Hutchins Library News Blog

May is a month when we can celebrate the heritage, accomplishments, and contributions of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States. The observance started as a Congressional joint resolution in 1978 calling for a week-long celebration of Asian and Pacific American heritage; President Carter signed the proclamation in 1979, and the first celebration happened on the week of May 4, 1979. Congress then passed legislation designating May as Asian Pacific American Month in 1992. President Obama in 2009 expanded the proclamation to include Pacific Islanders.

To celebrate, here is a small list of some books to read this month or any time. The books are not listed in any particular order, and they include fiction and nonfiction. If you want to find these and other books and resources, you can check the Library Catalog from our website.

American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang (Illustrator)

Call Number: Graphic Novels 741.597 Y223a 2021

ISBN: 9781250811899

Publication Date: 2021-02-23

Original Series Now Available on Disney+ A tour-de-force by New York Times bestselling graphic novelist Gene Yang, American Born Chinese tells the story of three apparently unrelated characters: Jin Wang, who moves to a new neighborhood with his family only to discover that he's the only Chinese-American student at his new school; the powerful Monkey King, subject of one of the oldest and greatest Chinese fables; and Chin-Kee, a personification of the ultimate negative Chinese stereotype, who is ruining his cousin Danny's life with his yearly visits. Their lives and stories come together with an unexpected twist in this action-packed modern fable. American Born Chinese is an amazing ride, all the way up to the astonishing climax. American Born Chinese is the winner of the 2007 Michael L. Printz Award, a 2006 National Book Award Finalist for Young People's Literature, the winner of the 2007 Eisner Award for Best Graphic Album: New, an Eisner Award nominee for Best Coloring, a 2007 Bank Street Best Children's Book of the Year, and a New York Times bestseller.

 

 

They Called Us Enemy by Justin Eisenger; Steven Scott; George Takei

Call Number: Graphic Novels 940.531 T136t 2019

ISBN: 9781603094504

Publication Date: 2019-07-16

New York Times Bestseller! A stunning graphic memoir recounting actor/author/activist George Takei's childhood imprisoned within American concentration camps during World War II. Experience the forces that shaped an American icon -- and America itself -- in this gripping tale of courage, country, loyalty, and love. George Takei has captured hearts and minds worldwide with his captivating stage presence and outspoken commitment to equal rights. But long before he braved new frontiers in Star Trek, he woke up as a four-year-old boy to find his own birth country at war with his father's -- and their entire family forced from their home into an uncertain future. In 1942, at the order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, every person of Japanese descent on the west coast was rounded up and shipped to one of ten "relocation centers," hundreds or thousands of miles from home, where they would be held for years under armed guard. They Called Us Enemy is Takei's firsthand account of those years behind barbed wire, the joys and terrors of growing up under legalized racism, his mother's hard choices, his father's faith in democracy, and the way those experiences planted the seeds for his astonishing future. What does it mean to be American? Who gets to decide? When the world is against you, what can one person do? To answer these questions, George Takei joins co-writers Justin Eisinger & Steven Scott and artist Harmony Becker for the journey of a lifetime.

 

 

Asian American Histories of the United States by Catherine Ceniza Choy

Call Number: Stacks 973.049 C552a 2022

ISBN: 9780807050798

Publication Date: 2022-08-02

An inclusive and landmark history, emphasizing how essential Asian American experiences are to any understanding of US history. Original and expansive, Asian American Histories of the United States is a nearly 200-year history of Asian migration, labor, and community formation in the US. Reckoning with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the surge in anti-Asian hate and violence, award-winning historian Catherine Ceniza Choy presents an urgent social history of the fastest growing group of Americans. The book features the lived experiences and diverse voices of immigrants, refugees, US-born Asian Americans, multiracial Americans, and workers from industries spanning agriculture to healthcare. Despite significant Asian American breakthroughs in American politics, arts, and popular culture in the twenty-first century, a profound lack of understanding of Asian American history permeates American culture. Choy traces how anti-Asian violence and its intersection with misogyny and other forms of hatred, the erasure of Asian American experiences and contributions, and Asian American resistance to what has been omitted are prominent themes in Asian American history. This ambitious book is fundamental to understanding the American experience and its existential crises of the early twenty-first century.

