life in the city to live in his now empty house in a small town. There she connects with his history as well as her own, learns about her aunt’s long-term secret relationship, and reflects on the trans women she has left behind.
Small Beauty explores the protagonist’s transness, but it also tenderly yet bitterly unpacks her experiences as a mixed-race person of Chinese descent, cycles of death and loss, and queer and intergenerational community. Small Beauty wanders through isolation, and then breaks it.
Spinster Kang
$22.95Thirty-two-year-old Kang is a new immigrant in Toronto. Having an older sister who was raped and suffers from the ensuing stigma in China, Kang is determined to remain a spinster, which has its own stigma in China, and she struggles with her fear and distrust of men. But Kang’s story is not a hard luck story. She is an intelligent woman and a successful immigrant. Kang deals with the perplexities of a different culture by maintaining a sense of curiosity, an enjoyment of learning about the new culture, and by finding humour rather than the humiliation that so often characterizes descriptions of immigrant experience. Kang rooms with Tania, a Russian immigrant, and learns that many years earlier, Tanya was in love with a Chinese medical student at Moscow University who was abruptly returned to China for having had a relationship with her. Kang’s own father once studied at that university but has never talked about it since he was forced to leave Moscow and then was labelled as a rightist during the Chinese Anti-Rightist Campaign. Since then her father has been dispatched to work and live in Kunming, a city far away from Beijing. Could the paths of her father and Tania have ever crossed? Curious about her father’s past, Kang decides to pay a visit to Moscow, accompanied by Brian, Tania’s nephew, a charming engineer who wants to explore his Russian Jewish roots. Spending time with Brian helps Kang to see how much her sister’s tragedy has shadowed her life. When Brian suddenly shows symptoms of schizophrenia, Kang must decide whether to throw her spinster’s hat away or end her relationship with Brian.