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The brightest star : a novel / by Tsukiyama, Gail,author.;
Includes bibliographical references."At the dawn of a new century, America is falling in love with silent movies, including young Wong Liu Tsong. The daughter of Chinese immigrants who own a laundry, Wong Liu and her older sister Lew Ying (Lulu) are taunted and bullied for their Chinese heritage. But while Lulu diligently obeys her parents and learns to speak Chinese, Wong Liu sneaks away to the local nickelodeons, buying a ticket with her lunch money and tips saved from laundry deliveries. By eleven Wong Liu is determined to become an actress and has already chosen a stage name: Anna May Wong. At sixteen, Anna May leaves high school to pursue her Hollywood dreams, defying her disapproving father and her Chinese traditional upbringing, a choice that will hold emotional and physical consequences"--
Subjects: Biographical fiction.; Historical fiction.; Novels.; Wong, Anna May, 1905-1961; Chinese American women; Cultural appropriation; Motion picture actors and actresses; Racism in motion pictures;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Viewfinder : a memoir of seeing and being seen / by Chu, Jon M.(Jon Murray),1979-author.; McCarter, Jeremy,1976-author.;
"Long before he directed Wicked, In The Heights, or the groundbreaking film Crazy Rich Asians, Jon M. Chu was a movie-obsessed first-generation Chinese American, helping at his parents' Chinese restaurant in Silicon Valley and forever facing the cultural identity crisis endemic to children of immigrants. Growing up on the cutting edge of 21st-century technology gave Chu the tools he needed to make his mark at USC film school, and to be discovered by Steven Spielberg, but he soon found himself struggling to understand who he was. In this book, for the first time, Chu dives deep into his life and work, telling the universal story of questioning what it means when your dreams collide with your circumstances, and showing how it's possible to succeed even when the world changes beyond all recognition. With striking candor and unrivalled insights, Chu offers a firsthand account of the collision of Silicon Valley and Hollywood -- what it's been like to watch his old world shatter and reshape his new one. Ultimately, Viewfinder is about reckoning with your own story, becoming your most creative self, and finding a path all your own"--
Subjects: Biographies.; Autobiographies.; Personal narratives.; Chu, Jon M. (Jon Murray), 1979-; Asian American motion picture producers and directors; Chinese Americans;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Little gods : a novel / by Jin, Meng,author.;
On the night of June Fourth, a woman gives birth in a Beijing hospital alone. Thus begins the unraveling of Su Lan, a brilliant physicist who until this moment has successfully erased her past, fighting what she calls the mind's arrow of time. When Su Lan dies unexpectedly seventeen years later, it is her daughter Liya who inherits the silences and contradictions of her life. Liya, who grew up in America, takes her mother's ashes to China-- to her, an unknown country. In a territory inhabited by the ghosts of the living and the dead, Liya's memories are joined by those of two others: Zhu Wen, the woman last to know Su Lan before she left China, and Yongzong, the father Liya has never known. In this way a portrait of Su Lan emerges: an ambitious scientist, an ambivalent mother, and a woman whose relationship to her own past shapes and ultimately unmakes Liya's own sense of displacement.
Subjects: Domestic fiction.; Mothers and daughters; Chinese American women; Immigrants;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Messy roots [graphic novel] : a graphic memoir of a Wuhanese American / by Gao, Laura,author,illustrator.; Xu, Weiwei,illustrator,colourist.;
"After spending her early years in Wuhan, China, riding water buffalos and devouring stinky tofu, Laura immigrates to Texas, where her hometown is as foreign as Marsat least until 2020, when COVID-19 makes Wuhan a household name. In Messy Roots, Laura illustrates her coming-of-age as the girl who simply wants to make the basketball team, escape Chinese school, and figure out why girls make her heart flutter."--Provided by publisher.014+.Grades 10-12.
