Paper Sons and Daughters

Paper Sons and Daughters PDF Author: Ufrieda Ho
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821444441
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Ufrieda Ho’s compelling memoir describes with intimate detail what it was like to come of age in the marginalized Chinese community of Johannesburg during the apartheid era of the 1970s and 1980s. The Chinese were mostly ignored, as Ho describes it, relegated to certain neighborhoods and certain jobs, living in a kind of gray zone between the blacks and the whites. As long as they adhered to these rules, they were left alone. Ho describes the separate journeys her parents took before they knew one another, each leaving China and Hong Kong around the early 1960s, arriving in South Africa as illegal immigrants. Her father eventually became a so-called “fahfee man,” running a small-time numbers game in the black townships, one of the few opportunities available to him at that time. In loving detail, Ho describes her father’s work habits: the often mysterious selection of numbers at the kitchen table, the carefully-kept account ledgers, and especially the daily drives into the townships, where he conducted business on street corners from the seat of his car. Sometimes Ufrieda accompanied him on these township visits, offering her an illuminating perspective into a stratified society. Poignantly, it was on such a visit that her father—who is very much a central figure in Ho’s memoir—met with a tragic end. In many ways, life for the Chinese in South Africa was self-contained. Working hard, minding the rules, and avoiding confrontations, they were able to follow traditional Chinese ways. But for Ufrieda, who was born in South Africa, influences from the surrounding culture crept into her life, as did a political awakening. Paper Sons and Daughters is a wonderfully told family history that will resonate with anyone having an interest in the experiences of Chinese immigrants, or perhaps any immigrants, the world over.

Paper Sons and Daughters

Paper Sons and Daughters PDF Author: Ufrieda Ho
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821444441
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Get Book Here

Book Description
Ufrieda Ho’s compelling memoir describes with intimate detail what it was like to come of age in the marginalized Chinese community of Johannesburg during the apartheid era of the 1970s and 1980s. The Chinese were mostly ignored, as Ho describes it, relegated to certain neighborhoods and certain jobs, living in a kind of gray zone between the blacks and the whites. As long as they adhered to these rules, they were left alone. Ho describes the separate journeys her parents took before they knew one another, each leaving China and Hong Kong around the early 1960s, arriving in South Africa as illegal immigrants. Her father eventually became a so-called “fahfee man,” running a small-time numbers game in the black townships, one of the few opportunities available to him at that time. In loving detail, Ho describes her father’s work habits: the often mysterious selection of numbers at the kitchen table, the carefully-kept account ledgers, and especially the daily drives into the townships, where he conducted business on street corners from the seat of his car. Sometimes Ufrieda accompanied him on these township visits, offering her an illuminating perspective into a stratified society. Poignantly, it was on such a visit that her father—who is very much a central figure in Ho’s memoir—met with a tragic end. In many ways, life for the Chinese in South Africa was self-contained. Working hard, minding the rules, and avoiding confrontations, they were able to follow traditional Chinese ways. But for Ufrieda, who was born in South Africa, influences from the surrounding culture crept into her life, as did a political awakening. Paper Sons and Daughters is a wonderfully told family history that will resonate with anyone having an interest in the experiences of Chinese immigrants, or perhaps any immigrants, the world over.

Paper Son: The Inspiring Story of Tyrus Wong, Immigrant and Artist

Paper Son: The Inspiring Story of Tyrus Wong, Immigrant and Artist PDF Author: Julie Leung
Publisher: Schwartz & Wade
ISBN: 1524771899
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 40

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Book Description
Winner of the American Library Association's 2021 Asian/Pacific American Award for Best Picture Book! An inspiring picture-book biography of animator Tyrus Wong, the Chinese American immigrant responsible for bringing Disney's Bambi to life. Before he became an artist named Tyrus Wong, he was a boy named Wong Geng Yeo. He traveled across a vast ocean from China to America with only a suitcase and a few papers. Not papers for drawing--which he loved to do--but immigration papers to start a new life. Once in America, Tyrus seized every opportunity to make art, eventually enrolling at an art institute in Los Angeles. Working as a janitor at night, his mop twirled like a paintbrush in his hands. Eventually, he was given the opportunity of a lifetime--and using sparse brushstrokes and soft watercolors, Tyrus created the iconic backgrounds of Bambi. Julie Leung and Chris Sasaki perfectly capture the beautiful life and work of a painter who came to this country with dreams and talent--and who changed the world of animation forever.

Paper Sons

Paper Sons PDF Author: Dickson Lam
Publisher: Autumn House
ISBN: 9781938769283
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Winner of the Autumn House Nonfiction Contest, selected by Alison Hawthorne Deming (2017) Set in a public housing project in San Francisco, Lam's memoir explores his transformation from a teenage graffiti writer to a high school teacher working with troubled youth while navigating the secret violence in his immigrant's family's past.

Paper Daughter

Paper Daughter PDF Author: Jeanette Ingold
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780152055073
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Past and present collide in a Chinese-American teen's search for identity amid family secrets.

Passage to Promise Land

Passage to Promise Land PDF Author: Vivienne Poy
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773541497
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
How the Chinese community became an indispensable part of multicultural Canada.