 

 

Another Appalachia by Neema Avashia

Call Number: Stacks 975.437 A946a 2022

ISBN: 9781952271427

Publication Date: 2022-03-30

When Neema Avashia tells people where she's from, their response is nearly always a disbelieving "There are Indian people in West Virginia?" A queer Asian American teacher and writer, Avashia fits few Appalachian stereotypes. But the lessons she learned in childhood about race and class, gender and sexuality continue to inform the way she moves through the world today: how she loves, how she teaches, how she advocates, how she struggles. Another Appalachia examines both the roots and the resonance of Avashia's identity as a queer desi Appalachian woman, while encouraging readers to envision more complex versions of both Appalachia and the nation as a whole.

 

 

Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong

Call Number: Stacks 305.489 H772m 2020

ISBN: 9781984820365

Publication Date: 2020-02-25

Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative--and its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world. Binding these essays together is Hong's theory of "minor feelings." As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these "minor feelings" occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality--when you believe the lies you're told about your own racial identity. Minor feelings are not small, they're dissonant--and in their tension Hong finds the key to the questions that haunt her.  With sly humor and a poet's searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and female friendship. A radically honest work of art, Minor Feelings forms a portrait of one Asian American psyche--and of a writer's search to both uncover and speak the truth.

 

 

The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui

Call Number: Graphic Novels 973.049 B932b 2017

ISBN: 9781419718779

Publication Date: 2017-03-07

An intimate and poignant graphic novel portraying one family's journey from war-torn Vietnam, from debut author Thi Bui. This beautifully illustrated and emotional story is an evocative memoir about the search for a better future and a longing for the past. Exploring the anguish of immigration and the lasting effects that displacement has on a child and her family, Bui documents the story of her family's daring escape after the fall of South Vietnam in the 1970s, and the difficulties they faced building new lives for themselves. At the heart of Bui's story is a universal struggle: While adjusting to life as a first-time mother, she ultimately discovers what it means to be a parent - the endless sacrifices, the unnoticed gestures, and the depths of unspoken love. Despite how impossible it seems to take on the simultaneous roles of both parent and child, Bui pushes through. With haunting, poetic writing and breathtaking art, she examines the strength of family, the importance of identity, and the meaning of home.

 

 

Eating Asian America by Robert Ji-Song Ku (Editor); Martin F. Manalansan (Editor); Anita Mannur (Editor)

Call Number: Stacks 394.1209 E141 2013

ISBN: 9781479810239

Publication Date: 2013-09-23

Examines the ways our conceptions of Asian American food have been shaped Chop suey. Sushi. Curry. Adobo. Kimchi. The deep associations Asians in the United States have with food have become ingrained in the American popular imagination. So much so that contentious notions of ethnic authenticity and authority are marked by and argued around images and ideas of food. Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader collects burgeoning new scholarship in Asian American Studies that centers the study of foodways and culinary practices in our understanding of the racialized underpinnings of Asian Americanness. It does so by bringing together twenty scholars from across the disciplinary spectrum to inaugurate a new turn in food studies: the refusal to yield to a superficial multiculturalism that naively celebrates difference and reconciliation through the pleasures of food and eating. By focusing on multi-sited struggles across various spaces and times, the contributors to this anthology bring into focus the potent forces of class, racial, ethnic, sexual and gender inequalities that pervade and persist in the production of Asian American culinary and alimentary practices, ideas, and images. This is the first collection to consider the fraught itineraries of Asian American immigrant histories and how they are inscribed in the production and dissemination of ideas about Asian American foodways.

