Empfehlungen basierend auf "The Original Daughter"

“I am most grateful for two things: that I was born in North Korea, and that I escaped from North Korea.”Yeonmi Park has told the harrowing story of her escape from North Korea as a child many times, but never before has she revealed the most intimate and devastating details of the repressive society she was raised in and the enormous price she paid to escape. Park’s family was loving and close-knit, but life in North Korea was brutal, practically medieval. Park would regularly go without food and was made to believe that, Kim Jong Il, the country’s dictator, could read her mind. After her father was imprisoned and tortured by the regime for trading on the black-market, a risk he took in order to provide for his wife and two young daughters, Yeonmi and her family were branded as criminals and forced to the cruel margins of North Korean society. With thirteen-year-old Park suffering from a botched appendectomy and weighing a mere sixty pounds, she and her mother were smuggled across the border into China.I wasn’t dreaming of freedom when I escaped from North Korea. I didn’t even know what it meant to be free. All I knew was that if my family stayed behind, we would probably die—from starvation, from disease, from the inhuman conditions of a prison labor camp. The hunger had become unbearable; I was willing to risk my life for the promise of a bowl of rice. But there was more to our journey than our own survival. My mother and I were searching for my older sister, Eunmi, who had left for China a few days earlier and had not been heard from since. Park knew the journey would be difficult, but could not have imagined the extent of the hardship to come. Those years in China cost Park her childhood, and nearly her life. By the time she and her mother made their way to South Korea two years later, her father was dead and her sister was still missing. Before now, only her mother knew what really happened between the time they crossed the Yalu river into China and when they followed the stars through the frigid Gobi Desert to freedom. As she writes, “I convinced myself that a lot of what I had experienced never happened. I taught myself to forget the rest.” In In Order to Live, Park shines a light not just into the darkest corners of life in North Korea, describing the deprivation and deception she endured and which millions of North Korean people continue to endure to this day, but also onto her own most painful and difficult memories. She tells with bravery and dignity for the first time the story of how she and her mother were betrayed and sold into sexual slavery in China and forced to suffer terrible psychological and physical hardship before they finally made their way to Seoul, South Korea—and to freedom. Still in her early twenties, Yeonmi Park has lived through experiences that few people of any age will ever know—and most people would never recover from. Park confronts her past with a startling resilience, refusing to be defeated or defined by the circumstances of her former life in North Korea and China. In spite of everything, she has never stopped being proud of where she is from, and never stopped striving for a better life. Indeed, today she is a human rights activist working determinedly to bring attention to the oppression taking place in her home country. Park’s testimony is rare, edifying, and terribly important, and the story she tells in In Order to Live is heartbreaking and unimaginable, but never without hope. Her voice is riveting and dignified. This is the human spirit at its most indomitable.

More than 150 interviews with Vietnam veterans, including military nurses, yield emotional, firsthand accounts of the Vietnam experience, from boot camp to homecoming

“Messy Roots is a laugh-out-loud, heartfelt, and deeply engaging story of their journey to find themself--as an American, as the daughter of Chinese immigrants, as a queer person, and as a Wuhanese American in the middle of a pandemic.”—Malaka Gharib, author of I Was Their American DreamAfter spending her early years in Wuhan, China, riding water buffalos and devouring stinky tofu, Laura immigrates to Texas, where her hometown is as foreign as Mars—at least until 2020, when COVID-19 makes Wuhan a household name.In Messy Roots, Laura illustrates her coming-of-age as the girl who simply wants to make the basketball team, escape Chinese school, and figure out why girls make her heart flutter.Insightful, original, and hilarious, toggling seamlessly between past and present, China and America, Gao’s debut is a tour de force of graphic storytelling.

Ruth, An Only Child Of Kenyan Immigrant Parents, Lives In An Emotionally Cold Household And Attends The Local Catholic Girl's School On A Scholarship. Maria, A Beautiful Orphan Whose Panamanian Mother Dies By Suicide And Is Taken Care Of By An Ill Aunt, Is Also One Of The Only Other Students Of Color At The School. When Ruth Becomes Drawn Into Maria's Orbit, And They Fall Into An Easy, Yet Intense, Friendship, Ruth's World Opens Up. While Maria Eases Into Her Full Self, Embracing Her Queerness And Her Own Creative Pursuits, Ruth Is Mostly Content To Follow Her Around: To College And Then Into The Early-90s Art World Of New York City. There, The Push And Pull Of Female Ambition And Friendship Tear, And Come Back Together, Over The Years As Maria Finds Success In The Art World And While Ruth Stumbles Along The Fringes Of It While Deciding To Go Down A More Traditional Path Of Marriage. As Their Lives Converge And Diverge, It Culminates In One Final Confrontation. What Does It Mean To Be An Artist? To Be True To Oneself? Marking The Arrival Of A Sensational New Literary Talent, Lonely Crowds Interrogates The Nature Of Friendship, Desire, And Time, Challenging Us To Reckon Honestly With Our Own Ambitions And The Lives We Hope To Lead-- Provided By Publisher.

For fans of Kelly Yang and Rebecca Stead, this touching middle grade novel maps one girl’s quest to remember her grandfather through his scavenger hunts; reconnect with her family; and fight for her community in her rapidly changing hometown. Winner of the APALA Youth Literature Award!Thanks to her Ye-Ye’s epic scavenger hunts, thirteen-year-old Ruby Chu knows San Francisco like the back of her hand. But after his death, she feels lost, and it seems like everyone—from her best friends to her older sister—is abandoning her.After Ruby gets in major trouble at school, her parents decide she has to spend the summer at a local senior center with her grandmother, Nai-Nai, and Nai-Nai’s friends for company. When a new boy from Ruby’s grade, Liam Yeung, starts showing up too, Ruby’s humiliation is complete.But Nai-Nai, her friends, and Liam all surprise Ruby. She finds herself working with Liam, who might not be as annoying as he seems, to help save a historic Chinatown bakery that’s being priced out of the neighborhood. And alongside Nai-Nai, who is keeping a secret that threatens to change everything, Ruby retraces Ye-Ye’s scavenger hunt maps in an attempt to find a way out of her grief—and maybe even find herself.

