From a hospital bed a dying man unfolds the tale of an arduous life on the fringes of a Hawai‘i sugar plantation in the 1920s. There Kim Sung Wha—laborer, patriot, revolutionary, aviator—envisioned building an airplane from ricepaper, bamboo, and the scrap parts of a broken-down bicycle, an airplane that would carry him back to his … [Read More]
Booklist: Korean diaspora (page 8)
Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots
From the publisher’s website: No one will soon forget the image, blazed across the airwaves, of armed Korean Americans taking to the rooftops as their businesses went up in flames during the Los Angeles riots. Why Korean Americans? What stoked the wrath the riots unleashed against them? Blue Dreams is the first book to make sense of … [Read More]
The Korean American Dream: Immigrants and Small Business in New York City
From he publisher’s website: Korean immigrants to the United States establish their own small businesses at a rate exceeding that of immigrants from any other nation, with more than one third of all Korean immigrant adults involved in small businesses. Kyeyoung Park examines this phenomenon in Queens, New York, tracing its historical bases and exploring … [Read More]
The Golden Mountain: The Autobiography of a Korean Immigrant, 1895-1960
From the publisher’s website: The classic of Asian American literature and memoir At the age of ten and without his parents, Easurk Charr, a convert to Christianity, came to Hawa’ii in 1904 to earn enough money to acquire an education and return to his native Korea as a medical missionary. The Golden Mountain is Charr’s … [Read More]
Native Speaker
Description from Google Books: In Native Speaker, author Chang-rae Lee introduces readers to Henry Park. Park has spent his entire life trying to become a true American–a native speaker. But even as the essence of his adopted country continues to elude him, his Korean heritage seems to drift further and further away. Park’s harsh Korean … [Read More]
The Korean Frontier in America: Immigration to Hawaii, 1896–1910
From the publisher’s website: Korean immigration to Hawaii provides a striking glimpse of the inner workings of Yi-dynasty Korea in its final decade. It is a picture of confusion, functionalism, corruption, oppression, and failure of leadership at all levels of government. Patterson suggests that the weakness of the Korean government on the issue of emigration … [Read More]