Featured Ebooks
Welcome
May is the month of celebrating Asian and Pacific Islander Heritage. To help you get started with this month's reads, we've compiled a list of books from various nations and cultures. These books cover a wide range of topics including classic works, mythology, fashion, and relaxing reads that highlight the beauty and diversity of those we celebrate.
Contemporary Poetry Books
Waterman
Waterman is the first comprehensive biography of Duke Kahanamoku (1890-1968): swimmer, surfer, Olympic gold medalist, Hawaiian icon, and waterman. Long before Michael Phelps and Mark Spitz made their splashes in the pool, Kahanamoku emerged from the backwaters of Waikiki to become America's first superstar Olympic swimmer. The original "human fish" set dozens of world records and topped the world rankings for more than a decade; his rivalry with Johnny Weissmuller transformed competitive swimming from an insignificant sideshow into a headliner event. Kahanamoku used his Olympic renown to introduce the sport of "surf-riding," an activity unknown beyond the Hawaiian Islands, to the world. Standing proudly on his traditional wooden longboard, he spread surfing from Australia to the Hollywood crowd in California to New Jersey. No American athlete has influenced two sports as profoundly as Kahanamoku did, and yet he remains an enigmatic and underappreciated figure: a dark-skinned Pacific Islander who encountered and overcame racism and ignorance long before the likes of Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, and Jackie Robinson.
Trying to Find Chinatown
"David Henry Hwang is a true original. A native of Los Angeles, born to immigrant parents, he has one foot on each side of a cultural divide. He knows America - its vernacular, its social landscape, its theatrical traditions. He knows the same about China. In his plays, he manages to mix both of these conflicting cultures until he arrives at a style that is wholly his own. Mr. Hwang's works have the verve of well-made American comedies and yet, with little warning, they can bubble over into the mystical rituals of Oriental stagecraft. This volume collects a generous selection of Mr. Hwang''s plays, including FOB, The Dance and the Railroad, Family Devotions, The Sound of a Voice, The House of Sleeping Beauties, The Voyage, Bondage, and Trying to Find Chinatown. FOB is an OBIE Award-winning play that explores the contrasting experiences, attitudes, and conflicts of established Asian Americans and fresh-off-the-boat (FOB) Asian immigrants. One of David Henry Hwang''s earliest plays, FOB has been called "a theatrically provocative combination of realism and fantasy... A sensitive, insightful, and multilevel play" (Christian Science Monitor). Trying to Find Chinatown, an exploration of racial identity and appearance, revolves around the interaction between an Asian street musician and a Caucasian man who claims Asian American heritage.
Yosano Akiko and the Tale of Genji
Yosano Akiko (1878-1942) has long been recognized as one of the most important literary figures of prewar Japan. Her renown derives principally from her passion for her early poetry and her contributions to 20th-century debates about women. This emphasis obscures a major part of her career, which was devoted to work on the Japanese classics and, in particular, the great Heian period text The Tale of Genji. Akiko herself felt that Genji was the bedrock upon which her entire literary career was built, and her bibliography shows a steadily increasing amount of time devoted to projects related to the tale. This study traces for the first time the full range of Akiko's involvement with The Tale of Genji. The Tale of Genji provided Akiko with her conception of herself as a writer and inspired many of her most significant literary projects.
We Play a Game
Duy Doan's striking debut reveals the wide resonance of the collection's unassuming title, in poems that explore--now with abundant humor, now with a deeply felt reserve--the ambiguities and tensions that mark our effort to know our histories, our loved ones, and ourselves. These are poems that draw from Doan's experience as a Vietnamese-American while at the same time making a case for--and masterfully playing with--the fluidity of identity, history, and language. Nothing is alien to these poems: the Saigon of a mother's dirge, the footballer Zinedine Zidane, an owl that "talks to his other self in the well"--all have a place in Doan's far-reaching and intimately human art.
Samoan Archaeology and Cultural Heritage
The overall purpose of this book is to provide a foundation for Samoan students to become the custodians of the historical narrative based on Archaeological research. Issues that are explored are; Do ancient remains matter in contemporary Samoa? What is the chronological status, and spatial relationship of archaeological monuments found in Samoa? Is the settlement pattern stable over the past 3000 years that Samoa has been populated and/or do central places emerge through time? Previous efforts from the outside during 1960 -70 of introducing Archaeology to Samoa that used archaeological methods, historical linguistics, and ethnohistory to interpret the Samoan past are assessed regarding the development in Samoa but also a wider West-Polynesian context.
Fashioning Japanese Subcultures
Western fashion has been widely appreciated and consumed in Tokyo for decades, but since the mid-1990s Japanese youth have been playing a crucial role in forming their unique fashion communities and producing creative styles which have had a major impact on fashion globally. Geographically and stylistically defined, subcultures such as Lolita in Harajuku, Gyaru and Gyaru-o in Shibuya, Age-jo in Shinjuku, and Mori Girl in Kouenji, reflect the affiliation and identities of their members, and have often blurred the boundary between professionals and amateurs for models, photographers, merchandisers and designers. Based on insightful ethnographic fieldwork in Tokyo, Fashioning Japanese Subcultures is the first theoretical and analytical study on Japan's contemporary youth subcultures and their stylistic expressions. It is essential reading for students, scholars, and anyone interested in fashion, sociology, and subcultures.
Kabuki
While its actors made their entrance down the Flower Way over three hundred years ago, little of kabuki's repertory has been available to English readers. Not only are adequate translations difficult to produce, but also because the spoken parts of the drama constitute but a portion of that grand spectacle, English renderings often have an elliptical quality. These five plays, however, were translated from tapes made by James Brandon at actual performances, imparting to them an unusual immediacy. The superb translations are further enhanced by detailed commentary and stage directions that reflect the music and sound effects as well as the positions of actors on stage and their stylized gestures and posturing, all of which are such a vital part of a live performance. A concise introduction includes the history of kabuki, its religious background and ties with prostitution, its themes and playwriting systems, and its performance conventions, actors, music, and dance. Appendixes provide a fascinating focus on various sound effects and music cues in performance. More than one hundred production photographs vividly convey the action and emotion of one of the world's greatest stage arts. First published in 1975, this volume remains a classic. A reprint of the 1975 edition. Accepted into the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works, Japanese Series.
The Book of Yokai
A lively excursion into Japanese folklore and its ever-expanding influence on global popular culture through the concept of yokai. Monsters, ghosts, fantastic beings, and supernatural phenomena of all sorts haunt the folklore and popular culture of Japan. Broadly labeled yokai, these creatures come in infinite shapes and sizes, from tengu mountain goblins and kappa water spirits to shape-shifting foxes and long-tongued ceiling-lickers. Currently popular in anime, manga, film, and computer games, many yokai originated in local legends, folktales, and regional ghost stories. Drawing on years of research in Japan, Michael Dylan Foster unpacks the history and cultural context of yokai, tracing their roots, interpreting their meanings, and introducing people who have hunted them through the ages. In this delightful and accessible narrative, readers will explore the roles played by these mysterious beings within Japanese culture and will also learn of their abundance and variety through detailed entries, some with original illustrations, on more than fifty individual creatures. The Book of Yokai invites readers to examine how people create, transmit, and collect folklore, and how they make sense of the mysteries in the world around them. By exploring yokai as a concept, we can better understand broader processes of tradition, innovation, storytelling, and individual and communal creativity.
Maori Oral Tradition
Introduces readers to the distinctive oral style and language of the traditional compositions, acknowledges the skills of the composers of old, and explores the meaning of their striking imagery and figurative language.
Touring Pacific Cultures
Tourism is vital to the economies of most Pacific nations and as such is an important site for the meaningful production of shared and disputed cultural values and practices. This is especially the case when tourism intersects with other important arenas for cultural production, both directly and indirectly. Touring Pacific Cultures captures the central importance of tourism to the visual, material, and performed cultures of the Pacific region.
