Folsom Library Collection Highlights

• Central Asia by Adeeb Khalid

  ISBN: 0691220433

  Publication Date: 2021-06-01

  A major history of Central Asia and how it has been shaped by modern events Central Asia is often seen as a remote and inaccessible land on the peripheries of modern history. Encompassing Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and the Xinjiang province of China, it in fact stands at the crossroads of world events. Adeeb Khalid provides the first comprehensive history of Central Asia from the mid-eighteenth century to today, shedding light on the historical forces that have shaped the region.
• Chinese American Voices by Judy Yung (Editor); Gordon Chang (Editor); Him Mark Lai (Editor)

  ISBN: 9780520938328

  Publication Date: 2006-03-20

  Offering a textured history of the Chinese in America since their arrival during the California Gold Rush, this work includes letters, speeches, testimonies, oral histories, personal memoirs, poems, essays, and folksongs. It provides an insight into immigration, work, family and social life, and the longstanding fight for equality and inclusion.
• A Companion to Hong Kong Cinema by Esther M. K. Cheung (Editor); Gina Marchetti (Editor); Esther C. M. Yau (Editor)

  ISBN: 9781118883594

  Publication Date: 2015-07-06

  A Companion to Hong Kong Cinema provides the first comprehensive scholarly exploration of this unique global cinema. By embracing the interdisciplinary approach of contemporary film and cultural studies, this collection navigates theoretical debates while charting a new course for future research in Hong Kong film.
• Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

  Call Number: ML420.Z3913 A3 2021

  ISBN: 9780525657743

  Publication Date: 2021-04-20

  From the indie rockstar of Japanese Breakfast fame, and author of the viral 2018 New Yorker essay that shares the title of this book, an unflinching, powerful memoir about growing up Korean-American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity. In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist.
• Issei Baseball by Robert K. Fitts

  ISBN: 9781496220899

  Publication Date: 2020-04-01

  Issei Baseball is the story of the pioneers of Japanese American baseball, Harry Saisho, Ken Kitsuse, Tom Uyeda, Tozan Masko, Kiichi Suzuki, and others—young men who came to the United States to start a new life but found bigotry and discrimination. In 1905 they formed a baseball club in Los Angeles and began playing local amateur teams. Inspired by the Waseda University baseball team’s 1905 visit to the West Coast, they became the first Japanese professional baseball club on either side of the Pacific and barnstormed across the American Midwest in 1906 and 1911. Tens of thousands came to see “how the minions of the Mikado played the national pastime.” As they played, the Japanese earned the respect of their opponents and fans, breaking down racial stereotypes.
• The Man Who Knew Infinity by Robert Kanigel

  Call Number: QA29.R3 K36 1991

  ISBN: 0684192594

  Publication Date: 1991-05-01

  A biography of one of the most innovative mathematicians of all time traces the rise of Srinivasa Ramanujan from his days as a clerk to his collaboration with one of England's greatest mathematicians.
• Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

  Call Number: PS3612.E346 P33 2017

  ISBN: 9781455563920

  Publication Date: 2017-11-14

  Pachinko follows one Korean family through the generations, beginning in early 1900s Korea with Sunja, the prized daughter of a poor yet proud family, whose unplanned pregnancy threatens to shame them all. Deserted by her lover, Sunja is saved when a young tubercular minister offers to marry and bring her to Japan. So begins a sweeping saga of an exceptional family in exile from its homeland and caught in the indifferent arc of history. Through desperate struggles and hard-won triumphs, its members are bound together by deep roots as they face enduring questions of faith, family, and identity.
• Real Americans by Rachel Khong

  Call Number: F KHO

  ISBN: 9780593537251

  Publication Date: 2024-04-30

  Real Americans begins on the precipice of Y2K in New York City, when twenty-two-year-old Lily Chen, an unpaid intern at a slick media company, meets Matthew. Matthew is everything Lily is not: easygoing and effortlessly attractive, a native East Coaster, and, most notably, heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Lily couldn't be more different: flat-broke, raised in Tampa, the only child of scientists who fled Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Despite all this, Lily and Matthew fall in love. In 2021, fifteen-year-old Nick Chen has never felt like he belonged on the isolated Washington island where he lives with his single mother, Lily. He can't shake the sense she's hiding something. When Nick sets out to find his biological father, the journey threatens to raise more questions than it provides answers. In immersive, moving prose, Rachel Khong weaves a profound tale of class and striving, race and visibility, and family and inheritance—a story of trust, forgiveness, and finally coming home.
• Redefining the Immigrant South by Uzma Quraishi

