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Orphan bachelors : a memoir : on being a confession baby, Chinatown daughter, baa-bai sister, caretaker of exotics, literary balloon peddler, and grand historian of a doomed American family / by Ng, Fae Myenne,1956-author.;
"From the bestselling, award-winning author of novels Bone and Steer Toward Rock, Fae Myenne Ng's Orphan Bachelors is a singular memoir of her beloved San Francisco's Chinatown and of a family building a life in a country bent on their exclusion. Beloved by readers for her "incantatory" (New York Times) novels and their luminous depictions of Chinatown, Fae Myenne Ng's new memoir is a personal, timely portrait of the same storied place. In pre-Communist China, Ng's father memorized a book of lies and gained entry to the United States as a stranger's son, evading the Exclusion Act, an immigration law which he believed was meant to extinguish the Chinese American family. During the McCarthy era, he entered the Confession Program only to have his citizenship revoked. Ng was her parents' precocious firstborn. A child raised by a seafaring father and a seamstress mother, by Chinatown and its legendary Orphan Bachelors--men without wives or children, exclusion's living legacy. Exclusion's shadow followed Ng from the back alleys of Chinatown in the sixties, to Manhattan in the eighties, to the high desert of California in the nineties, until her return home in the 2000s when the deaths of her youngest brother and her father devastated the family. As a child, Ng believed her father's lies; as an adult, she returned to her childhood home to write his truth. Orphan Bachelors weaves together the history of one doomed family; an elegy for brothers estranged and for elders lost; and insights into writing between languages and teaching between generations. In this powerful remembrance, Ng gives voice to her ancestors, her Orphan Bachelors, and her own inner self, howling in Cantonese, impossible to translate but determined to be heard"--
Subjects: Biographies.; Autobiographies.; Personal narratives.; Ng, Fae Myenne, 1956-; Chinese American authors; Chinese American families;
Available copies: 0 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

War at the margins : Indigenous experiences in World War II / by Poyer, Lin,1953-author.;
Includes bibliographical references (pages 259-306) and index."War at the Margins offers a broad comparative view of the impact of World War II on Indigenous societies. Using historical and ethnographic sources, Lin Poyer examines how Indigenous communities emerged from the trauma of the wartime era with social forms and cultural ideas that laid the foundations for their twenty-first century emergence as players on the world's political stage. With a focus on Indigenous voices and agency, a global overview reveals the enormous range of wartime activities and impacts on these groups, connecting this work with comparative history, Indigenous studies, and anthropology. The distinctiveness of Indigenous peoples offers a valuable perspective on World War II, as those on the margins of Allied and Axis empires and nation-states were drawn in as soldiers, scouts, guides, laborers, and victims. Questions of loyalty and citizenship shaped Indigenous combat roles-from integration in national armies to service in separate ethnic units to unofficial use of their special skills, where local knowledge tilted the balance in military outcomes. Front lines crossed Indigenous territory most consequentially in northern Europe, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands, but the impacts of war go well beyond combat. Like others around the world, Indigenous civilian men and women suffered bombing and invasion, displacement, forced labor, military occupation, and economic and social disruption. Infrastructure construction and demand for key resources affected even areas far from front lines. World War II dissolved empires and laid the foundation for the postcolonial world. Indigenous people in newly independent nations struggled for autonomy, while other veterans returned to home fronts still steeped in racism. National governments saw military service as evidence that Indigenous peoples wished to assimilate, but wartime experiences confirmed many communities' commitment to their home cultures and opened new avenues for activism. By century's end, Indigenous Rights became an international political force, offering alternative visions of how the global order might make room for greater local self-determination and cultural diversity. In examining this transformative era, War at the Margins adds an important contribution to both World War II history and to the development of global Indigenous identity"--
Subjects: Indigenous peoples; World War, 1939-1945; World War, 1939-1945;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI