Saturday, April 9, 2022

Seven titles about the Chinese Exclusion Act

Jenny Tinghui Zhang is a Chinese-American writer from Austin and Senior Editor for The Adroit Journal. Her work has appeared in Apogee, CALYX, Ninth Letter, Passages North, wildness, and The Rumpus, with essays in HuffPost, Bustle, The Cut, and HelloGiggles, among others. She is a Kundiman fellow and graduate of the VONA/Voices and Tin House workshops, and holds an MFA from the University of Wyoming.

Her debut novel Four Treasures of the Sky is out now from Flatiron Books.

At Electric Lit Zhang tagged seven books that examine "the impact of the 1882 law that restricted Chinese migration to the United States," including:
The Fortunes by Peter Ho Davies

In four distinct sections, Peter Ho Davies presents the lives of four generations of Chinese Americans (three of which are real figures) and interrogates what it means to be a stranger in your home, in a land that refuses to call itself your own. We meet Ah Ling, who is struggling to carve his way in 1860s California; Anna Mae Wong, the first Chinese movie star in Hollywood; Vincent Chin, a young Chinese American killed in 1982 by a pair of Detroit auto workers for looking Japanese; and John Ling Smith, a half-Chinese writer who hopes to adopt a baby girl in China. Spanning 150 years, this unique novel examines pivotal moments of Chinese American history and the ways in which anti-Chinese and anti-Asian racism have haunted the lives lived (and extinguished) along the way....
Read about the other titles on the list at Electric Lit.

--Marshal Zeringue