The Pacific Arts of Polynesia and Micronesia
Comprising thousands of islands and hundreds of cultural groups, Polynesia and Micronesia cover a large part of the vast Pacific Ocean, from the dramatic mountains of Hawaii to the small, flat coral islands of Kiribati. The Pacific Arts of Polynesia and Micronesia offers a superb introduction to the rich artistic traditions of these two regions, traditions that have had a considerable impact on modern Western art through the influence of artists such as Gauguin. After an introduction to Polynesian and Micronesian art separately, the book focuses on the artistic types, styles, and concepts shared by the two island groups, thereby placing each in its wider cultural context. From the textiles of Tonga to the canoes of Tahiti, Adrienne Kaeppler sheds light on religious and sacred rituals and objects, carving, architecture, tattooing, personal ornaments, basket-making, clothing, textiles, fashion, the oral arts, dance, music and musical instruments--even canoe-construction--to provide the ultimate introduction to these vibrant cultures.
Tahiti Beyond the Postcard
Winner of the 2013 ICAS Book Prize (Social Sciences) The Tahitithat most people imagine - white-sand beaches, turquoise lagoons, and beautiful women - is a product of 18th-century European romanticism and persists today as the bedrock of Tahiti's tourism industry. This postcard image, however, masks a different reality. The dreams and desires that the tourism industry promotes distract from the medical nightmares and environmental destruction caused by France's 30-year nuclear testing program in French Polynesia. Tahitians see the burying of a bomb in their land as deeply offensive. For Tahitians, the land abounds with ancestral fertility, and genealogical identity, and is a source of physical and spiritual nourishment. These imagined and lived perspectives seem incompatible, yet are intricately intertwined in the political economy. Tahiti Beyond the Postcard engages with questions about the subtle but ubiquitous ways in which power entangles itself in place-related ways. Miriam Kahn uses interpretive frameworks of both Tahitian and European scholars, drawing upon ethnographic details that include ancient chants, picture postcards, antinuclear protests, popular song lyrics, and the legacy of Paul Gauguin's art, to provide fresh perspectives on colonialism, tourism, imagery, and the anthropology of place.
Japan Beyond the Kimono
In the ancient city of Kyoto, contemporary artisans and designers are using heritage techniques and traditional clothing aesthetics to reinvent wafuku (Japanese clothing, including kimono) for modern life. Japan Beyond the Kimono explores these shifts, highlighting developments in the Kyoto fashion industry such as its integration of digital weaving and printing techniques and the influence of social media on fashion distribution systems. Through case studies of designers, artisans, and retailers, Jenny Hall provides a comprehensive picture of the reasons behind the production and consumption of these rejuvenated fashion goods. She argues that conceptualizations of Japanese tradition include innovation and change, which is vital to understanding how Japanese cultural heritage is both sustained and evolving. Essential reading for students and scholars of fashion, anthropology, and Japanese studies, Jenny Hall's sensory ethnography is the first of its kind, describing the lived experiences of people in the Kyoto textiles industry, explaining the renewal of traditional techniques and styles, and placing them both within contexts such as transnational 'craftscapes' and fast or slow fashion systems.
Korean Stories for Language Learners
The most enjoyable way to learn about an unfamiliar culture is through its stories--especially when they're told in two languages! Korean Stories for Language Learners introduces 42 traditional Korean folktales with bilingual Korean and English versions, presented on facing pages, together with detailed notes and exercises aimed at beginning learners of the language. The book can be used by a reader in first- and second-year Korean language courses or by anyone who wishes to learn about Korean folktales and traditional Korean culture. This elegantly illustrated volume is designed to help language learners expand their vocabulary and develop a basic familiarity with Korean culture. The stories gradually increase in length and complexity throughout the book as the reader improves their vocabulary and understanding of the language. After the first few stories, the reader is asked to use the vocabulary in speaking and writing exercises. By reading these classic stories, they also are given a window into Korean culture and learn to appreciate the uniqueness of the country--which provides greater motivation to continue learning the difficult language.