 

 

Shattered by Jeff Yang (Editor); Parry Shen (Editor); Keith Chow (Editor); Jerry Ma (Editor)

Call Number: Graphic Novels 741.597 S533 2012

ISBN: 9781595588241

Publication Date: 2012-11-06

Three years after the publication of the groundbreaking Asian American comics anthology Secret Identities, the same team is back with a new volume--bigger, bolder, and more breathtaking in scope. While the first collection focused on the conventions of superhero comics, this new book expands its horizon to include edgier genres, from hard-boiled pulp to horror, adventure, fantasy, and science fiction. Using this darker range of hues, it seeks to subvert--to shatter--the hidebound stereotypes that have obscured the Asian image since the earliest days of immigration: the stoic brute, the prodigious brain, the exotic temptress, the inscrutable alien, the devious manipulator. The eclectic and impressive lineup of contributors includes leading Asian American comics creators Bernard Chang (Supergirl), Sean Chen (Iron Man), Cliff Chiang (Wonder Woman), Larry Hama (G.I. Joe), Sonny Liew (Malinky Robot), Takeshi Miyazawa (Runaways), Christine Norrie (Hopeless Savages), Greg Pak (The Hulk), G.B. Tran (Vietnamerica), Gene Yang (American Born Chinese), and many others, as well as such film and literary standouts as Tanuj Chopra (Punching at the Sun), Michael Kang (The Motel), Jamie Ford (Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet), Gary Jackson (Missing You, Metropolis), and Bao Phi (Song I Sing). Their original graphic short stories cover topics from ethnic kiddie shows, China's AIDS policy, and airline security procedures to the untold backstory of Flash Gordon's nemesis Ming the Merciless and the gritty reality of a day in the life of a young Koreatown gangster. Shattered incorporates thrills, chills, and delights while exposing the hidden issues and vital truths of the nation's fastest-growing and most dynamic community.

 

 

Chains of Babylon by Daryl J. Maeda

Call Number: Stacks 305.895 M184c 2009

ISBN: 9780816648900

Publication Date: 2009-10-23

In Chains of Babylon, Daryl J. Maeda presents a cultural history of Asian American activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, showing how the movement created the category of "Asian American" to join Asians of many ethnicities in racial solidarity. Drawing on the Black Power and antiwar movements, Asian American radicals argued that all Asians in the United States should resist assimilation and band together to oppose racism within the country and imperialism abroad. As revealed in Maeda's in-depth work, the Asian American movement contended that people of all Asian ethnicities in the United States shared a common relationship to oppression and exploitation with each other and with other nonwhite peoples. In the early stages of the civil rights era, the possibility of assimilation was held out to Asian Americans under a model minority myth. Maeda insists that it was only in the disruption of that myth for both African Americans and Asian Americans in the 1960s and 1970s that the full Asian American culture and movement he describes could emerge. Maeda challenges accounts of the post-1968 era as hopelessly divisive by examining how racial and cultural identity enabled Asian Americans to see eye-to-eye with and support other groups of color in their campaigns for social justice. Asian American opposition to the war in Vietnam, unlike that of the broader antiwar movement, was predicated on understanding it as a racial, specifically anti-Asian genocide. Throughout he argues that cultural critiques of racism and imperialism, the twin "chains of Babylon" of the title, informed the construction of a multiethnic Asian American identity committed to interracial and transnational solidarity.

 

 

Asian-American Literature by Shirley Lim

Call Number: Stacks 820.808 A832

ISBN: 9780844217291

Publication Date: 2000-09-01

 

 

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Call Number: Fiction N57695sy