Subjects: Biographical comics.; Nonfiction comics.; Autobiographical comics.; Graphic novels.; Personal narratives.; Gao, Laura; Chinese Americans; Immigrants; Lesbians; Sexual minority students;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Strangers in the land : exclusion, belonging, and the epic story of the Chinese in America / by Luo, Michael,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."From New Yorker editor and writer Michael Luo, a vivid, urgent history of two centuries of Chinese exclusion and the birth of anti-Asian feeling in America. In 1889, when the Supreme Court upheld the Chinese Exclusion Act-a measure barring Chinese laborers from entering the United States that remained in effect for more than fifty years -- Justice Stephen Johnson Field characterized the Chinese as a people "residing apart by themselves." They were, Field concluded, "strangers in the land." Today, there are more than twenty-two million people of Asian descent in the United States, yet this label still hovers over Asian Americans. In Strangers in the Land, Luo traces anti-Asian feeling in America to the first wave of immigrants from China in the mid-nineteenth-century: laborers who traveled to California in search of gold and railroad work. Their communities almost immediately faced mobs of white vigilantes who drove them from their workplaces and homes. In his rich, character-driven history, Luo tells stories like that of Denis Kearney, the sandlot demagogue who became the face of the anti-Chinese movement, and of activists who fought back, like Massachusetts Senator George Frisbie Hoar and newspaperman Wong Chin Foo. After the halt on immigration in 1889, the Chinese-American community who remained struggled to survive and thrive on the margins of American life. In 1965, when LBJ's Immigration and Nationality Act forbade discrimination by national origin, America opened its doors wide to families like those of Luo's parents, but he finds that the centuries of exclusion of Chinese-Americans left a legacy: many Asians are still treated, and feel, like outsiders today. Strangers in the Land is a sweeping narrative of a forgotten chapter in American history, and a reminder that America's present reflects its exclusionary past"--
Subjects: United States.; Chinese Americans; Chinese;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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The school for good mothers : a novel / by Chan, Jessamine,author.;
"Set in near-future America, The School for Good Mothers introduces readers to a government-run reform program where bad mothers are retrained using robot doll children with artificial intelligence. Protagonist Frida Liu, a 39-year-old Chinese-American single mother in Philadelphia, loses custody of her 18-month-old daughter, Harriet, after she leaves Harriet home alone for two hours on one very bad day. To regain custody, Frida must spend a year at a newly-created institution, where she practices parenting with bad mothers from all over the county. There, she learns to love an uncannily life-like toddler girl doll in order to demonstrate her maternal instincts and prove to her family court judge that she deserves a second chance. Frida is an outsider in every way: better educated, more affluent, and the only Asian. The mothers, whose transgressions range from benign to horrific, are under constant surveillance. If they don't pass all the school's tests, their parental rights will be terminated. Inspired by dystopian classics such as 1984, Never Let Me Go, and The Handmaid's Tale, the novel eviscerates the dominant American parenting culture, while highlighting the tragedy of state-sponsored family separation. Is there one right way to mother? Can a bad mother ever be redeemed? With warmth, heart, and dark humor, the novel tells a timeless story of a mother fighting to win back her child, and her struggle to hold onto her integrity while being indoctrinated"--
Subjects: Dystopian fiction.; Chinese American women; Motherhood; Single mothers;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Joan is okay : a novel / by Wang, Weike,author.;
"'Joan is a thirtysomething ICU physician at a busy New York City hospital, the daughter of Chinese parents who moved to America to secure the American dream for Joan and her brother, Fang, then returned to China. Joan's whole life has been about study and work. She logs excessive hours at the hospital, exhibits little interest in having friends, let alone lovers, and her medical colleagues sometimes resent her, misreading dedication to work as ambition. Sometimes Joan looks up and wonders where her true roots lie: at the hospital, where her white doctor's coat makes her feel at home; or with her family, who try to shape her life by their own social and cultural expectations. But when Joan's father suddenly dies, her mother returns to America, now more determined than ever to connect with Joan while staying with Fang on his sprawling Greenwich estate. The hospital, and life on the Upper West Side of New York City, provide cover, and protection--for a while. But then a compelling new neighbor moves in to the apartment next door, and Joan is unwillingly drawn into the social lives of people she's been happily ignoring for years. And at the hospital, a new HR "wellness initiative" about work/life balance forces Joan to take a mandatory leave of absence; she's barred from the hospital and life as she knows it. When she decides to decamp to Fang's, and to her newly reconstituted family, her family tries to reorder her life, threatening the parameters she'd carefully calibrated--until the day she must return to the city to face a crisis larger than anything she's encountered"--