China's Hidden Children

China's Hidden Children PDF Author: Kay Ann Johnson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022635265X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
In the thirty-five years since China instituted its One-Child Policy, 120,000 children—mostly girls—have left China through international adoption, including 85,000 to the United States. It’s generally assumed that this diaspora is the result of China’s approach to population control, but there is also the underlying belief that the majority of adoptees are daughters because the One-Child Policy often collides with the traditional preference for a son. While there is some truth to this, it does not tell the full story—a story with deep personal resonance to Kay Ann Johnson, a China scholar and mother to an adopted Chinese daughter. Johnson spent years talking with the Chinese parents driven to relinquish their daughters during the brutal birth-planning campaigns of the 1990s and early 2000s, and, with China’s Hidden Children, she paints a startlingly different picture. The decision to give up a daughter, she shows, is not a facile one, but one almost always fraught with grief and dictated by fear. Were it not for the constant threat of punishment for breaching the country’s stringent birth-planning policies, most Chinese parents would have raised their daughters despite the cultural preference for sons. With clear understanding and compassion for the families, Johnson describes their desperate efforts to conceal the birth of second or third daughters from the authorities. As the Chinese government cracked down on those caught concealing an out-of-plan child, strategies for surrendering children changed—from arranging adoptions or sending them to live with rural family to secret placement at carefully chosen doorsteps and, finally, abandonment in public places. In the twenty-first century, China’s so-called abandoned children have increasingly become “stolen” children, as declining fertility rates have left the dwindling number of children available for adoption more vulnerable to child trafficking. In addition, government seizures of locally—but illegally—adopted children and children hidden within their birth families mean that even legal adopters have unknowingly adopted children taken from parents and sent to orphanages. The image of the “unwanted daughter” remains commonplace in Western conceptions of China. With China’s Hidden Children, Johnson reveals the complex web of love, secrecy, and pain woven in the coerced decision to give one’s child up for adoption and the profound negative impact China’s birth-planning campaigns have on Chinese families.

The Lost Daughters of China

The Lost Daughters of China PDF Author: Karin Evans
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9781585426768
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
In 1997 journalist Karin Evans walked into an orphanage in southern China and met her new daughter, a beautiful one-year-old baby girl. In this fateful moment Evans became part of a profound, increasingly common human drama that links abandoned Chinese girls with foreigners who have traveled many miles to complete their families. At once a compelling personal narrative and an evocative portrait of contemporary China, The Lost Daughters of China has also served as an invaluable guide for thousands of readers as they navigated the process of adopting from China. However, much has changed in terms of the Chinese government?s policies on adoption since this book was originally published and in this revised and updated edition Evans addresses these developments. Also new to this edition is a riveting chapter in which she describes her return to China in 2000 to adopt her second daughter who was nearly three at the time. Many of the first girls to be adopted from China are now in the teens (China only opened its doors to adoption in the 1990s), and this edition includes accounts of their experiences growing up in the US and, in some cases, of returning to China in search of their roots. Illuminating the real-life stories behind the statistics, The Lost Daughters of China is an unforgettable account of the red thread that winds form China?s orphanages to loving families around the globe.

American Exodus

American Exodus PDF Author: Charlotte Brooks
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520302680
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
In the first decades of the 20th century, almost half of the Chinese Americans born in the United States moved to China—a relocation they assumed would be permanent. At a time when people from around the world flocked to the United States, this little-noticed emigration belied America’s image as a magnet for immigrants and a land of upward mobility for all. Fleeing racism, Chinese Americans who sought greater opportunities saw China, a tottering empire and then a struggling republic, as their promised land. American Exodus is the first book to explore this extraordinary migration of Chinese Americans. Their exodus shaped Sino-American relations, the development of key economic sectors in China, the character of social life in its coastal cities, debates about the meaning of culture and “modernity” there, and the U.S. government’s approach to citizenship and expatriation in the interwar years. Spanning multiple fields, exploring numerous cities, and crisscrossing the Pacific Ocean, this book will appeal to anyone interested in Chinese history, international relations, immigration history, and Asian American studies.

The Joy Luck Club

The Joy Luck Club PDF Author: Amy Tan
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101502738
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
“The Joy Luck Club is one of my favorite books. From the moment I first started reading it, I knew it was going to be incredible. For me, it was one of those once-in-a-lifetime reading experiences that you cherish forever. It inspired me as a writer and still remains hugely inspirational.” —Kevin Kwan, author of Crazy Rich Asians Amy Tan’s beloved, New York Times bestselling tale of mothers and daughters, now the focus of a new documentary Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir on Netflix Four mothers, four daughters, four families whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's "saying" the stories. In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Rather than sink into tragedy, they choose to gather to raise their spirits and money. "To despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable." Forty years later the stories and history continue. With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery.

The Chinese Exclusion Act and Angel Island

The Chinese Exclusion Act and Angel Island PDF Author: Judy Yung
Publisher: Macmillan Higher Education
ISBN: 1319077870
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
The Chinese Exclusion Act and Angel Island will introduce students to a broader and more inclusive vision of U.S. immigration history and, ultimately, a better understanding of the world we live in. What is uniquely important about this book are the personal stories and viewpoints of proponents and opponents of the Chinese exclusion laws; of Chinese immigrants who posed as “paper sons” and “paper daughters” to evade the exclusion laws; and of immigration officials who held strong convictions about how the immigration laws should be enforced. The introduction provides students with an over-arching historical, socio-economic, and political context by which to understand the compilation of primary documents that follow. For the same reason, each document has its own headnote with background information about the author and comments on its historical significance. Further pedagogical aids include a Chronology, new Questions for Consideration, and a revised Selected Bibliography.