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asianamlitfansAsian American Literature Fans – Megareview for May 20, 2012: Creative Nonfiction Megapost
In this post, reviews of Sunny Che’s Forever Alien: A Korean Memoir: 193-1951 (McFarland, 2000); Paisley Rekdal’s Intimate: An American Family Photo Album (Tupelo Press, 2012); Mel Ramaswamy’s An Immigrant Celebrates America: Reflections on America through the Fresh Eye of an Immigrant (University of Indianapolis Press, 2007); Laura Ling and Lisa Ling’s Somewhere Inside: One Sister’s Captivity in North Korea and the Other’s Fight to Bring Her Home (Harper, 2010); Manchurian Legacy: Memoirs of a Japanese Colonist (Michigan State University Press, 1999); Charles N. Li’s The Bitter Sea: Coming of Age in a China before Mao (Harper, 2008).
A Review of Sunny Che’s Forever Alien: A Korean Memoir: 193-1951 (McFarland, 2000).
Sunny Che’s Forever Alien: A Korean Memoir is another work that I have not even heard about and only discovered based upon late night, random web searches. These moments are always evidence to me of the practical impossibility of keeping up with the field of Asian American literature as it is traditionally defined and complicates assertions that ethnic studies is in fact just a “ghetto.” Che’s work provides an important edition to the personal documentation of the overseas Koreans during the Japanese colonial period. Che’s family lived and work in Japan for a couple of decades, dealing with their status as inferior beings and “aliens” as the title suggests. With Japan’s increasing instability in the face of World War II, the Che family moves back to Korea. Che painstakingly details her family’s many difficulties: a sister Kiyon has a pregnancy out of wedlock; another sister Duli runs away with a man, only to return home (like Kiyon) with her reputation in ruins; her brother Taiam clashes mightily with their stepmother. Che also has one other brother named Taikun and a stepsister named Jinju. Che excels in school and it is her academic capabilities which provides her with a significant mode of independence. She is able to attend a college with the help of mentorship from local missionaries. One of the most harrowing sequences deals with Che’s experiences as a refugee during the Korean War. In the final arc of the memoir, Che details how she escapes Seoul before one of the main bridges explodes, but then must move continually southward (either by train or by foot) until she is at the Pusan Perimeter. America’s ability to repel North Korean forces at Pusan was a major turning point in the early period of the war. Unfortunately, Che’s memoir ends with her receiving a passport and traveling to the United States. I wanted to know more about Che’s acculturation process and have no idea if there is or ever were any plans for a second installment to the memoir. The other element that I found interesting in terms of the Che’s life is its depiction of friendships and relationships. Though Che has fleeting moments where she reveals some of her romantic sentiments, her life is largely devoid of significant attachment to those who would be considered her peer groups. But it is clear to a certain extent that her intense desire for independence and her dream to see the United States pushes her to work extremely hard in schooling to the detriment of making other social connections. A fascinating work and definitely a memoir that requires more critical attention.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Forever-Alien-Korean-Memoir-1930-1951/dp/0786421541
A Review of Paisley Rekdal’s Intimate: An American Family Photo Album (Tupelo, 2012).
I read Paisley Rekdal’s Intimate in one sitting last night, simply couldn’t put it down. The work has all of the qualities of creative nonfiction that I absolutely love; Rekdal’s Intimate is genre-bending, confessional, speculative, self-conscious and analytical, and historically textured. There is poetry, there is historical fiction, there is autobiography and memoir, there are many photographs. The major players in this work are Rekdal’s parents—her mother is suffering from cancer and her father appears as a larger-than-life figure who commands an authoritative voice—and Rekdal’s interest in Edward Curtis, a famous American photographer, as well as one of his native guides, Alexander Upshaw, who would also be the subject of some of his photographs. In some ways, Rekdal’s autobiographical narrator is more interested in reconstructing Upshaw’s life, of which there are very few details, so much of Intimate is a fictionalization of his background. At the same time, Rekdal’s interest in Curtis’s work gives her an avenue to explore the politics of representation. Rekdal’s investment in Curtis’s native depictions is multi-faceted. On the one hand, there is an obvious cross-racial identification simply based upon the fact that as a mixed race subject Rekdal realizes that she could be mistaken for someone of indigenous ancestry. On a more ambivalent level, Rekdal seems to be working out her interest in Curtis’s photographic approach, one that while aiming for authenticity of the native subject, nevertheless instills a kind of performance, the dignity of the vanishing Indian that while problematic in its stereotypical conception, she still somehow finds beautiful. These contradictory and paradoxical elements seem to be at the root of so many acts of cultural production—the blockages as one attempts to seek out the authentic, the seduction of particular representations, and finally still: the ways that one cultural production allows us to meditate upon the very difficult tensions in our own personal lives. A beautiful work!
