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The freedom seeker / by Gupta, Ruchira.;
"In one girl's relentless search for home and safety, The Freedom Seeker takes readers on a daring journey of displacement and immigration. Illuminated by the kindness of strangers across continents and the strength of the human spirit, renowned activist and award-winning documentarian Ruchira Gupta has written a powerful tale of resilience, hope, and the enduring strength of familial love. Twelve-year-old Simi Singh's life in Northern India is filled with love, family traditions, and ordinary worries about hockey competitions, school exams, and avoiding the snide remarks of her class nemesis. But when a single rock carrying a note crash through their window during their Eid celebration, Simi's life will shatter. Her Sikh father and Muslim mother's interfaith marriage is becoming a target of violent vigilantes. Faced with rising threats, they must make an impossible choice: stay and risk their lives, or flee their homeland. Simi's father is the first of them to make the journey to the U.S., but when their petition to be reunited in America is denied, Simi and her mother are left with no choice but to attempt a perilous crossing through the Arizona desert with the help of a smuggler. Throughout her nail-biting journey towards safety and belonging, Simi will face unthinkable danger-- and when Simi and her mother are separated during the crossing, each led to believe the other is dead, she refuses to accept this fate. Alone in an unfamiliar and unforgiving land, she must summon all her courage and resourcefulness to survive, find her mother, and reunite her shattered family.
Subjects: Social problem fiction.; Interfaith marriage; Refugees; Human smuggling; Emigration and immigration; Families; Sikhs; Muslims;

Restaurant kid : a memoir of family and belonging / by Phan, Rachel,author.;
"A warm and poignant narrative about finding one's self amidst the grind of restaurant life, the cross-generational immigrant experience, and a daughter's attempts to connect with parents who have always been just out of reach. When she was three years old, Rachel Phan met her replacement. Instead of a new sibling, her mother and father's time and attention were suddenly devoted entirely to their new family restaurant. For her parents--whose own families fled China during Japanese occupation and then survived bombs and starvation during the war in Vietnam--it was a dream come true. For Phan, it was something quite different. Overnight, she became a restaurant kid, living on the periphery of her own family and trying her best to stay out of the way. As Phan grew up, the restaurant was the most stalwart and suffocating member of her family. For decades, it's been both their crowning achievement and the origin of so much of their pain and suffering: screaming matches complete with smashed dishes; bodies worn down by long hours and repetitive strain; and tenuous relationships where the family loved one another deeply without ever really knowing each other. In Restaurant Kid, Phan seeks to examine the way her life has been shaped by the rigid boxes placed around her. She had to be a "good daughter," never asking questions, always being grateful. She had to be a "real Canadian," watching hockey and speaking English so flawlessly that her tongue has since forgotten how to contort around Cantonese tones. As the only Chinese girl at school, she had to alternate between being the sidekick, geek, or Asian fetish, depending on whose gaze was on her. Now, three decades after their restaurant first opened, Phan's parents are cautiously talking about retirement. As an adult, Phan's "good daughter" role demands something new of her--and a chance to get to know her parents away from the restaurant. In Restaurant Kid, Phan deftly combines candour, wit and insight to craft a vibrant and important narrative on the strength and foibles of family, and how we come to understand ourselves."--Provided by publisher.
Subjects: Biographies.; Autobiographies.; Personal narratives.; Phan, Rachel.; Phan, Rachel; Children of immigrants; Restaurateurs; Restaurateurs; Chinese Canadian women;

