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Made in China : a memoir of love and labor / by Qu, Anna,author.;
"As a teen, Anna Qu is sent by her mother to work in a garment factory in Queens. At home, she works as a maid and babysitter for her step-siblings, and suffers punishment for doing her homework at night. Her mother wants to teach her a lesson: she is Chinese, not American, and such is their tough path in their new country. But instead of surrendering, Qu alerts the Office of Family and Child Services, an act with consequences for the rest of her life. Nearly 20 years later, estranged from her mother and working at a Manhattan startup, Qu requests her OFCS report. When it arrives, key details are wrong, revealing the indifference of the system. Faced with this false narrative, and on the brink of losing her job as the once-shiny startup collapses, Qu looks once more at her life's truths, from abandonment to an abusive family to seeking dignity and meaning in work. Traveling from Wenzhou to Xi'An to New York, from the cutting table at a sweatshop to a startup's conference room, MADE IN CHINA is a fierce memoir unafraid to ask thorny questions about labor, dysfunctional families, and the costs of immigration"--
Subjects: Biographies.; Autobiographies.; Qu, Anna.; Chinese Americans; Immigrants;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Not everybody lives the same way / by Dubois, Jean-Paul,1950-author.; Homel, David,translator.; translation of:Dubois, Jean-Paul,1950-Tous les hommes n'habitent pas le monde de la même façon.English.;
"Narrated by a man held for an unknown crime in a Montreal prison, this "affecting and nostalgic novel of lost happiness" (Agence-France Presse) was the winner of the Prix Goncourt. When the novel starts, Paul Hansen is incarcerated in a large and insalubrious prison on the outskirts of Montreal. He shares his cell with a much-feared Hells Angel called Patrick Horton, who is serving time for murder. Although it is unclear why Paul is in prison, his position as Patrick Horton's cell mate is precarious; he has a knife that could kill him at any moment. An evaluator regularly assesses Paul's behavior, but he shows no remorse for what he has done, and he will not be released until he does. So patiently, he must serve his time. Paul's story is told in alternating chapters, moving between his present incarceration and his life leading to this point. We meet his parents--free-spirited Anna, who is disgraced when her art house cinema shows the scandalous Deep Throat, and Johannes, the pastor of the local church who runs away for a new life in Quebec. We meet his lover, a seaplane pilot called Winona, who takes him up into the cloudless sky away from his penny-pinching, arrogant boss Edouard Sedgwick and the ageing residents of the luxury apartment building he was so diligently the caretaker to for 20 years. Not Everybody Lives the Same Way is a powerfully original and unusual book, whose troubled protagonist leads us to question what it takes to lead a dignified life"--Prix Goncourt for Fiction
Subjects: Novels.; Fathers and sons; Loss (Psychology); Prisoners;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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