Asian American / Asian Research Institute
The City University of New York
Born 1941 in Oakland, California’s Chinatown, William Gee Wong is the only son of his father, known as Pop. Born in Guangdong Province, China, Pop emigrated to Oakland as a teenager during the Chinese Exclusion era in 1912 and entered the U.S. legally as the “son of a native,” despite having partially false papers. Sons of Chinatown is Wong’s evocative dual memoir of his and his father’s parallel experiences in America.
The entry of Cambodians in the United States was not simply a migration, but a crash-landing as refugees after an incredible loss of population, humanity, culture & arts, religion, and thinkers. How, then, do the diasporic inheritors of this history respond via cultural production? And how does artist-scholar Sokunthary Svay’s own work including her newly published memoir, Put It On Record, address this question?
Please join our AAARI Reads Book Club discussion of Rajiv Mohabir’s Antiman: a Hybrid Memoir. Bring a friend, your students, a colleague, a family member—all are welcome!
AAARI Reads fosters a communal reading experience for CUNY students, staff, and faculty of work by Asian American and Pacific Islander writers. AAARI Reads focuses on texts that reflect the complex and heterogeneous identities and experiences of AAPI New Yorkers. Our inaugural selection is Rajiv Mohabir’s Antiman: a Hybrid Memoir, an experimental genre-blending exploration of … Read more
Our Laundry, Our Town (Empire State Editions, 2022) is a memoir that decodes and processes the fractured urban oracle bones of Alvin Eng’s growing up in Flushing, Queens, a neighborhood of that singular universe that was New York City in the 1970s. As a theatre practitioner and professor, Alvin discovered the under-chronicled Chinese influence on Thornton Wilder’s seminal Americana drama, Our Town.
From the 1950s through the 1970s, blue-collar Filipino Americans, or Pinoys, lived a hardscrabble existence. In this collection of autobiographical essays, acclaimed novelist and short-story writer Peter Bacho centers the experiences of the Pinoy generation that grew up in Seattle’s multiethnic neighborhoods, from the Central Area to Beacon Hill to Rainier Valley.