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Intimate-American-Family-Tupelo-Lineage/dp/1932195963/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1335367162&sr=8-2
A Review of Mel Ramaswamy’s An Immigrant Celebrates America: Reflections on America through the Fresh Eye of an Immigrant (University of Indianapolis Press, 2007).
Mel Ramaswamy’s An Immigrant Celebrates America: Reflections on America through the Fresh Eye of an Immigrant is an interesting example of the creative nonfiction form. Rather than a traditional memoir, the “reflections” that Ramaswamy provides are short one page narrative pieces on a particular topic or issue, many focusing on elements of language and everyday activities. In the preface, Ramaswamy explains: “I became an immigrant in 1967 and a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1985. This book is my humble way of celebrating America. It contains observations made over the years on wide-ranging topics relating to America’s people and processes from an Indian immigrant’s viewpoint.” One of the challenges that the text presents is how to convey a “celebration” without necessarily succumbing to n kind of positivistic apoliticism (especially from the point of view of many of our interests here). Certainly, one must read the social contexts around Ramaswamy’s reflections. He is of the “brain drain” generation that occurred in the wake of the Immigration Act of 1965. As a man of a high educational background, Ramaswamy’s various writings here also reflect that mobile transnational upbringing and many of his pieces tangentially explore issues such as colonialism and assimilation. There are also many moments of levity, which I believe to be this work’s strongest quality. In “Indian Names,” for instance, Ramaswamy writes “By American standards, my last name is long. But it is short by Indian standards. The intricacy of a South Indian last name such as Venkatashivasubramanyam (24 letters) is enough to liven up the dullest conversation” (62). The reflections often include comic strips to accompany such humorous considerations. For those looking for a strong narrative, there is none to be had here, but consider this work as a novel approach to the creative nonfiction genre.
Buy the Book here:
http://www.amazon.com/An-Immigrant-Celebrates-America-Reflections/dp/0880938684/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1335284504&sr=8-1
A Review of Laura Ling and Lisa Ling’s Somewhere Inside: One Sister’s Captivity in North Korea and the Other’s Fight to Bring Her Home (Harper, 2010).
I was partly interested in reading this title for the simple fact that it was a co-written memoir and certainly, it has one of the more unique structural qualities, as it is narrated in alternating perspectives throughout. Laura, who is the captive, and Lisa, the older (and more famous due in part to her stint on the nationally known program called The View), the sister who campaigns and works on Laura’s behalf to get her home, both provide the grounding narrative voices for this nonfictional text. Of course, given their collective journalistic backgrounds, the memoir offers them a form to also focus on the lives and histories of others. The memoir opens quite quickly with the capture and captivity of Laura and her coworker, Euna Lee, who are both working on a documentary focusing on North Korean refugees who live illegally in China and who seek asylum but are often deported back to North Korea. When they inadvertently cross over the North Korean border, they are apprehended by soldiers and are taken prisoner by them, though they are only captured and dragged when they are officially still on the Chinese side. Laura and Euna endure many days of interrogation and are separated. Stateside, when Lisa finally discovered what has happened to Laura, diplomatic channels are opened to negotiate Laura and Euna’s release. Like Roxana Saberi’s memoir, this one reveals the tenuousness of journalistic freedom in totalitarian and autocratic regimes. And like Roxana’s experiences, Laura faces endless days in confinement, having to find ways to keep her mind and both from withering completely. While Laura is continually interrogated to find out if she may be working with the CIA, it is also clear that one reason she has become a target is because both she and Lisa have reported about North Korea in less than flattering ways. The memoir is quite illuminating in terms of revealing the complicated and tortuous path of diplomatic processes, especially given two countries who are basically sworn enemies of each other. With very few accounts of the notoriously secretive North Korean regime, this memoir offers an invaluable look of the country’s culture, especially in relation to its political structure and bureaucratic intricacies.
