Asian American / Asian Research Institute
The City University of New York
Author & illustrator Laura Gao will present on her debut graphic memoir, Messy Roots: A Graphic Memoir of a Wuhanese American. Gao will present her own experiences around the themes of trauma, remembrance, and compassion.
For this volume, noted translator Keming Liu selected one hundred poems, chiefly representing poet Zhang Lian’s multifaceted perceptions of his world at dusk, when farmer and shepherd are blessed with a moment to daydream.
“Wherever our memories, story fragments, visual details, and thoughts laid in the finished comics, they will be different, new, and perhaps…revelatory” — M.K. Czerwiec ON JANUARY, 23, 2020, two days before Chinese New Year, the Chinese central government ordered a total lockdown of Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province, and other cities in the province … Read more
CHINESE PARENTING IS IN MANY SENSES strikingly similar to porcelain making. One manipulates the clay as one wishes; yet after the firing, only few turn out exactly the same as desired. Legend has it that the ancient Japanese figured out how to repair the cracked pieces of ceramic vases at an enormous cost, which they … Read more
On the Human Condition I HAVE READ RICHARD HOFSTADTER and understand the root of anti-intellectualism in this country’s history, but its abysmally low point still surprises and saddens me. Almost thirty years ago, after witnessing the lights at Tiananmen Square go out and a massacre carried out in the dark, I looked towards the New … Read more
PANDEMIC BRINGS US TO PANDEMONIUM, not the center of Hell—Pandemonium in Milton’s Paradise Lost—but tumult, chaos, the upending of our quotidian lives due to the infernal virus, on which we have conferred the somewhat majestic title, Novel Corona Virus-19. Normalcy is a far-away country, and even with all its attendant and even discordant notes, seems … Read more