Weekend Reading:: When Asian Americans identify themselves; Romance novel industry down and dirty; 74 years after he died, Manzanar internee's body found

KEN GAETIEN

Jeffery Paul Chan, Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada, Shawn Wong, and Chan’s daughter Jennifer, photographed near San Quentin State Prison, in the San Francisco Bay Area.

When Asian Americans separated from immigrants from Asia

Hua Hsu has an really interesting piece in The New Yorker about the "The Asian-American Canon Breakers" Proudly embracing their role as outsiders, a group of writer-activists set out to create a cultural identity—and a literature—of their own.

Identity politics offers a voluntary response to an involuntary situation. Power structures beyond our grasp sort us according to categories not of our own choosing, predestining us to be seen in a certain way by (as Ching might put it) “the average person.” Choosing to call oneself an Asian-American, rather than answering to “Oriental,” makes the most of an imposition. It offers some people a ready-made sense of purpose, short-circuiting the power of an epithet imposed from without. 

Students and activists in California invented this term in the late sixties, inspired by Black Power and similar movements among Native Americans and Chicanos, and those involved in Third World Liberation. They ultimately emphasized what connected different Asian-immigrant communities and their struggles: efforts to resist gentrification and alleviate poverty, the antiwar movement, stereotypes about Asians as passive or perpetually foreign. The term implied a set of shared historical conditions. Where to go next was an open question.

READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE

WASHINGTON POST

Racism has romance novel industry questioning itself

Everyone is getting hot and bothered over in the aisle where the romance novels are shelved. and its not because of the book jackets' of shirtless men locked in passionate embraces with lingerie-clad, swooning women.

Mikki Kendall takes a deeper look into the growing controversy in Think.

Romance as a literary genre represents a quarter of all fiction sales and more than half of all paperback sales, and it brings in over a billion dollars in sales annually.

The impact of romance books on the culture is outsize because everyone is interested in romance, whether they admit it publicly or not.

When Asian American romance novelist Courtney Milan wrote about the industry's institutional racism in publishing and depiction of people of color, particularly Asian American women, it exposed the dirty laundry no one wanted to admit to ... until now. Mikkie Kendal writes about the growing controversy for NBC.

READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE.

GILCHI MATSUMURAWAS

Skeletal remains of Manzanar internee found

The Los Angeles Times tells the touching story how a long-lost grave of an internee at Manzanar Incarceration Camp was found.

Giichi Matsumurawas was separated from his group of fishermen who escaped the camp at night to go fishing at a nearby lake. A blizzard came upon the group, which found shelter in a cave.

Matsumurawas' body was found a month later.He was buried nearby under a pile of stones.

For 74 years, the grave lost to time and elevation. Like so much from the closing days of the war, it became a fading memory held by aging survivors of the camp who rarely spoke of the tragedies they endured.

Last week, the Inyo County Sheriff’s Office and the National Park Service announced that they had used DNA to positively identify Matsumura’s body, which was found by hikers in October.

Seventy-four years after he died, Matsumurawas' family has closure.

READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE.