The first woman and Asian to win the Commonwealth Prize, Among the White Moon Faces is an autobiography that chronicles the confusion of personal identity—linguistically, culturally, and sexually. The English-educated child of a Chinese father and a Peranakan mother, Lim grew up in post-colonial Malaysia with a tangle of names, languages and roles. The deep-seated, cross-cultural ironies of this fragmented identity also echo throughout this memoir; from the love-hate relationship she shares with a neglectful father and an estranged mother, the pain of hunger suffered during childhood, to her Anglophile education and the loneliness of cultural displacement. Lim eventually finds reconciliation in her perpetual exile, using the solace of writing to create a sense of place and to counter the pull of ancient ghosts.

Describes Lim's childhood in Malaysia after her mother abandons her family, and her journey into womanhood as an Asian American with professional, family, and cultural concerns

This book brings together fourteen articles by prominent critics of Malaysian Anglophone literature from five different countries: Australia, Italy, Malaysia, Singapore, and the US. It investigates the thematic and stylistic trends in the literary products of selected writers of the tradition in the genres of drama, fiction, and poetry, from its beginnings to the present, focusing mainly on the postcolonial themes of ethnicity, gender, diaspora, and nationalism, which are central to the creativity and imagination of these writers. The book explores the works of not just the established writers of the tradition but also those who have received little critical attention to date but who are equally gifted, such as Adibah Amin, Edward Dorall, Rehaman Rashid, and Huzir Suleiman. The chapters collectively address the challenges and achievements of writers in the English language in a country where English is widely used in daily life and yet marginalised in the creative domain to elevate the status of writings in the national language, i.e., Bahasa Malaysia. The book will demonstrate that in spite of such recurrent neglect of the medium, Malaysia has produced a number of outstanding writers in the language, who are comparable in creativity and craftsmanship to writers of other Anglophone traditions. The book will be of interest to readers and researchers of Malaysian literature, postcolonial literatures, minority literatures, gender studies, and Southeast Asian studies.

This anthology covers writings by Asian Americans in all genres, from the early twentieth century to the present. Some sixty authors of Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, South Asian, and Southeast Asian American origin are represented, with an equal split between male and female writers. The collection is divided into four sections-memoir, fiction, poetry, and drama-prefaced by an introductory essay from a well-known practitioner of that genre: Meena Alexander on memoir, Gary Pak on fiction, Eileen Tabios on poetry, and Roberta Uno on drama. The selections depict the complex realities and wide range of experiences of Asians in the United States. They illuminate the writers' creative responses to issues as diverse as resistance, aesthetics, biculturalism, sexuality, gender relations, racism, war, diaspora, and family.

Asian Americans have made many significant contributions to industry, science, politics, and the arts. At the same time, they have made great sacrifices and endured enormous hardships. This reference examines autobiographies and memoirs written by Asian Americans in the twentieth century. Included are alphabetically arranged entries on 60 major autobiographers of Asian descent. Some of these, such as Meena Alexander and Maxine Hong Kingston, are known primarily for their writings; others, such as Daniel K. Inouye, are known largely for other achievements, which they have chronicled in their autobiographies. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and provides a reliable account of the autobiographer's life; reviews major autobiographical works and themes, including fictionalized autobiographies and autobiographical novels; presents a meticulously researched account of the critical reception of these works; and closes with a bibliography of primary and secondary sources. An introductory essay considers the history and development of autobiography in American literature and culture and discusses issues and themes vital to Asian American autobiographies and memoirs, such as family, diaspora, nationhood, identity, cultural assimilation, racial dynamics, and the formation of the Asian American literary canon. The volume closes with a selected bibliography.

The book seeks to address how movements across cultures shape the different ways in which China and Chineseness have been imagined and represented since the beginning of the last century. In so doing, it aims to offer an overview of the debate about Chineseness as it has emerged in different global locations.

By means of contextualized readings, this work argues that autobiographic writing allows an intimate access to processes of colonization and decolonization, incorporation and resistance, and the formation and reformation of identities which occurs in postcolonial space. The book explores the interconnections between race, gender, autobiography and colonialism and uses a method of reading which looks for connections between very different autobiographical writings to pursue constructions of blackness and whiteness, femininity and masculinity, and nationality. Unlike previous studies of autobiography which focus on a limited Euro American canon, the book brings together contemporary and 19th-century women's autobiographies and travel writing from Canada, the Caribbean, Kenya, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. With emphasis on the reader of autobiography as much as the subject, it argues that colonization and resistance are deeply embedded in thinking about the self.

Through close readings grounded in the socio-historical context of each work, Ty studies how authors and filmmakers meet the gaze of the dominant culture and respond to the assumptions and meanings commonly associated with Orientalized, visible bodies. Ty does not survey Asian Canadian and Asian America literature, but presents readings of selected texts that actively engage with issues of otherness, visibility, and identification. Many of them, she says, are in the process of working out how larger issues of representation, power, and history affect Asian North American subjectivity. Parts of the work have been published previously.