Shalin Hai-Jew
Shalin Hai-Jew has worked in higher education for many years. She has edited dozens of nonfiction educational books and authored a dozen with a number of publishers.
Vietnamese American best friends try to make it in 1930s Hollywood
It is 1936 in Culver City, California. Issa (Issabel) Bui, a 20-year-old ingenue, is auditioning for a film role. She can just manage speaking her line. She has...
‘Plant Asia’: Does Asian cuisine hold the key to healthier eating in the world?
In the Introduction to Plant Asia: Asia’s Vegetable Wisdom in Recipes, Stories, and Techniques, Pamelia Chia describes her awakening to the costs of so much human consumption of food...
Seeing, hearing, speaking in the face of human corruption
A young married teacher Kang Inho is driving from Seoul, the capital city of South Korea, to Mujin City. He has been unemployed...
In “Bad Bad Girl,” a daughter comes to terms with late estranged mother
Gish Jen’s latest novel, Bad Bad Girl, originally started as a memoir, a non-fiction attempt to answer people’s observation: “You never wrote about your...
Rebecca Suzuki’s prose and poetry live the multilingual, multinational life
The profound and the mundane intertwine in Rebecca Suzuki’s collection of prose and other poetic forms in When My Mother is Most Beautiful.
The collection...
In “Asterism,” Ae Hee Lee poetically crosses borders to make a modern life
The state of being in Ae Hee Lee’s Asterism is one of a privileged migrant, born in E. Asia, migrated to S. America with...
“The House Before Falling into the Sea” is a place of refuge in the...
Warfare exists as a human practice of ultimate contention, rife with deviousness and brutality and ruin.
Amidst such violence, there are occasional rare glimmers of...
“The Lotus Shoes” advance female emancipation in waning Qing Dynasty times
Jane Yang’s novel The Lotus Shoes (2025) follows two young girls with intertwined lives as they grow up in the late Qing Dynasty period...
“Beautiful Country” follows a scavenging, undocumented life in New York
Qian Julie Wang’s memoir of a difficult girlhood as a new immigrant to the U.S. at age 7 would be achingly difficult to read...
“Chinese Prodigal” looks at the American dream with improved multi-racial understandings
A “prodigal” is someone who is “profligate” and “wasteful.” A “Chinese prodigal,” per David Shih, might refer to someone who is wasting his Chineseness,...
