216 pp. August 2008
paper
, ISBN 978-0-8248-3289-6, $24.00
|
Keywords: |
Asia
Southeast Asia
history
biography
Asian American studies
textbook |
|
Hakka Soul: Memories, Migrations, Meals
by Chin Woon Ping
Intersections: Asian and Pacific American Transcultural Studies
Chin Woon Ping’s Hakka Soul chronicles the dreams, ambitions, and idiosyncrasies of her family, beginning with the death of her grandmother in pre-Independence Malaya. It was a tumultuous period when the occupying Japanese army had just been defeated, the British colonial government was losing its grip on the country, and a communist guerilla insurgency had broken out in the jungles of the Malay Peninsula. Her stories follow the family’s move to the United States and a journey to China to visit her father’s ancestral home.
The family’s migrations are part of the global diaspora of the Hakkas, known in China as the Guest People. Chin’s poetically and amusingly rendered accounts of Hakka history, language, and mythology, derived from research and oral history, are a moving tribute to the endurance of her people and their culture, and a paean to the incomparable Hakka cuisine.
36 illus.
For sale only in the U.S., its dependencies, Canada, and Mexico
Malaysian-born Chin Woon Ping teaches English and women’s and gender studies at Dartmouth College. She is the author of In My Mother’s Dream and The Naturalization of Camellia Song. Her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Solidarity, and Amerasia, and is included in the Harper Collins Anthology of Literature and the Norton Anthology of Language for a New Century. She has held positions at Swarthmore College and the National University of Singapore and has been a Fulbright professor in Shanghai and Jakarta.
|
