Wednesday, December 25, 2013

Paper

I commend to you NPR's recent interview on on Paper Sons.

I also highly recommend The Chinese-American Family Album, which is in a line of different cultures' American family albums: Jewish, Irish, Italian, German, African-American, etc.

Tangenially, on other aspects of the Chinese immigration/assimilation experience, I love the kids' novel In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson, which is about an 8yo (10 by Chinese reckoning) who immigrates to the states and has to learn what it means to be American without losing being Chinese.

Graphic novelist Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese (ABC) weaves three stories about family and heritage, and his Level Up is about parental expectation and personal preference for second-generation ABCs.
Personally speaking, when my grandfather was finally able to come clean about his identity, he got a declaration page that something like seven different aliases would all be known as R____.

Over the course of time, my mom and every one of her sibs actually had their names changed to add in the true family name. Some added it as a middle name, others as a surname.

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