Camp Nine
"Camp Nine beautifully captures a sense of time and place that resonates with authenticity. It shows an intimate familiarity with the internment camp at Rohwer-how the camp came to be situated in such a remote part of Arkansas, life within the camp, and the feelings of the Japanese Americans held captive there, as well as what life was like in the 1940s for the locals outside. It is a perspective that has never been presented. I love this book and recommend it as a must-read." -Delphine Hirasuna, author of The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps, 1942 - 1946 "Through the prisms of place, family, race, class, power, and privilege, Vivienne Schiffer skillfully constructs a necessarily complicated portrait of the era into a meaningful mosaic and satisfying story."
Eat a Bowl of Tea
At the close of the Second World War, racist immigration laws trapped enclaves of old men in Chinatowns across the United States, preventing their wives or families from joining them. They took refuge from loneliness in the repartee and rivalries exchanged over games of mahjong in the backrooms of barbershops or at the local tong. These bachelors found hope in the nascent marriages and future children who would someday grow roots on American soil, made possible at last by the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943. Louis Chu tells the story of a newlywed couple that inherits the burden of this tightly bonded community's expectations. Returning soldier Ben Loy travels to China to marry Mei Oi, a beautiful, intelligent woman who then emigrates to New York. After their honeymoon, Ben Loy becomes impotent, and his inability to father a child frustrates both Mei Oi and the Chinatown bachelors. This discontent boils over when Mei Oi has an affair and the community learns of Ben Loy's humiliation. Eat a Bowl of Tea remains a groundbreaking and influential work. The first novel to capture the tone and sensibility of everyday life in an American Chinatown is an incisive portrayal of Chinese America on the brink of change.
This Is One Way to Dance
In the linked essays that make up her debut collection, This Is One Way to Dance, Sejal Shah explores culture, language, family, and place. Throughout the collection, Shah reflects on what it means to make oneself visible and legible through writing in a country that struggles with race and maps her identity as an American, South Asian American, writer of color, and feminist. This Is One Way to Dance draws on Shah's ongoing interests in ethnicity and place: the geographic and cultural distances between people, both real and imagined. Her memoir in essays emerges as Shah wrestles with her experiences growing up and living in western New York, an area of stark racial and economic segregation, as the daughter of Gujarati immigrants from India and Kenya. These essays also trace her movement over twenty years from student to teacher and meditate on her travels and life in New England, New York City, and the Midwest, as she considers what it means to be of a place or from a place, to be foreign or familiar.
A Holly Jolly Diwali
"Lalli's prose is deft,her characters are delightful and her book is the just-right holiday romance."--USA Today One type-A data analyst discovers her free-spirited side on an impulsive journey from bustling Mumbai to the gorgeous beaches of Goa and finds love waiting for her on Christmas morning. Twenty-nine-year-old Niki Randhawa has always made practical decisions. Despite her love for music and art, she became an analyst for stability. She's always stuck close to home, in case her family needed her. And she's always dated guys that seem good on paper, rather than the ones who give her butterflies. When she's laid off, Niki realizes that practical hasn't exactly paid off for her. So for the first time, she throws caution to the wind and books a last-minute flight for her friend Diya's wedding.
Grown-Up Pose
Telling her conservative Indian parents that she was separating from her husband was the hardest thing Anu Desai has ever done - and she's still dealing with the fallout. She has a young daughter to raise and a loud, opinionated family to appease. And when she invests all of her savings into running her yoga studio, the feelings of irresponsibility send Anu reeling. She'll be forced to look inside herself to become the strong, independent woman she's never had the chance to be - the kind of woman who would be proud to have her daughter follow in her footsteps.
The Phoenix Song
A young violin prodigy grows up in Harbin and Shanghai amidst the absurd and often deadly politics of mid-century China. Under the dual influences of her revolutionary parents and the White Russian intellectuals who are her tutors (and who provide her with a link, personal and tragic, to the composer Dmitri Shostakovich) she is drawn into a precarious world of ideology and espionage where music must serve not only 'the masses', but also the unpredictable whims and grand strategies of great leaders. Moving between China, Europe, and New Zealand, the young protagonist learns how music and its artifacts link individuals across time in a chain alternately transcendent and tragic and encounter the compromises that talent, fate, and family force upon her.