Almost brown : a mixed-race family memoir / by Gill, Charlotte,1971-author.;
"An award-winning writer retraces her dysfunctional, biracial, globe-trotting family's journey as she reckons with ethnicity and belonging, diversity and race, and the complexities of life within a multicultural household. Charlotte Gill's father is Indian. Her mother is English. They meet in 1960's London when the world is not quite ready for interracial love. Their union, a revolutionary act, results in a total meltdown of familial relations, a lot of immigration paperwork, and three children, all in varying shades of tan. Together they set off on a journey from the United Kingdom to Canada and to the United States in elusive pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness--a dream that eventually tears them apart. Almost Brown is an exploration of diasporic intermingling involving parents of two different races and their half-brown children as they experience the paradoxes and conundrums of life as it's lived between race checkboxes. Eventually, her parents drift apart because they just aren't compatible. But as she finds herself distancing from her father too--why is she embarrassed to walk down the street with him and not her mom?--she doesn't know if it's because of his personality or his race. As a mixed-race child, was this her own unconscious bias favoring one parent over the other in the racial tug-of-war that plagues our society? Almost Brown looks for answers to questions shared by many mixed-race people: What are you? What does it mean to be a person of color when the concept is a societal invention and really only applies halfway if you are half white? And how does your relationship with your parents change as you change and grow older? In a funny, turbulent, and ultimately heartwarming story, Gill examines the brilliant messiness of ancestry, "diversity," and the idea of "race," a historical concept that still informs our beliefs about ethnicity today"--
Subjects: Biographies.; Autobiographies.; Personal narratives.; Gill, Charlotte, 1971-; Gill, Charlotte, 1971-; Identity (Psychology); Immigrants; Race awareness in children.; Racially mixed families; Racially mixed families; Racially mixed people; Racially mixed people; Racially mixed women; Women authors, Canadian; Race;

Bad bad girl : a novel / by Jen, Gish,author.;
"Gish's mother--Loo Shu-hsin--is born in 1925 to a wealthy Shanghai family where girls are expected to behave and be quiet. Every act of disobedience prompts the same reprimand: "Bad bad girl! You don't know how to talk!" She gets sent to Catholic school, where she is baptized, re-named for St. Agnes, and, unusually for a girl, given an internationally-minded education. Still, her father would say, "Too bad. If you were a boy, you could accomplish a lot." Agnes finds solace in books, reading every night with a flashlight and an English-Chinese dictionary, before announcing her intention to pursue a Ph.D in America. It is 1947, and with the forces of Communist revolution on the horizon, she leaves--never to return. Lonely and adrift in Manhattan, Agnes begins dating Chao-Pei, an engineering student also from Shanghai. While news of their country and their families grows increasingly dire, they set out to make a new life together: marriage, a number one son, a small house in the suburbs. By the time Gish is born, her parents' marriage is unraveling, and her mother, struggling to understand her strong-willed American daughter, is repeating the refrain that punctuated her own childhood: "Bad bad girl! You don't know how to talk!" Bad Bad Girl is a novel about a mother and a daughter forced to reckon with one another across decades of curiosity and ambition, elation and disappointment, intense intimacy and misunderstanding. Spanning continents and generations, this is a rich, heartbreaking portrait of two fierce women locked in a complicated life-long embrace"--
Subjects: Autobiographical fiction.; Domestic fiction.; Novels.; Chinese American families; Chinese Americans; Chinese diaspora; Emigration and immigration; Intergenerational relations; Interpersonal relations; Mothers and daughters;

Nuclear family : a novel / by Han, Joseph,author.;
"Mr. and Mrs. Cho run a successful chain of Hawai'ian plate lunch restaurants, and their adult children are finding their way in the world: 21-year-old Grace is graduating in a few months, and 25-year-old Jacob is teaching English in Seoul. They're set to take over the restaurants when Umma and Appa retire. But when Jacob is captured by the South Korean government for attempting to run across the DMZ, the Chos' peaceful lives are shattered. What could possess Jacob to do something so stupid? The Chos don't know that Jacob has been literally possessed by his wily grandfather's ghost, don't know that Jacob is hiding his bisexuality and confusion over his identity as a Korean-American; they don't know that Grace is constantly stoned and plotting her escape from the island and her family's expectations. The children don't know the burdens of their immigrant parents. Joseph Han draws from Korean myth to explore the generational trauma experienced by families shattered by partition, and the impacts of American imperialism on the Korean peninsula. Nuclear family is a spectacular debut novel -- at once devastating and hilarious -- about the memories that bind and divide families, and the yearning for home"--
Subjects: Ghost stories.; Domestic fiction.; Novels.; Adult children of immigrants; Bisexuals; Family secrets; Identity (Psychology); Korean American families; Korean Americans;

