Marlon Hom has selected and translated 220 rhymes from two collections of Chinatown songs published in 1911 and 1915. The songs are outspoken and personal, addressing subjects as diverse as sex, frustrations with the American bureaucracy, poverty and alienation, and the loose morals of the younger generation of Americans. Hom has arranged the songs thematically and gives an overview of early Chinese American literature.
Guangdong -- Gold Mountain -- Central Pacific -- Foothills -- The High Sierra -- The Summit -- The Strike -- Truckee -- The Golden Spike -- Beyond Promontory.
Offering a textured history of the Chinese in America since their arrival during the California Gold Rush, this work includes letters, speeches, testimonies, oral histories, personal memoirs, poems, essays, and folksongs. It provides an insight into immigration, work, family and social life, and the longstanding fight for equality and inclusion.
In folk tradition, stories of love lost, betrayal, jealousy, conflict, emigration, and the supernatural are often immortalized in songs of many traditions, demonstrating that singing has been a universal vehicle for the human condition. the criteria for this wonderful collection of prose and melodies is from Celtic traditions that have been with us for hundreds of years. These compositions have been arranged so that each will work both as an air and as a song. All of the selections in the book appear on the companion CD.
This text is the first volume of a comprehensive anthology of Californian literature. It is divided into four parts and contains material ranging from Native American origin myths to Hollywood novels dissecting the American dream.
The figure of the Chinese sex worker—who provokes both disdain and desire—has become a trope for both Asian American sexuality and Asian modernity. Lingering in the cultural imagination, sex workers link sexual and cultural marginality, and their tales clarify the boundaries of citizenship, nationalism, and internationalism. In Transpacific Attachments, Lily Wong studies the mobility and mobilization of the sex worker figure through transpacific media networks, illuminating the intersectional politics of racial, sexual, and class structures. Transpacific Attachments examines shifting depictions of Chinese sex workers in popular media—from literature to film to new media—that have circulated within the United States, China, and Sinophone communities from the early twentieth century to the present. Wong explores Asian American writers’ articulation of transnational belonging; early Hollywood’s depiction of Chinese women as parasitic prostitutes and Chinese cinema’s reframing the figure as a call for reform; Cold War–era use of prostitute and courtesan metaphors to question nationalist narratives and heteronormativity; and images of immigrant brides against the backdrop of neoliberalism and the flows of transnational capital. She focuses on the transpacific networks that reconfigure Chineseness, complicating a diasporic framework of cultural authenticity. While imaginations of a global community have long been mobilized through romantic, erotic, and gendered representations, Wong stresses the significant role sex work plays in the constant restructuring of social relations. “Chineseness,” the figure of the sex worker shows, is an affective product as much as an ethnic or cultural signifier.
Takaki traces the economic and political history of Indians, African Americans, Mexicans, Japanese, Chinese, Irish, and Jewish people in America, with considerable attention given to instances and consequences of racism. The narrative is laced with short quotations, cameos of personal experiences, and excerpts from folk music and literature. Well-known occurrences, such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, the Trail of Tears, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Japanese internment are included. Students may be surprised by some of the revelations, but will recognize a constant thread of rampant racism. The author concludes with a summary of today's changing economic climate and offers Rodney King's challenge to all of us to try to get along. Readers will find this overview to be an accessible, cogent jumping-off place for American history and political science plus a guide to the myriad other sources identified in the notes.
"My Journey to the West was inspired by my father, uncles and grandfather’s ventures to the Gold Mountain at a very young age. I had already made up my mind that I would follow their paths and embark on this adventurous journey when I grew up and searched for my own fortune." ——Brian Wong 黄荣富 From a small village to the west. From a fish pond to Hong Kong. Across the ocean to the port city of Liverpool... The story of searching for Gold Mountain started with a little boy, Brian Wong, who was living in Kaiping City, a small village in China. Brian Wong knew that one day he would embark on this perilous journey—language difficulties, prejudice—but owing to his endurance and hardworking spirit, he overcame. Follow the steps of his ancestors to achieve his dream of a golden mountain. It is a story about Brian Wong and all the overseas Chinese. See how they built Chinese culture in a foreign land with the Chinese spirit. Over 200 years ago the Wuyi people (Note 1) consisted of five counties: Jiangmen (Xin Hui), Kaiping (my county), Tai Shan, Enping and He Shan, many of them went overseas in search of fame and fortune. They went to San Francisco and later Barkerville, Canada in search of fortune which actually they worked as coolies in laundries or chefs or grocery keepers. Like my grandfather, he left his wife and the extended families behind and embarked on such treacherous journeys, facing racial discrimination, language barriers, harsh and dangerous working conditions. Some of them returned home in triumph. They became financially rich and spent huge sums of money to build the famous ‘Diaolou’ (under the World Heritage Conservation-a fusion of west and east architectural designed mansion called Diaolou) in Wuyi County, Guangdong Province, China. In the 17th century, most of the Chinese went to the West because of the weakness of China, which was still under imperial rule, and was plagued by wars, occupations by great powers, Japanese invasions, famines, floods, and warlordism. Domestically, it was faced with rebellions, Opium Wars and banditry, especially in rural areas. These were the turbulent times in Wuyi County, with many Wuyi people went to Southeast Asia and lost their lives in rubber plantations due to harsh working conditions. My journey will highlight our Wuyi people’s spirit and perseverance across the globe, where the ‘see Yap Dialect’ still exists and is widely spoken in San Francisco today. Features It records the struggle of overseas Chinese, who traveled around the west and developed Chinese culture in a foreign country.
Unlike any other book of its kind, this volume celebrates published works from a broad range of American ethnic groups not often featured in the typical canon of literature. This culturally rich encyclopedia contains 160 alphabetically arranged entries on African American, Asian American, Latino/a, and Native American literary traditions, among others. The book introduces the uniquely American mosaic of multicultural literature by chronicling the achievements of American writers of non-European descent and highlighting the ethnic diversity of works from the colonial era to the present. The work features engaging topics like the civil rights movement, bilingualism, assimilation, and border narratives. Entries provide historical overviews of literary periods along with profiles of major authors and great works, including Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Maya Angelou, Sherman Alexie, A Raisin in the Sun, American Born Chinese, and The House on Mango Street. The book also provides concise overviews of genres not often featured in textbooks, like the Chinese American novel, African American young adult literature, Mexican American autobiography, and Cuban American poetry.
Overview: Steven Gould Axelrod, Camille Roman, and Thomas Travisano continue the standard of excellence set in Volumes I and II of this extraordinary anthology. Volume III provides the most compelling and wide-ranging selection available of American poetry from 1950 to the present. Its contents are just as diverse and multifaceted as America itself and invite readers to explore the world of poetry in the larger historical context of American culture. Nearly three hundred poems allow readers to explore canonical works by such poets as Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, and Sylvia Plath, as well as song lyrics from such popular musicians as Bob Dylan and Queen Latifah. Because contemporary American culture transcends the borders of the continental United States, the anthology also includes numerous transnational poets, from Julia de Burgos to Derek Walcott. Whether they are the works of oblique avant-gardists like John Ashbery or direct, populist poets like Allen Ginsberg, all of the selections are accompanied by extensive introductions and footnotes, making the great poetry of the period fully accessible to readers for the first time.