Buy the Book here:
http://www.amazon.com/Somewhere-Inside-Sisters-Captivity-Others/dp/0062000675
A Review of Kazuko Kuramoto’s Manchurian Legacy: Memoirs of a Japanese Colonist (Michigan State University Press, 1999).
I have no idea how I found out about this book. I must have been trolling through amazon.com late at night like I often do to find some random new title. Though published over a decade ago, no one has ever mentioned Kazuko Kuramoto’s Manchurian Legacy and I think it’s a text that certainly could have more critical and readerly attention directed toward it. Kuramoto’s memoir focuses on a little known historical context that I first encountered while reading Mary Yukari Waters’s brilliant short story collection, The Laws of Evening. The first story, “Seed,” focused on the lives of Japanese colonial elites living in China and demonstrated the complicated nature of colonial power, especially as it depicted the lives of a seemingly ordinary family not directly connected to the military. In some sense, the story clarifies the heterogeneous communities formed out of the Japanese imperial project, a social context that Kuramoto illustrates quite wonderfully in Manchurian Legacy. On the one hand, Kuramoto is intent to show that as a colonial subject living in China prior to the fall of the Japanese empire in 1945, she possessed particular cultural, social and economic capital. On the other, as Russia attacked the Japanese colonial holdings in China, Kuramoto and her family were subjected to incredible hardships and became refugees. Later still, Kuramoto along with numerous others were forced to repatriate to Japan, though many considered parts of China their home. The second half of the memoir focuses much more on Kuramoto’s attempts to carve out her own identity as a modern Japanese woman. Certainly, she realizes that she is culturally different than her native Japanese counterparts; her independent and progressive attitudes put her at odds with many of her peers and she finds some refuge in romances and friendships borne of the American forces occupying Japan. This memoir is definitely one to consider in any course exploring postcolonialism and Asian American literature.
buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Manchurian-Legacy-Memoirs-Japanese-Colonist/dp/0870137255/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1330926246&sr=8-1
A Review of Charles N. Li’s The Bitter Sea: Coming of Age in a China before Mao (Harper, 2008).
Charles N. Li’s The Bitter Sea adds to the ever-growing body of Chinese American memoirists detailing the incredible transformations that China under the space of half a century’s time (see also: Diane Wei Liang’s Lake with No Name, Xiaoda Xiao’s The Visiting Suit, among others recently reviewed). In The Bitter Sea, Li focuses on his childhood and early adult periods. The memoir focuses mostly on Li’s tortured relationship with his domineering father, a man whose single-minded focus and ambitions would later lead to his family’s financial downfall and eventual disintegration. Li’s father came from humble backgrounds but through an incredible determination and poise was able to rise up to a top governmental post, serving during the “Vichy” Nanjing regime under Japanese colonial rule. His family is able to live in an affluent area and is protected from the chaos of the 1937 invasion. But because Li’s father aligned himself with the Japanese colonialists, he is eventually prosecuted for his support of enemy nationals and his family must endure new lives living in a local Nanjing Slum. At one point, Li ends up moving to Shanghai to live with his aunt, a period of time which he looks upon with fondness, but he is later reunited with his family as the communist government comes to power and the entire family has relocated in Hong Kong. At this point, Li ends up throwing himself further into his studies, but he is not necessarily academically oriented (though he still excels rather admirably). His mother ends up leaving his father to pursue studies in the seminary; this moment also reveals the ways in which his mother had quietly suffered under the continued ambitions of her husband. Indeed, Li’s father continued to harbor dreams that he would be elevated in some way to his former political stature. Despite their rather intricate relationship, one of the ways that Li and his father do end up bonding is over the discussion of politics. It is in this realm where the Confucian boundaries between parents and their children become the most mutable for Li and he is able to come to a more sophisticated understanding of national and international contexts and histories. Li’s memoir is a compelling read and rather directly confronts the thorniness of familial tensions and large reversals of fortune. Given its accessibility, it is also certainly a text that could be adopted in various classroom formats.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Bitter-Sea-Coming-Before/dp/B0046LUF2W/ref=tmm_pap_title_0
In this post, reviews of Sunny Che’s Forever Alien: A Korean Memoir: 193-1951 (McFarland, 2000); Paisley Rekdal’s Intimate: An American Family Photo Album (Tupelo Press, 2012); Mel Ramaswamy’s An Immigrant Celebrates America: Reflections on America through the Fresh Eye of an Immigrant (University of Indianapolis Press, 2007); Laura Ling and Lisa Ling’s Somewhere Inside: One Sister’s Captivity in North Korea and the Other’s Fight to Bring Her Home (Harper, 2010); Manchurian Legacy: Memoirs of a Japanese Colonist (Michigan State University Press, 1999); Charles N. Li’s The Bitter Sea: Coming of Age in a China before Mao (Harper, 2008).
