Welcome to Litsy!

Some of my favourite Asian-authored books. Are some of these your favourites too?
The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki (Japanese/Fiction)
Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho @zenaldehyde (Malaysian/Speculative fiction )
Mãn by Kim Thuy (Vietnamese/Fiction)
The Housekeeper and the Professor
The Diving Pool
by Yoko Ogawa (Japanese/Fiction)
Inheritance
Sugarbread
by Balli Kaur Jaswal (Sikh-Singaporean/Fiction)

An excellent book about one fathers story and his loss of words. A story of survival. Culture and immigration.

Gripping story about an immigrant family and an art form.

I could not ask you to stand young beside me for longer than I could stand young beside you. We knew we would age in America.

#marchintoreading day 16: #greencovers
So many good books come in green!

That is all.

#booktober day 11: #memorablememoirs. I decided to go with memoirs written by women. I've not read Cocktail Hour yet but it's about her mother's life in East Africa. Persepolis - you all probably already know it! The subtitle of Bad Mother tells you all about it. And The Song Poet is by a Hmong writer and about her father, who recounts the story of their people through song. Very different reads but such good ones.

The different voices of the father and daughter weave an interesting and intimate narrative of the Hmong diaspora. The Song Poet reveals the devastation of war and the difficulties of learning how to live in a completely foreign environment and it is beautifully written.

If you haven't read Yang's memoir The Latehomecomer you should because it is a powerful beautifully written account of the Hmong experience. I've been looking forward to her follow up and if the first few pages are any indication her writing has gotten even stronger.

“I grew up hearing my father digging into words for images that will stretch the limits of life for my siblings and me. In my father‘s mouth, bitter, rigid words become sweet and elastic like taffy candy. His poetry shields us from the poverty of our lives.” (Also it's on my blog today)

Such a moving and beautiful memoir of the writer's father, a Hmong refugee in Minnesota. "I sang songs of finding love, of losing love, of loving through the ages, of loving through different lifetimes."