Subjects: Domestic fiction.; Chinese American physicians; Chinese Americans; Epidemics; Families; Women physicians; Work-life balance;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Hungry ghost [graphic novel] / by Ying, Victoria,author,artist.; Wong, Lynette,colourist.;
"Valerie Chu is quiet, studious, and above all, thin. No one, not even her best friend, Jordan, knows that she has been bingeing and purging for years. But when tragedy strikes, Val finds herself reassessing her priorities, her choices, and her body. The path to happiness may lead her away from her hometown and her mothers toxic projections--but first she will have to find the strength to seek help."--
Subjects: Coming-of-age comics.; Graphic novels.; Chinese Americans; Coming of age; Eating disorders; Fathers; Friendship; Mothers and daughters;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Searching for Sylvie Lee : a novel / by Kwok, Jean,author.;
"It begins with a mystery. Sylvie, the beautiful, brilliant, successful older daughter of the Lee family, flies to the Netherlands for one final visit with her dying grandmother-- and then vanishes. Amy, the sheltered baby of the Lee family, is too young to remember a time when her parents were newly immigrated and too poor to keep Sylvie. Seven years older, Sylvie was raised by a distant relative in a faraway, foreign place, and didn't rejoin her family in America until age nine. Timid and shy, Amy has always looked up to her sister, the fierce and fearless protector who showered her with unconditional love. But what happened to Sylvie? Amy and her parents are distraught and desperate for answers. Sylvie has always looked out for them. Now, it's Amy's turn to help. Terrified yet determined, Amy retraces her sister's movements, flying to the last place Sylvie was seen. But instead of simple answers, she discovers something much more valuable: the truth. Sylvie, the golden girl, kept painful secrets ... secrets that will reveal more about Amy's complicated family-- and herself-- than she ever could have imagined."-- Dust jacket flap.
Subjects: Domestic fiction.; Psychological fiction.; Missing persons; Family secrets; Sisters; Chinese American families; Immigrants;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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One jump at a time : my story / by Chen, Nathan,1999-author.; Park, Alice,author.; Wang, Vera,writer of foreword.;
"In this exhilarating memoir, three-time World Champion and Olympic gold-medalist Nathan Chen tells the story of his remarkable journey to success, reflecting on his life as a Chinese American figure skater and the joys and challenges he has experienced-including the tremendous sacrifices he and his family made, and the physical and emotional pain he endured. When three-year-old Nathan Chen tried on his first pair of figure skates, magic happened. But the odds of this young boy-one of five children born to Chinese immigrants-competing and making it into the top echelons of figure skating were daunting. Chen's family didn't have the resources or access to pay for expensive coaches, rink time, and equipment. But Nathan's mother, Hetty Wang, refused to fail her child. Recognizing his tremendous talent and passion, she stepped up as his coach, making enormous sacrifices to give Nathan the opportunity to compete in this exclusive world. That dedication eventually paid off at the 2022 Olympic Games in Beijing, where Chen-reverently known as the "Quad King"-won gold, becoming the first Asian-American man to stand at the highest podium in figure skating. In this moving and inspiring memoir Chen opens up for the first time, chronicling everything it took to pursue his dreams. Bolstered by his unwavering passion and his family's unconditional support, Chen reveals the most difficult times he endured, and how he overcame each obstacle-from his disappointment at the 2018 Olympic Games, to competing during a global pandemic, to the extreme physical and mental toll the sport demands. Pulling back the curtain on the figure skating world and the Olympics, Chen reveals what it was really like at the Beijing Games and competing on the US team in the same city his parents had left-and his grandmother still lived. Poignant and unfiltered, told in his own words, One Jump at a Time is the story of one extraordinary young man-and a testament to the love of a family and the power of persistence, grit, and passion"-Publisher description.
Subjects: Biographies.; Autobiographies.; Chen, Nathan, 1999-; Chinese American figure skaters; Figure skaters;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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