A Review of Sunny Che’s Forever Alien: A Korean Memoir: 193-1951 (McFarland, 2000).
Sunny Che’s Forever Alien: A Korean Memoir is another work that I have not even heard about and only discovered based upon late night, random web searches. These moments are always evidence to me of the practical impossibility of keeping up with the field of Asian American literature as it is traditionally defined and complicates assertions that ethnic studies is in fact just a “ghetto.” Che’s work provides an important edition to the personal documentation of the overseas Koreans during the Japanese colonial period. Che’s family lived and work in Japan for a couple of decades, dealing with their status as inferior beings and “aliens” as the title suggests. With Japan’s increasing instability in the face of World War II, the Che family moves back to Korea. Che painstakingly details her family’s many difficulties: a sister Kiyon has a pregnancy out of wedlock; another sister Duli runs away with a man, only to return home (like Kiyon) with her reputation in ruins; her brother Taiam clashes mightily with their stepmother. Che also has one other brother named Taikun and a stepsister named Jinju. Che excels in school and it is her academic capabilities which provides her with a significant mode of independence. She is able to attend a college with the help of mentorship from local missionaries. One of the most harrowing sequences deals with Che’s experiences as a refugee during the Korean War. In the final arc of the memoir, Che details how she escapes Seoul before one of the main bridges explodes, but then must move continually southward (either by train or by foot) until she is at the Pusan Perimeter. America’s ability to repel North Korean forces at Pusan was a major turning point in the early period of the war. Unfortunately, Che’s memoir ends with her receiving a passport and traveling to the United States. I wanted to know more about Che’s acculturation process and have no idea if there is or ever were any plans for a second installment to the memoir. The other element that I found interesting in terms of the Che’s life is its depiction of friendships and relationships. Though Che has fleeting moments where she reveals some of her romantic sentiments, her life is largely devoid of significant attachment to those who would be considered her peer groups. But it is clear to a certain extent that her intense desire for independence and her dream to see the United States pushes her to work extremely hard in schooling to the detriment of making other social connections. A fascinating work and definitely a memoir that requires more critical attention.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Forever-Alien-Korean-Memoir-1930-1951/dp/0786421541
A Review of Paisley Rekdal’s Intimate: An American Family Photo Album (Tupelo, 2012).
I read Paisley Rekdal’s Intimate in one sitting last night, simply couldn’t put it down. The work has all of the qualities of creative nonfiction that I absolutely love; Rekdal’s Intimate is genre-bending, confessional, speculative, self-conscious and analytical, and historically textured. There is poetry, there is historical fiction, there is autobiography and memoir, there are many photographs. The major players in this work are Rekdal’s parents—her mother is suffering from cancer and her father appears as a larger-than-life figure who commands an authoritative voice—and Rekdal’s interest in Edward Curtis, a famous American photographer, as well as one of his native guides, Alexander Upshaw, who would also be the subject of some of his photographs. In some ways, Rekdal’s autobiographical narrator is more interested in reconstructing Upshaw’s life, of which there are very few details, so much of Intimate is a fictionalization of his background. At the same time, Rekdal’s interest in Curtis’s work gives her an avenue to explore the politics of representation. Rekdal’s investment in Curtis’s native depictions is multi-faceted. On the one hand, there is an obvious cross-racial identification simply based upon the fact that as a mixed race subject Rekdal realizes that she could be mistaken for someone of indigenous ancestry. On a more ambivalent level, Rekdal seems to be working out her interest in Curtis’s photographic approach, one that while aiming for authenticity of the native subject, nevertheless instills a kind of performance, the dignity of the vanishing Indian that while problematic in its stereotypical conception, she still somehow finds beautiful. These contradictory and paradoxical elements seem to be at the root of so many acts of cultural production—the blockages as one attempts to seek out the authentic, the seduction of particular representations, and finally still: the ways that one cultural production allows us to meditate upon the very difficult tensions in our own personal lives. A beautiful work!
