Asian-American Books

I enjoyed and appreciated the opportunity to learn folk stories. These were stories that my own parents had forgotten about from their childhood. It was nice to share this book with my parents as well as my younger family members. In the future, I would like to teach my own children not only Mother Goose nursery rhymes but also stories from their family's homeland. And the illustrations were wonderfully detailed and enjoyable to look at while reading the story in English or Tagalog.

This book makes me become a huge fan of Michelle Kwan. She is my role model now. Cited from the book: Tom Collins, producer of the figure skating show Champions on Ice, echoed that sentiment. "I've been in skating 55 years and I've never seen anyone like Michelle Kwan handle things so well, good or bad. A lot of it was bad at the two Olympics, but she accepted her defeat with graciousness," he said.... That's why Olympic gold medalist wouldn't have made us love and admire her(Sara Huges) more than Michelle Kwan.-Peggy Fleming. Learn from Michelle, we'll get better career and live better and happier.

This is a very fine collection of poems by Shirley Lim, who is currently teaching at the University of Hong Kong.

She was born in Malaysia to Chinese parents, and has lived in both Asia and America. This blend of cultures and languages has given her a unique understanding of the nature of translation, of roots, of travel, and of culture. These are themes she addresses in her poetry.

Her skill with words is considerable, and no two poems resemble each other. There are many voices, many situations. There is humor, horror, urban paranoia, love, and struggle. I treasure this volume as much for its skillful craft as for its tender stories of Asian women.

Her prose afterword, entitled Tongue and Root, an essay on the subject of translation and the English language, is quite wonderful. Excellent for students of linguistics and translation, or of modern Asian history, but I would think anyone interested in the problems of the Third Culture phenomena would find a lot to like in this book.

An essential part of any library of Asian Women's Studies.

This is a wonderful book! To anyone who loves Long Island, particularly Montauk and the Hamptons, this is a must. Bill Akin repeatedly captures the East End's natural and (hopefully) eternal beauty, often contrasting it with the all-too-human demands of modernity. The photographs are exquisite, the poems/haiku touching, humourous, and apt. Bill has lived in and around Montauk all his life. He obviously loves and wants to preserve and protect the area. This small yet quietly powerful book is a strong yet subtle detailing of every reason why we should try to do just that.

Yuan's sketches on life and lonliness come from a uniquely complex vantage filled with tightly-charged, unabashed subjectivity and existential motifs you've forgot you'd taken for granted. Stripped down verse that at points almost qualifies as literary outsider-art keeps the attention moving from one heart-felt syllable to the next.

If you grew up in a Japanese-American family, Ms. Adler's content will sound familiar. A lot of insight is provided on the dynamics of life in a Japanese-American family and some of the ethnic roots of those dynamics. Cultural explanations are provided for behaviors I thought "just ran in my family." The book is useful for anyone who deals with Japanese-Americans and wants to understand some of the motivations for their behaviors.

Lynn Fujiwara (assistant professor in the Department of Sociology, University of Oregon) presents Mothers Without Citizenship: Asian Immigrant Families and the Consequences of Welfare Reform, a scholarly, extensively researched, and highly critical account of the American government's increasingly hostile attitude toward immigrants in general and Asian immigrants particular, especially female Asian immigrants and their children. Taking to task policy changes in the 1990's to the present day, which enacted draconian cuts in public assistance to poor immigrant families among other stigmatizations, Mothers Without Citizenship questions the nationalist assumptions that poverty is the fault of the poor, or the racist assumption that Asian immigrants are a "model minority" that does not need the health care, food stamps, or other public services provided as a safety net against the ravages of utter destitution. The overall climate for immigrants in general has only become worse in the wake of the September 11th attacks. "Within Asian Pacific Islander communities, the drastic increase of deportations among Cambodians and Filipinos has alarmed communities as families are separated, and as people are deported back to a country they do not know and/or where they will face persecution. Thus, even though new voting blocs have emerged and reshaped local politics with high immigrant constituencies, the pervasive "terrorist" threat has subjugated political consciousness of immigrant rights." A strongly worded and much-needed counterbalance to consider in the wake of rising anti-immigrant sentiment.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

Bernard Lewis is probably the West's foremost scholar on Islam and the Middle East; I have enjoyed several of his books on these topics. Even so, I was surprised to find a volume of poetry, translated by Lewis, at my bookstore, and I bought it immediately, reasoning that if it remotely approached his other works, it would be well worth the money. I was not disappointed. With little or no knowledge of Near Eastern poetry to my credit, Music of a Distant Drum won me over. I read the entire volume of poems, about 130, in the first evening.