Yiyun Li’s remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance as she considers the loss of her son James.“There is no good way to say this,” Yiyun Li writes at the beginning of this book.“There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged. My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home.”There is no good way to say this―because words fall short. It takes only an instant for death to become fact, “a single point in a timeline.” Living now on this single point, Li turns to thinking and reasoning and searching for words that might hold a place for James. Li does what she can: “doing the things that work,” including not just writing but gardening, reading Camus and Wittgenstein, learning the piano, and living thinkingly alongside death.This is a book for James, but it is not a book about grieving or mourning. As Li writes, “The verb that does not die is to be. Vincent was and is and will always be Vincent. James was and is and will always be James. We were and are and will always be their parents. There is no now and then, now and later, only, now and now and now and now.” Things in Nature Merely Grow is a testament to Li’s indomitable spirit.

In the last fifty years, transnational adoption—specifically, the adoption of Asian children—has exploded in popularity as an alternative path to family making. Despite the cultural acceptance of this practice, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the factors that allowed Asian international adoption to flourish. In Global Families, Catherine Ceniza Choy unearths the little-known historical origins of Asian international adoption in the United States. Beginning with the post-World War II presence of the U.S. military in Asia, she reveals how mixed-race children born of Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese women and U.S. servicemen comprised one of the earliest groups of adoptive children. Based on extensive archival research, Global Families moves beyond one-dimensional portrayals of Asian international adoption as either a progressive form of U.S. multiculturalism or as an exploitative form of cultural and economic imperialism. Rather, Choy acknowledges the complexity of the phenomenon, illuminating both its radical possibilities of a world united across national, cultural, and racial divides through family formation and its strong potential for reinforcing the very racial and cultural hierarchies it sought to challenge.

Each year, thousands of Chinese children, primarily abandoned infant girls, are adopted by Americans. Yet we know very little about the local and transnational processes that characterize this new migration.Transnational Adoption is a unique ethnographic study of China/U.S. adoption, the largest contemporary intercountry adoption program. Sara K. Dorow begins by situating the popularity of the China/U.S. adoption process within a broader history of immigration and adoption. She then follows the path of the adoption process: the institutions and bureaucracies in both China and the United States that prepare children and parents for each other; the stories and practices that legitimate them coming together as transnational families; the strains placed upon our common notions of what motherhood means; and ways in which parents then construct the cultural and racial identities of adopted children.Based on rich ethnographic evidence, including interviews with and observation of people on both sides of the Pacific—from orphanages, government officials, and adoption agencies to advocacy groups and adoptive families themselves—this is a fascinating look at the latest chapter in Chinese-American migration.

"A thought-provoking book about the long journey of the Kyrgyz people to independence" that melds the stories of Chingiz Aitmatov and Azamat Altay (Roza Otunbayeva, former president of the Kyrgyz Republic). After surviving the blitzkrieg of World War II and escaping from three Nazi prison camps, Soviet soldier Azamat Altay fled to the West and was charged as a traitor in his homeland of Kyrgyzstan in Soviet Central Asia. Chingiz Aitmatov became a hero of Kyrgyzstan, propelled by family loss to write novels about the everyday lives of his fellow citizens. While both came from small villages in the beautiful mountainous countryside, they found themselves caught on opposite sides of the Cold War struggle between world superpowers. Altay became the voice of democracy on Radio Liberty, broadcasting back into his shuttered homeland, while Aitmatov rose through the ranks of Soviet society, a quiet rebel whose prose masked ugly truths about Soviet communism. Yet just as they seemed to be pulled apart by the divisions of the Cold War, they found their lives intersecting in compelling ways, joined by a common mission to save their people. "The stories of Chingiz Aitmatov and Azamat Altay are best told together, a herculean task which Jeffrey B. Lilley's Have The Mountain's Fallen? Two Journeys of Loss and Redemption in the Cold War manages deftly . . . Their story―because it is, in essence, a single story―is that of Kyrgyzstan itself, replete with tragedy and sacrifice, hope and triumph."— The Diplomat "A Cold War story that gives hope."—Richard G. Lugar, United States Senator (Ret.)

There is a rich body of literature on the experience of Japanese immigrants in the United States, and there are also numerous accounts of the cultural dislocation felt by American expats in Japan. But what happens when Japanese Americans, born and raised in the United States, are the ones living abroad in Japan? Redefining Japaneseness chronicles how Japanese American migrants to Japan navigate and complicate the categories of Japanese and "foreigner." Drawing from extensive interviews and fieldwork in the Tokyo area, Jane H. Yamashiro tracks the multiple ways these migrants strategically negotiate and interpret their daily interactions. Following a diverse group of subjects--some of only Japanese ancestry and others of mixed heritage, some fluent in Japanese and others struggling with the language, some from Hawaii and others from the US continent--her study reveals wide variations in how Japanese Americans perceive both Japaneseness and Americanness. Making an important contribution to both Asian American studies and scholarship on transnational migration, Redefining Japaneseness critically interrogates the common assumption that people of Japanese ancestry identify as members of a global diaspora. Furthermore, through its close examination of subjects who migrate from one highly-industrialized nation to another, it dramatically expands our picture of the migrant experience.