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Intimate-American-Family-Tupelo-Lineage/dp/1932195963/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1335367162&sr=8-2
A Review of Mel Ramaswamy’s An Immigrant Celebrates America: Reflections on America through the Fresh Eye of an Immigrant (University of Indianapolis Press, 2007).
Mel Ramaswamy’s An Immigrant Celebrates America: Reflections on America through the Fresh Eye of an Immigrant is an interesting example of the creative nonfiction form. Rather than a traditional memoir, the “reflections” that Ramaswamy provides are short one page narrative pieces on a particular topic or issue, many focusing on elements of language and everyday activities. In the preface, Ramaswamy explains: “I became an immigrant in 1967 and a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1985. This book is my humble way of celebrating America. It contains observations made over the years on wide-ranging topics relating to America’s people and processes from an Indian immigrant’s viewpoint.” One of the challenges that the text presents is how to convey a “celebration” without necessarily succumbing to n kind of positivistic apoliticism (especially from the point of view of many of our interests here). Certainly, one must read the social contexts around Ramaswamy’s reflections. He is of the “brain drain” generation that occurred in the wake of the Immigration Act of 1965. As a man of a high educational background, Ramaswamy’s various writings here also reflect that mobile transnational upbringing and many of his pieces tangentially explore issues such as colonialism and assimilation. There are also many moments of levity, which I believe to be this work’s strongest quality. In “Indian Names,” for instance, Ramaswamy writes “By American standards, my last name is long. But it is short by Indian standards. The intricacy of a South Indian last name such as Venkatashivasubramanyam (24 letters) is enough to liven up the dullest conversation” (62). The reflections often include comic strips to accompany such humorous considerations. For those looking for a strong narrative, there is none to be had here, but consider this work as a novel approach to the creative nonfiction genre.
Buy the Book here:
http://www.amazon.com/An-Immigrant-Celebrates-America-Reflections/dp/0880938684/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1335284504&sr=8-1
A Review of Laura Ling and Lisa Ling’s Somewhere Inside: One Sister’s Captivity in North Korea and the Other’s Fight to Bring Her Home (Harper, 2010).
I was partly interested in reading this title for the simple fact that it was a co-written memoir and certainly, it has one of the more unique structural qualities, as it is narrated in alternating perspectives throughout. Laura, who is the captive, and Lisa, the older (and more famous due in part to her stint on the nationally known program called The View), the sister who campaigns and works on Laura’s behalf to get her home, both provide the grounding narrative voices for this nonfictional text. Of course, given their collective journalistic backgrounds, the memoir offers them a form to also focus on the lives and histories of others. The memoir opens quite quickly with the capture and captivity of Laura and her coworker, Euna Lee, who are both working on a documentary focusing on North Korean refugees who live illegally in China and who seek asylum but are often deported back to North Korea. When they inadvertently cross over the North Korean border, they are apprehended by soldiers and are taken prisoner by them, though they are only captured and dragged when they are officially still on the Chinese side. Laura and Euna endure many days of interrogation and are separated. Stateside, when Lisa finally discovered what has happened to Laura, diplomatic channels are opened to negotiate Laura and Euna’s release. Like Roxana Saberi’s memoir, this one reveals the tenuousness of journalistic freedom in totalitarian and autocratic regimes. And like Roxana’s experiences, Laura faces endless days in confinement, having to find ways to keep her mind and both from withering completely. While Laura is continually interrogated to find out if she may be working with the CIA, it is also clear that one reason she has become a target is because both she and Lisa have reported about North Korea in less than flattering ways. The memoir is quite illuminating in terms of revealing the complicated and tortuous path of diplomatic processes, especially given two countries who are basically sworn enemies of each other. With very few accounts of the notoriously secretive North Korean regime, this memoir offers an invaluable look of the country’s culture, especially in relation to its political structure and bureaucratic intricacies.
Buy the Book here:
http://www.amazon.com/Somewhere-Inside-Sisters-Captivity-Others/dp/0062000675
A Review of Kazuko Kuramoto’s Manchurian Legacy: Memoirs of a Japanese Colonist (Michigan State University Press, 1999).
