Korean YA Fiction Everything Asian

EVERYTHING ASIAN
by Sung J. Woo

Published by St. Martin's Press, Thomas Dunne Books; 1 edition (April 14, 2009)
336 pages
ISBN-10: 0312538855
ISBN-13: 978-0312538859

Here's the blurb:

A funny and incisive Korean family coming-of-age novel in stories about a 12-year-old boy who moves with his mother and sister from Korea to work at their father's Asian gift shop in a New Jersey strip mall--and the growing pains that ensue.


In this charming tale of family, community and the struggle for understanding, young Korean immigrant David Kim learns to acculturate to a new American life. After five years on their own in Seoul, 12-year-old David, his big sister and mother reunite with his father in Oakbridge, N.J. Now known as Harry, David's father has a gift shop in a rundown strip mall called Peddlers Town. Though told largely by a grown-up David, some chapters switch to a third-person voice to examine other characters, including members of the Kim family and the other store owners at Peddler's Town (including an American with a cross-dressing son and a down-on-his-luck detective). Woo eschews immigrant cliches to focus on complicated familial relationships and surprising, sympathetic characters; alternating between humor and melancholy, Woo's text strikes a true chord while drawing readers into its strange, strip-mall world.

And here it is on barnes and noble

Author Blurb:

SUNG J. WOO's short stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, McSweeney’s, and KoreAm Journal. His short film was an audience choice screening of the NYC Downtown Short Film Festival 2008. A graduate of Cornell University with an MFA from New York University, he lives in Washington, New Jersey.

I don't think he's a Christian but heck, he's a minority...so you know how it is. Spread the word.

Chang-Rae Lee, Korean-American fiction author

Chang-Rae Lee, is a Korean author whose fiction delves into the meaning of acculturation, double allegiances, isolation, and cultural alienation.

He's the author of several books including Native Speaker, Aloft, A Gesture: Life



Here's an interview


And here's another

And yet another

He's had his share of controversy ...but that tends to happen with all minority writers who attempt to speak their hearts honestly.

Sweet Mandarin by Helen Tse

Sweet Mandarin:
The Courageous True Story of Three Generations of Chinese Women and Their Journey from East to West
by Helen Tse
St. Martin's Press
07/08/2008.
Biographies/Memoirs, 288 pp.
$23.95

Here's the blurb from Thomas Dunne books website

About the Book

Spanning almost a hundred years, this rich and evocative memoir recounts the lives of three generations of remarkable Chinese women.

Their extraordinary journey takes us from the brutal poverty of village life in mainland China, to newly prosperous 1930s Hong Kong and finally to the UK. Their lives were as dramatic as the times they lived through.

A love of food and a talent for cooking pulled each generation through the most devastating of upheavals. Helen Tse's grandmother, Lily Kwok, was forced to work as an amah after the violent murder of her father. Crossing the ocean from Hong Kong in the 1950s, Lily honed her famous chicken curry recipe. Eventually she opened one of Manchester's earliest Chinese restaurants where her daughter, Mabel, worked from the tender age of nine. But gambling and the Triads were pervasive in the Chinese immigrant community, and tragically they lost the restaurant. It was up to author Helen and her sisters, the third generation of these exceptional women, to re-establish their grandmother's dream. The legacy lived on when the sisters opened their award-winning restaurant Sweet Mandarin in 2004.

Sweet Mandarin shows how the most important inheritance is wisdom, and how recipes--passed down the female line--can be the most valuable heirloom.

Here are a few reviews on book browse