Watch us dance / by Slimani, Leïla,1981-author.; Taylor, Sam,1970-translator.; translation of:Slimani, Leïla,1981-Regardez-nous danser.English.;
"The rebellions within an interracial family play out against the countercultural rebellions of the 1960s in this sexy, stylish, sophisticated new novel by the award-winning, internationally bestselling author of The Perfect Nanny and In the Country of Others"--
Subjects: Biographical fiction.; Historical fiction.; Novels.; Slimani, Leïla, 1981-; Siblings; Women immigrants;

A place to belong / by Kadohata, Cynthia.; Kuo, Julia.;
Twelve-year-old Hanako and her family, reeling from their confinement in an internment camp, renounce their American citizenship to move to Hiroshima, a city devastated by the atomic bomb dropped by Americans.Ages 10-14.LSC
Subjects: Historical fiction.; Japanese Americans; Emigration and immigration; Families; Belonging (Social psychology); Identity (Psychology); World War, 1939-1945;

A man of two faces : a memoir, a history, a memorial / by Nguyen, Viet Thanh,1971-author.;
Includes bibliographical references (pages 363-380)."With insight, humor, formal invention, and lyricism, Viet Thanh Nguyen rewinds the film of his own life. He expands the genre of personal memoir by acknowledging larger stories of refugeehood, colonization, and ideas about Vietnam and America, writing with his trademark sardonic wit and incisive analysis, as well as a deep emotional openness about his life as a father and a son. At the age of four, Nguyen and his family are forced to flee his hometown of Ban Mê Thuot and come to the USA as refugees. After being removed from his brother and parents and homed with a family on his own, Nguyen is later allowed to resettle into his own family in suburban San José. But there is violence hidden behind the sunny facade of what he calls AMERICA TM.
Subjects: Biographies.; Autobiographies.; Nguyen, Viet Thanh, 1971-; Nguyen, Viet Thanh, 1971-; Authors; Immigrants; Vietnam War, 1961-1975; Vietnamese Americans;

Fatty fatty boom boom : a memoir of food, fat, and family / by Chaudry, Rabia,author.;
"A memoir about food, body image, and growing up in a loving but sometimes oppressively concerned Pakistani immigrant family"--
Subjects: Biographies.; Autobiographies.; Personal narratives.; Chaudry, Rabia.; Body image; Overweight persons; Pakistani American women; Pakistani Americans; Pakistani Americans; Pakistani Americans;

Almost American girl [graphic novel] : an illustrated memoir / by Ha, Robin,author,illustrator.;
"A powerful and moving teen graphic novel memoir about immigration, belonging, and how arts can save a life--perfect for fans of American Born Chinese and Hey, Kiddo. For as long as she can remember, it's been Robin and her mom against the world. Growing up as the only child of a single mother in Seoul, Korea, wasn't always easy, but it has bonded them fiercely together. So when a vacation to visit friends in Huntsville, Alabama, unexpectedly becomes a permanent relocation--following her mother's announcement that she's getting married--Robin is devastated. Overnight, her life changes. She is dropped into a new school where she doesn't understand the language and struggles to keep up. She is completely cut off from her friends in Seoul and has no access to her beloved comics. At home, she doesn't fit in with her new stepfamily, and worst of all, she is furious with the one person she is closest to--her mother. Then one day Robin's mother enrolls her in a local comic drawing class, which opens the window to a future Robin could never have imagined"--Amazon.com.13-UP.08-UP.
Subjects: Autobiographies.; Graphic novels.; Autobiographical comics.; Nonfiction comics.; Ha, Robin; Emigration and immigration; Immigrants; Mothers and daughters; Teenage girls; Koreans; Korean American families; Women immigrants; Women illustrators;