I have no idea how I found out about this book. I must have been trolling through amazon.com late at night like I often do to find some random new title. Though published over a decade ago, no one has ever mentioned Kazuko Kuramoto’s Manchurian Legacy and I think it’s a text that certainly could have more critical and readerly attention directed toward it. Kuramoto’s memoir focuses on a little known historical context that I first encountered while reading Mary Yukari Waters’s brilliant short story collection, The Laws of Evening. The first story, “Seed,” focused on the lives of Japanese colonial elites living in China and demonstrated the complicated nature of colonial power, especially as it depicted the lives of a seemingly ordinary family not directly connected to the military. In some sense, the story clarifies the heterogeneous communities formed out of the Japanese imperial project, a social context that Kuramoto illustrates quite wonderfully in Manchurian Legacy. On the one hand, Kuramoto is intent to show that as a colonial subject living in China prior to the fall of the Japanese empire in 1945, she possessed particular cultural, social and economic capital. On the other, as Russia attacked the Japanese colonial holdings in China, Kuramoto and her family were subjected to incredible hardships and became refugees. Later still, Kuramoto along with numerous others were forced to repatriate to Japan, though many considered parts of China their home. The second half of the memoir focuses much more on Kuramoto’s attempts to carve out her own identity as a modern Japanese woman. Certainly, she realizes that she is culturally different than her native Japanese counterparts; her independent and progressive attitudes put her at odds with many of her peers and she finds some refuge in romances and friendships borne of the American forces occupying Japan. This memoir is definitely one to consider in any course exploring postcolonialism and Asian American literature.
buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Manchurian-Legacy-Memoirs-Japanese-Colonist/dp/0870137255/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1330926246&sr=8-1
A Review of Charles N. Li’s The Bitter Sea: Coming of Age in a China before Mao (Harper, 2008).
Charles N. Li’s The Bitter Sea adds to the ever-growing body of Chinese American memoirists detailing the incredible transformations that China under the space of half a century’s time (see also: Diane Wei Liang’s Lake with No Name, Xiaoda Xiao’s The Visiting Suit, among others recently reviewed). In The Bitter Sea, Li focuses on his childhood and early adult periods. The memoir focuses mostly on Li’s tortured relationship with his domineering father, a man whose single-minded focus and ambitions would later lead to his family’s financial downfall and eventual disintegration. Li’s father came from humble backgrounds but through an incredible determination and poise was able to rise up to a top governmental post, serving during the “Vichy” Nanjing regime under Japanese colonial rule. His family is able to live in an affluent area and is protected from the chaos of the 1937 invasion. But because Li’s father aligned himself with the Japanese colonialists, he is eventually prosecuted for his support of enemy nationals and his family must endure new lives living in a local Nanjing Slum. At one point, Li ends up moving to Shanghai to live with his aunt, a period of time which he looks upon with fondness, but he is later reunited with his family as the communist government comes to power and the entire family has relocated in Hong Kong. At this point, Li ends up throwing himself further into his studies, but he is not necessarily academically oriented (though he still excels rather admirably). His mother ends up leaving his father to pursue studies in the seminary; this moment also reveals the ways in which his mother had quietly suffered under the continued ambitions of her husband. Indeed, Li’s father continued to harbor dreams that he would be elevated in some way to his former political stature. Despite their rather intricate relationship, one of the ways that Li and his father do end up bonding is over the discussion of politics. It is in this realm where the Confucian boundaries between parents and their children become the most mutable for Li and he is able to come to a more sophisticated understanding of national and international contexts and histories. Li’s memoir is a compelling read and rather directly confronts the thorniness of familial tensions and large reversals of fortune. Given its accessibility, it is also certainly a text that could be adopted in various classroom formats.
Buy the Book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Bitter-Sea-Coming-Before/dp/B0046LUF2W/ref=tmm_pap_title_0
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no subject
Date: 2012-05-21 01:29 am (UTC)I also want to read Manchurian Legacy. I've read quite a few memoirs from a Korean person's point of view during the Japanese occupation, but I've never read a story from a Japanese colonist's side before. I believe I've only read one book regarding Japanese colonization of China, as well. Most definitely will want to check this book out.
no subject
Date: 2012-05-21 02:26 am (UTC)HAPPY READING!