Join a community of readers interested in the Asia Pacific this summer.
We’ve had such fun reading with you in the past, we’ve decided to offer another summer book club.
We’ll provide the online link, the moderator, and the community of fellow readers interested in learning more about the Asia Pacific region; you provide the book.
We’ve selected three fascinating books ranging from a collection of short stories set in contemporary China to a North Korean’s defector story to the memoirs of a Japanese colonist in Manchuria and her “homecoming” to Japan.
Join us for any or all of the book club meetings. Reserve your spot today!
Land of Big Numbers by Chen, Te-Ping
Wed., June 23rd, 5:30-6:30 p.m., Online via Zoom
This event is free and open to the USF community and the public. Register here.
Chen, Te-Ping. Land of Big Numbers. New York: Mariner Books. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021.
This book is available in e-book and print formats. Visit USF’s Gleeson Library to access the e-book.
“Chen has one of the year’s big debut books.” —Philadelphia Inquirer
“Gripping and illuminating . . . At the heart of Te-Ping Chen’s remarkable debut lies a question all too relevant in 21st Century America: What is freedom?” —Jennifer Egan
“Immensely rewarding, from the first sentence to the last . . . An exceptional collection.” —Charles Yu
A “stirring and brilliant” debut story collection, offering vivid portrayals of the men and women of modern China and its diaspora, “both love letter and sharp social criticism,” from a phenomenal new literary talent bringing great “insight from her years as a reporter with the Wall Street Journal” (Elle).
Gripping and compassionate, Land of Big Numbers traces the journeys of the diverse and legion Chinese people, their history, their government, and how all of that has tumbled—messily, violently, but still beautifully—into the present. Cutting between clear-eyed realism and tongue-in-cheek magical realism, Chen’s stories coalesce into a portrait of a people striving for openings where mobility is limited. Twins take radically different paths: one becomes a professional gamer, the other a political activist. A woman moves to the city to work at a government call center and is followed by her violent ex-boyfriend. A man is swept into the high-risk, high-reward temptations of China’s volatile stock exchange. And a group of people sit, trapped for no reason, on a subway platform for months, waiting for official permission to leave. With acute social insight, Te-Ping Chen layers years of experience reporting on the ground in China with incantatory prose in this taut, surprising debut, proving herself both a remarkable cultural critic and an astonishingly accomplished new literary voice.
Moderator: Melissa Dale, Ph.D., Executive Director and Associate Professor, Center for Asia Pacific Studies.
The Girl With Seven Names by Lee, Hyeonseo
Wed., July 14th, 5:30-6:30 p.m., Online via Zoom
This event is free and open to the USF community and the public. Register here.
Lee, Hyeonseo, and David John. The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story. William Collins. Harper Collins Publishers, 2015.
An extraordinary insight into life under one of the world’s most ruthless and secretive dictatorships – and the story of one woman’s terrifying struggle to avoid capture/repatriation and guide her family to freedom.
As a child growing up in North Korea, Hyeonseo Lee was one of millions trapped by a secretive and brutal communist regime. Her home on the border with China gave her some exposure to the world beyond the confines of the Hermit Kingdom and, as the famine of the 1990s struck, she began to wonder, question and to realise that she had been brainwashed her entire life. Given the repression, poverty and starvation she witnessed surely her country could not be, as she had been told “the best on the planet”?
Aged seventeen, she decided to escape North Korea. She could not have imagined that it would be twelve years before she was reunited with her family.
Moderator: Melissa Dale, Ph.D., Executive Director and Associate Professor, Center for Asia Pacific Studies.
Manchurian Legacy by Kuramoto, Kazuko
Wed., Aug. 11th, 5:30-6:30 p.m., Online via Zoom
This event is free and open to the USF community and the public. Register here.
Kuramoto, Kazuko. Manchurian Legacy: Memoirs of a Japanese Colonist. East Lansing, Mich: Michigan State University Press, 1999.
Kazuko Kuramoto was born and raised in Dairen, Manchuria, in 1927, at the peak of Japanese expansionism in Asia. Dairen and the neighboring Port Arthur were important colonial outposts on the Liaotung Peninsula; the train lines established by Russia and taken over by the Japanese, ended there. When Kuramoto’s grandfather arrived in Dairen as a member of the Japanese police force shortly after the end of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, the family’s belief in Japanese supremacy and its “divine” mission to “save” Asia from Western imperialists was firmly in place. As a third-generation colonist, the seventeen-year-old Kuramoto readily joined the Red Cross Nurse Corps in 1944 to aid in the war effort and in her country’s sacred cause. A year later, her family listened to the emperor’s radio broadcast “. . . we shall have to endure the unendurable, to suffer the insufferable.” Japan surrendered unconditionally.
Manchurian Legacy is the story of the family’s life in Dairen, their survival as a forgotten people during the battle to reclaim Manchuria waged by Russia, Nationalist China, and Communist China, and their subsequent repatriation to a devastated Japan. Kuramoto describes a culture based on the unthinking oppression of the colonized by the colonizer. And, because Manchuria was, in essence, a Japanese frontier, her family lived a freer and more luxurious life than they would have in Japan—one relatively unscathed by the war until after the surrender.
As a commentator Kuramoto explores her culture both from the inside, subjectively, and from the outside, objectively. Her memoirs describe her coming of age in a colonial society, her family’s experiences in war-torn Manchuria, and her “homecoming” to Japan—where she had never been—just as Japan is engaged in its own cultural upheaval.
Moderator: Melissa Dale, Ph.D., Executive Director and Associate Professor, Center for Asia Pacific Studies.
