How Much of These Hills Is Gold by C. Pam Zhang (Riverhead Books)

The Old West of the United States is a familiar icon. From childhood, Americans learn about the beauty of its desert canyons and grasslands, the gold that lay within its rivers, the uninhabited spaces that drew those who fit in nowhere else, who wanted the opportunity for reinvention, to find a place that would fit their definitions of home. Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, the Donner Party--these are the figures who haunt the West--the ones who made it, the ones who died trying, the ones who hammered the Golden Spike into the last piece of rail that connected East to West. 

C. Pam Zhang has taken this myth--of outsiders on their own, making their way through a landscape that is stark and sere, living on what they can hunt, and working their way toward the lives they hope to make that are beyond anything they’ve yet experienced. But these fugitives are orphans who were born to Chinese parents, traveling by themselves on a stolen horse, in the only world they’ve ever known.

Lucy and Sam each have been shaped by a different parent who has given them different dreams. Lucy learned from her mother the weapon that beauty can provide, the value of an education, the fragments of a distant culture found in a trunk that Ma had carried from an unnamed country. Sam has absorbed the essential attributes of being male, taught by a man who never knew his own parents, who was found by Native Americans when he was an infant, lying beside a dead Chinese couple. Ba needs a boy and he turns Sam from being his youngest daughter into his only son.

Lucy longs to reach Sweetwater, a town she’s only heard of, where she can live in the cleanliness and order that her mother had worked unsuccessfully to attain. Sam wants to keep going, far from anyone who might recognize the girl who hides beneath a boy’s tough exterior. But first they have to find a place where they can bury their father’s body that rots to pieces in their mother’s old trunk, waiting to be placed in the ground, anchored by two stolen silver dollars.

As they search, Lucy clandestinely buries the fragments of her father’s body that drop from cracks in the trunk. Even after she and Sam put the unrecognizable carcass within the grave they’ve dug, along with the stolen silver, Ba haunts her. At night his ghost tells Lucy the true story of who her parents had been and why each of them, in cruel and separate ways, had abandoned their children.

“What makes a home a home?” “What makes a family a family?” These are questions Lucy and Sam ask each other long before they ride off to find the answers for themselves. Each child finds what they thought they wanted; each ends up far from where they had dreamed of being, aching for what they’ve lost.

C. Pam Zhang has wriitten a novel that’s built upon the lives and bodies of the Chinese in America. Within the poetry of the Western landscape, she has placed two children who will live there forever, as legends and as revealed history.~Janet Brown

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong (One World, Random House)

 “If you want to write about race, you have to do it politely, because then people will listen.” Cathy Hong Park understood this statement made by another poet of color; she’d been writing poetry  “for a roomful of bored white people,” submerging her identity and her feelings to fit into a narrative that didn’t see color, only whiteness. Flattened into a category that lumped all Asian nationalities into a model minority that exists only for some, she felt “as interchangeable as lint,” without a voice of her own. Steeped in depression, she found a path to this after watching Richard Pryor and taking to the stage herself as a stand-up comic, delivering sardonic truths that shocked audiences into listening. She no longer had to be polite, a state that seeped into her poems and pervades her essays in Minor Feelings.

In defiance of the approved standardized language, Hong Park explores and celebrates “bad English,” collecting it from websites that find humor in mistranslations of English in other countries. “I steal those lines and use them in my poetry,” she says, “bad English is my heritage.” She treats “English as a weapon in a power struggle,” “hijacking English...to slit English open so its dark histories slide out,” “finding a way of speech that decentered whiteness.”

Dark histories emerge in Park Hong’s essays, through words that decenter whiteness like scalpels. She charts the odyssey that she traveled at Oberlin with two friends,Taiwanese and Korean, the three of them becoming “indomitable forces” in their different art forms, possessing “the confidence of white men, which was swiftly cut down after graduation.” 

She illuminates the death of artist and poet Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, who was raped and murdered in Manhattan. Her death went unnoticed by the New York press and it was her brother and her husband who discovered the site of her murder after the police had given up a cursory search. Cha was killed just as her book Dictee was released, just before her photographs were to appear in a group show at a Village gallery. With her murder, she vanished, so thoroughly that Park Hong discovered Dictee only through a workshop with a visiting Korean American professor.  A mixture of “memoir, poetry, essay, diagrams, and photography,” Cha’s book pulls Park Hong into an unfamiliar truth, a truth she expands upon in a scathing essay that focuses a long-denied attention upon Cha’s life, death, and art.

She brings to light an activist who by rights should be famous, a woman who held Malcolm X as he died and who’s immortalized in a photograph of his death but remains anonymous. Yuri Kochiyama grew up in a U.S internment camp during World War II. She became a civil rights activist and was one of the seven who occupied the Statue of Liberty in 1977 as supporters of independence for Puerto Rico. She fought for a government apology and reparations for the survivors of internment camps and in 1996 proclaimed “People have a right to violence, to rebel, to fight back.” “At a time when identities can be walled off,” Park Hong says, “it’s essential to lift up the life of Kochiyama.” The scalding shame is that this life needs to be lifted up when Kochiyama should be a shining part of America’s historical fabric. 

Park Hong defines minor feelings as those emotions that don’t enhance and pay homage to the ruling system: “envy,  irritation, boredom,” the feelings that emerge with honesty and are all too often submerged “to protect white feelings.” 

These essays will not do that. Reckonings are not conciliatory actions and Hong Park makes it clear from the beginning that this is what her book is about. What her essays will do is propel white readers into an awareness that should have come our way long ago. It’s a launching pad. Make a leap.~Janet Brown

A Cab Called Reliable by Patti Kim (St. Martin's)

Patti Kim was born in 1970 in Pusan, Korea. Her family immigrated to the U.S. when she was four years old. She wrote A Cab Called Reliable as her Master’s Thesis at the University of Maryland where she earned a Master of Fine Arts Degree. Her thesis was then published in 1997 and became her debut novel and opened the path for her to become a writer. She says her books “aren’t autobiographical and yet they are, if you know what I mean.”

The story is set in the early seventies. Ahn Joo and her family are from Pusan, Korea where they used to live in a small room behind a grocery store. They moved to the States when Ahn Joo was seven years old and settled down in Arlington, Virginia. They currently live in an apartment complex called Burning Rock Court.

Ahn Joon is in the third grade and was on her way home from school when she heard her younger brother crying. She remembers her mother saying “it was wicked for a child to cry in public” and yet she would not scold her son, Min-Joo, who often cried in public. She was told that Min Joo was special.

Ahn Joo saw her mother carrying her crying brother get into a taxi. She decided to hide behind a tree and when the car passed by, she saw her mother’s face through the window in a blue cab that had “Reliable” written on the door. When Ahn Joo got home, she found a note her mother left her along with a box filled with four small cakes with white frosting.  In the note which was written in Korean, her mother said the cakes were for Ahn Joo, to eat them and enjoy them. She would come back later to pick up Ahn Joo. That was the last time Ahn Joo saw her mother. 

We follow Ahn Joo’s life as the years pass, from grade to the fourth, from the fourth grade to the fifth and on up until high school, sharing in her failures and successes. She still believes her mother may one day come back and get her but life goes on with just her and her Dad.

Her father sums up the life of the Korean immigrant. Even though it is just him and his daughter, he squeaks a living with a welding job. He saves up enough money to buy a food truck then progresses to becoming the owner of a grocery store in a mostly African-American neighborhood and makes sure his daughter gets the education she needs. 

Patti Kim’s A Cab Called Reliable brings to life what it is like for a Korean-American girl to grow up in the U.S. The struggle for identity and adjusting to a new environment and culture. The family dynamics may not be the same for every Asian immigrant family, but many of the problems they face are easily recognizable - the prejudice, the language barrier, family ties (both good and bad) and wanting the best for their children.~Ernie Hoyt