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.
Join us for one or both of the book club meetings. Reserve your spot today!
Green with Milk and Sugar: When Japan Filled America’s Tea Cups by Rober Hellyer
Wed., June 22nd, 5:30-6:30 p.m., Online via Zoom
This event is free and open to the USF community and the public. Register here.
Moderator: Melissa Dale, Ph.D., Executive Director and Associate Professor, Center for Asia Pacific Studies.
Hellyer, Robert. Green with Milk and Sugar: When Japan Filled America’s Tea Cups. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2021.
This book is available in e-book and print formats. It is also available to the USF community through Gleeson Library.
What the publisher has to say about Green with Milk and Sugar:
Who would have guessed that the American heartland had a penchant for green tea (served with milk and sugar) before World War II and that U.S. tea drinkers contributed to the ubiquity of sencha in modern Japan? This engagingly written, delightfully illustrated, and stimulating book brings a lost world of ‘teaways’ to light. — Kristin Hoganson, author of The Heartland: An American History
Robert Hellyer’s book is a gem―an intriguing story that connects the United States and Japan through ‘teaways.’ It offers a fascinating entangled, trans-Pacific history of the production and consumption of Japanese green tea through the lens of intergenerational family stories, spanning over one hundred years. — Naoko Shimazu, author of Japanese Society at War: Death, Memory, and the Russo-Japanese War
Beautifully researched and written, Green with Milk and Sugar demonstrates how important Japan has been to developing U.S. tastes and trade and global capitalism. Hellyer reveals a tremendous amount about consumption and trade in Japan and how Pacific influences can be found throughout the American continent. This book will appeal to tea lovers, historians, food scholars, and members of the tea trade. — Erika Rappaport, author of A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World
An unquenchable curiosity―abetted by the author’s familial ties―drives this extraordinary story of the Japan-to-America tea trade. Equal parts business and cultural history, with a spoonful of diplomatic history mixed in, Green with Milk and Sugar reveals many surprising as well as previously unexplored effects of international commerce at both ends of the commodity chain. Altogether, a model transnational study. — Leon Fink, author of Undoing the Liberal World Order: Democratic Ambitions and Political Realities Since World War II
Delightfully rich in eye-opening revelations, Green with Milk and Sugar spotlights aspects of the modern history of tea found in no other books on this global drink. It offers a fine example of how the study of the forgotten past can alter our perception of present tastes and places. — Shigehisa Kuriyama, author of The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine
Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden: Two Sisters Separated by China’s Civil War by Li, Zhuqing
Wed., July 20th, 5:30-6:30 p.m., Online via Zoom
This event is free and open to the USF community and the public. Register here.
Moderator: Melissa Dale, Ph.D., Executive Director and Associate Professor, Center for Asia Pacific Studies.
Li, Zhuqing. Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden: Two Sisters Separated by China’s Civil. War. W. W. Norton & Company, 2022.
This book is available in e-book and print formats. It will also be available to the USF community through Gleeson Library.
What the publisher has to say about Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden: Two Sisters Separated by China’s Civil War:
“At last, a profoundly human story that illuminates the staggering personal consequences of China and Taiwan’s historic split―from both sides. Rare is the author who can portray war and its aftermath so evenhandedly. This powerful page-turner of a family torn apart―and surviving―is as unforgettable as it is important.”― Nicole Mones, author of The Last Chinese Chef
“With sensitivity and sincerity, Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden takes readers through the most complicated, difficult, sorrowful, and indecipherable years in China’s modern history.”― Ai Wei Wei, author of 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows
“A heartrending story, beautifully told, about the struggles and triumphs of two sisters separated by the Taiwan Strait, but united in their determination to pursue meaningful lives amid political upheaval. I couldn’t stop reading it.”― Amy Stanley, author of Stranger in the Shogun’s City
“In gorgeous prose, Zhuqing Li tells a story that is at once distinctive and familiar, of Chinese families of a certain generation that lived through wars, revolutions, separations, and reunions. I couldn’t put it down. A lovely book.”― Mae Ngai, author of The Chinese Question
“Beginning in war-torn China, Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden tells a compelling story about diaspora, root-seeking, and the triumph of familial love and human perseverance.”― David Wang, author of The Lyrical in Epic Time
“Zhuqing Li has captured the agonizing struggle of late-twentieth-century Chinese history within the microcosm of her own extraordinary family. This is a tale of accidental exile, capitalism and communism, medicine and mercantilism, lifelong nostalgia and willful forgetting, and the breathtaking resilience of two sisters, Li’s indomitable aunts. How lucky we are that their niece has the skill and devotion to tell their story so well.”― Janice Nimura, author of The Doctors Blackwell