ISBN: 9780802123459

Publication Date: 2015-04-07

Now an HBO Limited Series from Executive Producers Park Chan-wook and Robert Downey Jr., Streaming Exclusively on Max. Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Winner of the 2016 Edgar Award for Best First Novel Winner of the 2016 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction "[A] remarkable debut novel." --Philip Caputo, New York Times Book Review (cover review) Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize, a startling debut novel from a powerful new voice featuring one of the most remarkable narrators of recent fiction: a conflicted subversive and idealist working as a double agent in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. The winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as seven other awards, The Sympathizer is the breakthrough novel of the year. With the pace and suspense of a thriller and prose that has been compared to Graham Greene and Saul Bellow, The Sympathizer is a sweeping epic of love and betrayal. The narrator, a communist double agent, is a "man of two minds," a half-French, half-Vietnamese army captain who arranges to come to America after the Fall of Saigon, and while building a new life with other Vietnamese refugees in Los Angeles is secretly reporting back to his communist superiors in Vietnam.  The Sympathizer is a blistering exploration of identity and America, a gripping espionage novel, and a powerful story of love and friendship.

 

 

If you would like to do research  on Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, and related topics, in addition to the library catalog, you could try the following databases and online resources accessible through the library website:

• Access World News, which offers full text from nearly 3,700 U.S. and 2,300 International newspapers.
• Academic Source Complete.
• Alt Press Watch.
• Ethnic Newswatch.
• J-Stor.
• Films on Demand, for videos and documentaries.

In addition if you want to learn more, here are some online resources freely available on the Internet:

• May: Asian American Pacific Islander Month overview at National Day Calendar.
• Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month history and overview at National Today.
• "Dear Educators, it's time to fight for Asian America" from Rethinking Schools.
• "Addressing Anti-Asian Bias" from Learning for Justice.
• "Asian Americans in the People's History of the United States" from Zinn Ed Project.
• Resources from the Federal Asian Pacific American Council.
• The Asian American Education Project.
• "Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month" spotlight from National Park Service.
• An Asian Pacific American "care package" from the Smithsonian.
• A list of "free learning resources to celebrate Asian American heritage" from Common Sense Education.

 

 

 

Hutchins Library is pleased to announce that the Tibetan Monks of Tashi Kyil will be visiting Berea College's campus from February 15, 2019 to February 19, 2019. As part of their visit, they will construct a World Peace sand mandala in the central area of the main floor of Hutchins Library. Visitors can view the work during library's regular hours.

The itinerary of activities for the public includes:

Friday, February 15:

• 1 p.m.: Opening Ceremony (Atrium, Hutchins Library) & sand mandala construction. (Library closes 7 p.m.)
   

• 7 p.m.: “The Story of Tibet” (Room 100, Draper Building)

Saturday, February 16:

• 2 p.m.: Tashi Sholpa Dance and Tibetan Language Workshop (Dance Studio. 2nd Floor. Seabury Center)

Sunday, February 17:

• 7 p.m.: "A Course in Happiness." (Fireside Room. Danforth Chapel. Draper Building)

Monday, February 18:

• 10 a.m.: Meditation Workshop and Heart Sutra Chanting. (Room 006. Knapp Hall)

Tuesday, February 19:

• 12 p.m.: Sand Mandala Closing Ceremony. (Hutchins Library)

All events are free and open to the public.

Sponsored by:

• Art and History Department
• Asian Student Union
• Asian Studies Department
• Campus Christian Center
• Center for International Education
• Cosmopolitan Club
• Hutchins Library
• Office of the Academic Vice-President
• Office of the President

May's reference book of the month is Levinson and Christen's Encyclopedia of Modern Asia. The following description is from Googlebooks.com: 

"Intended for students and non-specialists, this six-volume set does an outstanding job of covering all aspects of modern Asia (economics, religion, technology, politics, education, the arts, environmental issues, international relations, and scientific advances). Recognizing that there is not one Asian culture but many, the editors have been careful to stress both the interrelatedness and the tremendous variance of traditions. The set is equally useful for those researching common themes across Asian culture and those examining a particular country. Well illustrated and carefully indexed, the set is highly recommended for all public and academic libraries."--"The Best of the Best Reference Sources," American Libraries, May 2003

Recommended for Asian Studies majors.

Interesting fact: The series has Asian regional maps in the beginning of each volume.

Encyclopedia of Modern Asia

Call Number: 950.03 E56

Publication Date: 2002