Book picks similar to
Becoming Chinese American: A History of Communities and Institutions by Him Mark Lai
california
culture
ethnicity-and-race
immigrant-experience
Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans
Ronald Takaki - 1989
Through richly detailed vignettes--by turns bitter, funny, and inspiring--he offers a stunning panorama of a neglected part of American history. 16 pages of photographs.
Watercress
Andrea Wang - 2021
Grabbing an old paper bag and some rusty scissors, the whole family wades into the muck to collect as much of the muddy, snail covered watercress as they can.At first, she's embarrassed. Why can't her family get food from the grocery store? But when her mother shares a story of her family's time in China, the girl learns to appreciate the fresh food they foraged. Together, they make a new memory of watercress.Andrea Wang tells a moving autobiographical story of a child of immigrants discovering and connecting with her heritage, illustrated by award winning author and artist Jason Chin, working in an entirely new style, inspired by Chinese painting techniques. An author's note in the back shares Andrea's childhood experience with her parents.
Hippie
Paulo Coelho - 2018
In the Dam Square in Amsterdam, long-haired young people wearing vibrant clothes and burning incense could be found meditating, playing music and discussing sexual liberation, the expansion of consciousness and the search for an inner truth. They were a generation refusing to live the robotic and unquestioning life that their parents had known.At this time, Paulo is a young, skinny Brazilian with a goatee and long, flowing hair who wants to become a writer. He sets off on a journey in search of freedom and a deeper meaning for his life: first, with a girlfriend, on the famous “Death Train to Bolivia,” then on to Peru and later hitchhiking through Chile and Argentina.His travels take him further, to the famous square in Amsterdam, where Paulo meets Karla, a Dutch woman also in her 20s. She convinces Paulo to join her on a trip to Nepal, aboard the Magic Bus that travels across Europe and Central Asia to Kathmandu. They embark on a journey in the company of fascinating fellow travelers, each of whom has a story to tell, and each of whom will undergo a transformation, changing their priorities and values, along the way. As they travel together, Paulo and Karla explore their own relationship, an awakening on every level that brings each of them to a choice and a decision that sets the course for their lives thereafter.
The Ways of Autumn
William Graney - 2017
Her ten-year journey will include a new relationship, a trek to the highest summit in the contiguous United States, and a poignant hospice experience that will challenge her to rise from the ashes of despair. Catherine decides to leave Boston when a company from the Silicon Valley presents an offer for her very successful website design company. After accepting the buyout, she signs a contract with a Los Angeles based health care corporation to work as a consultant and thus begins her decade-long stay on the west coast. As time passes in her sunny new environment, Catherine grows increasingly homesick despite the thrill of falling in love and her passion for hiking the Southern California trails. Conflicts arise when the desire to return to her native New England dominates her thoughts and she meets Kenny, a young man who is facing his final days. As Catherine sits at Kenny's bedside, she helps him work through his struggles to understand love and devotion while facing the fear of a completed life's journey. Their conversations inspire her to reflect deeply upon her own life, the decisions she has made, and the path she must follow.
Honolulu
Alan Brennert - 2009
As for me, my parents named me Regret."Honolulu is the rich, unforgettable story of a young "picture bride" who journeys to Hawai'i in 1914 in search of a better life.Instead of the affluent young husband and chance at an education that she has been promised, she is quickly married off to a poor, embittered laborer who takes his frustrations out on his new wife. Renaming herself Jin, she makes her own way in this strange land, finding both opportunity and prejudice. With the help of three of her fellow picture brides, Jin prospers along with her adopted city, now growing from a small territorial capital into the great multicultural city it is today. But paradise has its dark side, whether it's the daily struggle for survival in Honolulu's tenements, or a crime that will become the most infamous in the islands history...With its passionate knowledge of people and places in Hawai'i far off the tourist track, Honolulu is most of all the spellbinding tale of four women in a new world, united by dreams, disappointment, sacrifices, and friendship.
Don't Get Too Comfortable: The Indignities of Coach Class, The Torments of Low Thread Count, The Never-Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems
David Rakoff - 2005
Whether David Rakoff's contrasting the elegance of one of the last flights of the supersonic Concorde with the good-times-and-chicken-wings populism of Hooters Air; working as a cabana boy at a South Beach hotel; or traveling to a private island off the coast of Belize to watch a soft-core video shoot where he is provided with his very own personal manservant rarely have greed, vanity, selfishness, and vapidity been so mercilessly skewered. Somewhere along the line, our healthy self-regard has exploded into obliterating narcissism; our manic getting and spending have now become celebrated as moral virtues. Simultaneously a Wildean satire and a plea for a little human decency, Don t Get Too Comfortable shows that far from being bobos in paradise, we are in a special circle of gilded-age hell.
Blackbird: A Childhood Lost and Found
Jennifer Lauck - 2000
Wrenching and unforgettable, Blackbird will carry your heart away.To young Jenny, the house on Mary Street was home -- the place where she was loved, a blue-sky world of Barbies, Bewitched, and the Beatles. Even her mother's pain from her mysterious illness could be patted away with powder and a kiss on the cheek. But when everything that Jenny had come to rely on begins to crumble, an odyssey of loss, loneliness, and a child's will to survive takes flight....
The Supernatural Power of a Transformed Mind: Access to a Life of Miracles
Bill Johnson - 2014
Is this you? Are you ready to experience the miraculous lifestyle that Jesus made available to you because of the Cross? In Supernatural Power of a Transformed Mind, Pastor Bill Johnson delivers powerful and practical teaching, revealing how you were designed to bring heaven to Earth and how it all starts with your thought life. You will learn how to: • Enjoy complete forgiveness from sin and let go of guilt • Access the open heaven over your life and start living as God’s dwelling place • Position yourself for future breakthrough by studying and remembering God’s miracles Your access to a lifestyle of signs, wonders, and miracles starts by changing the way you think. When your mind is transformed, heaven becomes more than a place you go to one day—becomes the supernatural power that you release wherever you go today! “This book is needed in this hour as a wake-up call to the ‘greater things than these shall you do’ promise of Jesus.” – Randy Clark
China Survival Guide: How to Avoid Travel Troubles and Mortifying Mishaps
Larry Herzberg - 2008
Readers will learn essential skills like how to haggle, exchange currencies, cross the street, decipher menus, say useful phrases in Chinese, and more. The guide comes complete with survival tips on etiquette, a map, and resource lists. Don’t leave home for China without it!Veteran travelers Qin and Larry Herzberg are Chinese language and culture professors at Calvin College in Michigan.
Migrations to Solitude
Sue Halpern - 1992
In pursuit of the riddle of solitude, Halpern talks to Trappist monks and secular hermits, corresponds with a prisoner in solitary confinement, and visits and AIDS hospice and a shelter for the homeless places where privacy is the first—and perhaps the most essential—thing to go. This is a book that lends weight to the ideas that have become dangerously abstract in a society of data bases and car faxes, a guide not only ot the routes to solitude but to the selves we discover only when we arrive there.