Music of a Distant Drum is divided into four sections of approximately equal lengths, each providing poems, translated by Lewis, from four distinct (although sometimes contemporaneous) cultures: Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Hebrew. While I?m qualified to critique neither the poetry nor its translation, I can say that I found them all beautiful. Not knowing what to expect, I was surprised by the brevity of many of the works. The Persians and Arabs in particular seem to be fond of short works in tight stanzas. Too, I found the worldliness and circumspection of the Persians unexpected, even though they, among all four cultures, seemed most fond of metaphor.

If you are a student of the East, I think you might be interested in, and surprised by, the topics these poems: war, love, aging, politics, drinking (!). Some scholars note that drinking (or drunkenness), as a topic in this poetry, is a metaphor for an all-encompassing love of God. Lewis seems to suggest that the drinking references may not be as metaphorical as others maintain it is. Either way, the poetry is agile and moving, and I enjoyed it very much. Poetry lovers may appreciate that some of these works have probably never appeared in print in the West, and I was impressed by the very number of poets represented: there are an astonishing 54 mini-biographies (about a paragraph, each) in the back of the book.

Buy this book and read it. I believe you will find it as powerful and enjoyable as I did.

I have been an avid reader of Asian American poetry, and raley have I purchased a book, until now. This book is worth reading, buying, and re-reading. Liu's poetry is visual, moving, and uses the english language, in a unique and personal tone. I suggest anyone who is interesed in any form of Asian literature take a read.

Once upon a time a guy fresh out of college and seriously interested in Buddhism went to Japan; he visited local temples on a regular basis, and was increasingly confounded by the fact that it was usually a woman roughly the same age as the head monk who acted something like the temple's unofficial receptionist and public relations representative. Only slowly did it dawn on him that these women were the head monks' wives. Yeah, something odd had happened between the early Tokugawa period (where most of his Buddhism books cut off) and the present. Too bad he didn't have this excellent book by Richard Jaffe--the silly naif wouldn't have been quite so befuddled.

Indeed, "Neither Monk nor Layman" is a very important, ground-breaking study on a highly significant facet of modern Buddhism in Japan, a facet by the way that has influenced the development of American Buddhism in subtle ways. And Jaffe has done a first-rate job on this book; he combines the critical meticulous care of a historian and the knowledgeable, non-reductive sensitivity of a Buddhist Studies scholar. His writing is sharp and clear, his reasoning convincing, and his arguments compelling. He includes a wealth of fascinating detail but marshals all of this in advancing his narrative. The overall result is a remarkable scholarly achievement.

One of the things I liked best about the book though was Jaffe's eye for the complexity of the issues involved. The government's multiple reasons and motivations for decriminalizing clerical marriage are treated with great nuance and attention to larger patterns of Meiji Japanese nation-state formation, while the Buddhists are not relegated to being passive recipients of the government's policies as is often the case. Far from it, Buddhist interaction with the government is handled with finesse, and the range of Buddhist reactions to the decriminalization (staunch opposition, eager acceptance, and everything in between) is explored fully. In the process, we get a close look at the arguments and concerns of famous Buddhist monks of this time like Fukuda Gyokai and Shaku Unsho as well as lesser known but (Jaffe points out) highly influential figures like Otori Sesso and Kurama Takudo. The controversial Nichiren lay religious leader Tanaka Chigaku is also discussed extensively.

Basically, then, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in Buddhism, Religious Studies, and/or Modern Japanese History. Anyone more generally interested in the vicissitudes of religious institutions in modernity should also find the book useful. And if you like this book as much as I do, you may also want to check out Stephen Covell's "Japanese Temple Buddhism: Worldliness in a Religion of Renunciation" (which discusses contemporary issues with temple wives and clerical marriage) or Bernard Faure's "The Red Thread" (which discusses the convoluted views of Buddhism on gender and sexuality more generally).