Asia Pacific Forum
Mondays at 9pm ET on WBAI 99.5 in NYC and
live on the Web
Publisher's note: In her singular voice—humble, elegiac, practical—Maxine Hong Kingston sets out to reflect on aging as she turns sixty-five.
On her journeys as writer, peace activist, teacher, and mother, Kingston revisits her most beloved characters: she learns the final fate of her Woman Warrior, and she takes her Tripmaster Monkey, a hip Chinese American, on a journey through China, where he has never been—a trip that becomes a beautiful meditation on the country then and now, on a culture where rice farmers still work in the age-old way, even as a new era is dawning. “All over China,” she writes, “and places where Chinese are, populations / are on the move, going home. That home / where Mother and Father are buried. Doors / between heaven and earth open wide.”In her latest book, internationally renowned author Arundhati Roy draws on her unprecedented access to a little-known rebel movement in India to pen a work full of earth-shattering revelations. Deep in the forests, under the pretense of battling Maoist guerillas, the Indian government is waging a vicious total war against its own citizens-a war undocumented by a weak domestic press and fostered by corporations eager to exploit the rare minerals buried in tribal lands.
As the world counts down to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, China's Great Leap tackles the toughest issues surrounding the Games and provides deep political, social, and historical insights to help explain China’s “great leap” onto the world stage.
The Age of Dreaming is a novel that explores the silent era in Hollywood through the memories of a once-famous Japanese American sex symbol, Jun Nakayama. In recollecting his stardom, Nakayama also recalls the racial climate of Hollywood and America in the 1910s and 1920s, even as he reveals a peculiarly personal tragedy involving love, death, and desire.
Vijay Prashad’s newest book reconstructs the intellectual and political history of the Third World. Led by post-colonial titans like Nehru, Nasser, and Nkrumah, newly liberated societies joined forces to put forward an incredibly ambitious global program--before it all came crashing down. Vijay talked to APF’s Andrew Hsiao--who edited The Darker Nations--on our March 27, 2007 show.
Dorothea Lange, whose Depression photographs are among the most famous American images, was hired by the government to document the Japanese American internment. But when the army saw her stark photos of this great injustice, it promptly censored them. This new book brings more than 100 of these moving images to light, most for the first time.
The first memoir by a Guantanamo detainee, edited by APF's own Andrew Hsiao, is a searing story of America's War on Terror from the other side. British Muslim Begg was seized at midnight in 2002 and held largely incommunicado till his release--without explanation or charges--in 2005.
When president Bush named an Axis of Evil, he cast Iran, Iraq, and North Korea into the role of the enemy. But how much do we know about life in these countries? How many of us have read the work of a contemporary writer from Libya, or Syria, or the Sudan (and what would happen if we did)?
The first comic book ever to be nominated for a National Book award, this fascinating and fun graphic novel tells the coming-of-age story of an Asian American kid running the adolescent gauntlet in the subtly racist suburbs--with a little help from the Monkey King, the raucous antihero of Chinese classical literature.
Muslim Women on War, Faith, and Sexuality
The yellow cab is a striking metaphor for New York City and its exuberant twenty-four-hours-a-day rush. But just as the city has changed in recent years, so too has the industry that keeps it on the move. As Biju Mathew reveals in this fast-paced survey of New York's taxi business, just about everything has changed dramatically except the yellow paint.
Edgy, brilliant writer Han Ong's second novel is a satire of good intentions and a roadtrip through several levels of Filipino society. The book tells the story of a Filipino American prodigal son's return to the Philippines, where he decides to give away an unexpected and unwanted windfall inheritance. But who among the millions of needy Filipinos needs the money most?
This groundbreaking collection of essays gives voices to contemporary Asian American activism, and offers thoughtful, radical analyses on a range of pressing issues, including domestic violence, neo-conservatism, the social construction of race, and the politics of Asian American Studies.