New Books at Daley: Asian American Awareness Month

Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. 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.

This volume is unique in exploring Asian American and Pacific Islander women's lives along local, transnational, and global dimensions. The contributions present new research on diverse aspects of Asian American and Pacific Islander women's history, from the politics of language, to the role of food, to experiences as adoptees, mixed race, and second generation, while acknowledging shared experiences as women of color in the United States.

Asian American women scholars experience shockingly low rates of tenure and promotion because of the particular ways they are marginalized by the intersectionalities of race and gender in academia. Although Asian American studies critics have long since debunked the model minority myth that constructs Asian Americans as the ideal academic subject, university administrators still treat Asian American women in academia as though they will simply show up and shut up. Consequently, because silent complicity is expected, power holders will punish and oppress Asian American women severely when they question or critique the system. However, change is in the air. Fight the Tower is a continuation of the Fight the Tower movement, which supports women standing up for their rights to claim their earned place in academia and to work for positive change for all within academic institutions.

Based on interviews with more than 35 people intimately involved with AIDS prevention, care, and advocacy work, Love Your Asian Body explores the journeys these individuals took-connecting the deeply personal with the uncompromisingly political. Wat narrates the transformation of APAIT from a scrappy group of grassroots activists to its emergence as one of the more formidable forces in the AIDS service landscape in 1990s Los Angeles. These activists brought a sex positive ethos to the work of community organizing and HIV prevention, centering pleasure and the sexual agency of LGBTQ Asian Americans.

Monica Mong Trieu argues that we must consider the role of physical and symbolic space to fully understand the nuances of Asian American racialization. By doing this, we face questions such as, historically, who has represented Asian America? Who gets to represent Asian America? This book shifts the primary focus to Midwest Asian America to disrupt--and expand beyond--the existing privileged narratives in United States and Asian American history.   Drawing from in-depth interviews, census data, and cultural productions from Asian Americans in Ohio, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Minnesota, Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, and Michigan, this interdisciplinary research examines how post-1950s Midwest Asian Americans navigate identity and belonging, racism, educational settings, resources within co-ethnic communities, and pan-ethnic cultural community. Their experiences and life narratives are heavily framed by three pervasive themes of spatially defined isolation, invisibility, and racialized visibility.   Fighting Invisibility makes an important contribution to racialization literature, while also highlighting the necessity to further expand the scope of Asian American history-telling and knowledge production.

A revelatory compendium of writings, art and ephemera on the '90s New York collective that fostered a social space for diasporic Asian artists A New York Times critics' pick Best Art Books 2021 This anthology gathers writings, documentation and ephemera from Godzilla: Asian American Arts Network, a collective based in New York from 1990 to 2001, which was formed to provide a support structure for Asian American artists, writers and curators to stimulate visibility and critical discourse for their work.

It won't take long to fall in love with the subject of Painted Nails, Van Hoang, a Vietnamese nail salon owner who serves an ethnically diverse group of working class women with acrylic nails and intricate airbrush designs.The salon Van owns with her husband feels like a second home, but she is hesitant for her daughter to spend time there, fearing the adverse effects of product chemicals. Van herself suffers from headaches, memory loss, and has had trouble bringing other pregnancies to term, but continues to work morning until night every day. Determined to make her salon a safer place, Van takes her story to Washington D.C. and becomes one of the first to testify for safe cosmetics in over 30 years.

Her passport said she was Cha Jung Hee. She knew she was not. So began a 40-year deception for a Korean adoptee who came to the US in 1966. Told to keep her true identity a secret from her new American family, this eight-year-old girl quickly forgot she was ever anyone else. But why had her identity been switched? And who was the real Cha Jung Hee?

Because of her family's efforts to avoid scrutiny during the Cold War era of the 1950's they tried hard to blend in with their surroundings and little mention was made at home of their Chinese past. Light -hearted letters which would pass the scrutiny of censors on both sides of the Bamboo Curtain were the only way family ties were maintained. It was not until Flora's Aunt Ping immigrated to America in the late eighties that Flora learned about her ancestors and the intertwining of Chinese history and family history.

Marica Liu describes the imposter phenomenon, how it presents itself in therapy, and how to effectively work with it. Dr. Liu works with Precious - a Filipina graduate student who comes into therapy with general feelings of stress, sleeplessness, and worry. Dr. Liu skillfully opens up a dialogue about race dynamics and help her client recognize the external factors that are impacting her mental health.

"What does it mean to be an American revolutionary today? Grace Lee Boggs is a 98-year-old Chinese American writer, activist, and philosopher in Detroit. Rooted for more than 70 years in the African American movement, she has devoted her life to an evolving revolution that encompasses the contradictions of America's past and its potentially radical future.

THE CELINE ARCHIVE is simultaneously an act of journalism, a journey into family and community memory and archives, a love poem, a story of grief and trauma, and a séance for the buried history of Filipino-Americans. Filmmaker and scholar Celine Parreñas Shimizu artfully weaves together her own story of grief with the story of the tragic death of Celine Navarro, which has become lore. In 1932, Navarro was buried alive by her own community of Filipino-Americans in Northern California, but the circumstances surrounding her death were and are unclear and have oft been spun, sensationalized, and dramatized. The filmmaker, a grieving mother with ties to the same community, finds resonance with Navarro's memory and long-lost story, and she sets out to first learn - and then tell - the truth about Navarro's death, ultimately portraying her as a feminist heroine.