  ISBN: 9781469655208

  Publication Date: 2020-03-25

  In the early years of the Cold War, the United States mounted expansive public diplomacy programs in the Global South, including initiatives with the recently partitioned states of India and Pakistan. U.S. operations in these two countries became the second- and fourth-largest in the world, creating migration links that resulted in the emergence of American universities, such as the University of Houston, as immigration hubs for the highly selective, student-led South Asian migration stream starting in the 1950s. By the late twentieth century, Houston's South Asian community had become one of the most prosperous in the metropolitan area and one of the largest in the country. Mining archives and using new oral histories, Uzma Quraishi traces this pioneering community from its midcentury roots to the early twenty-first century, arguing that South Asian immigrants appealed to class conformity and endorsed the model minority myth to navigate the complexities of a shifting Sunbelt South.
• Rice and Baguette by Vu Hong Lien

  ISBN: 9781780237046

  Publication Date: 2016-09-15

  The once-obscure cuisine of Vietnam is a favourite of many people from East to West. After millennia of adaptation and innovation with a pervasive Chinese influence, today's Vietnamese food is, surprisingly, a mixture of Vietnamese and French dishes, with the baguette the most cherished part of the French culinary legacy. Introduced into Vietnam in the mid-nineteenth century, the baguette is now second only to rice, the wonder grain the Viêt discovered thousands of years ago and made their staple food. Drawing on archaeological evidence and a wealth of oral and written history, Rice and Baguette reveals the journey Vietnamese food has traversed through history to become a much-loved cuisine today.
• To Be an Actress by Yiman Wang

  ISBN: 0520975804

  Publication Date: 2024-06-25

  Between 1919 and 1961, pioneering Chinese American actress Anna May Wong established an enduring legacy that encompassed cinema, theater, radio, and American television. Born in Los Angeles, yet with her US citizenship scrutinized due to the Chinese Exclusion Act, Wong-a defiant misfit-innovated nuanced performances to subvert the racism and sexism that beset her life and career. In this critical study of Wong's cross-media and transnational career, Yiman Wang marshals extraordinary archival research and a multifocal approach to illuminate a lifelong labor of performance. Viewing Wong as a performer and worker, not just a star, To Be an Actress adopts a feminist decolonial perspective to speculatively meet her as an interlocutor while inviting a reconsideration of racialized, gendered, and migratory labor as the bedrock of the entertainment industries.
• Waterman by David Davis

  ISBN: 9780803285149

  Publication Date: 2015-10-01

  "Waterman "is the first comprehensive biography of Duke Kahanamoku (1890-1968): swimmer, surfer, Olympic gold medalist, Hawaiian icon, waterman. Long before Michael Phelps and Mark Spitz made their splashes in the pool, Kahanamoku emerged from the backwaters of Waikiki to become America s first superstar Olympic swimmer. The original human fish set dozens of world records and topped the world rankings for more than a decade; his rivalry with Johnny Weissmuller transformed competitive swimming from an insignificant sideshow into a headliner event. Kahanamoku used his Olympic renown to introduce the sport of surf-riding, an activity unknown beyond the Hawaiian Islands, to the world

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  Ai Wei Wei: The Fake Case (2013)

  Ai Weiwei is one the most prolific and influential artists of our time. He is also one of the most controversial, as the Chinese government attempted to censor and disgrace Ai with a brutal 81-day stint in solitary comfinement and a trumped-up tax-evasion lawsuit known as 'The Fake Case'. Along the way, Ai became something of a folk hero, as he refused to buckle to authoritarian oppression.
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  Aparājito (1956)

  Follows the life of the poor Bengali country boy, Apu and his encounter with the school system in Benares and later with the intellectual life at the university in Calcutta.
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  Bend it like Beckham (2002)

  Eighteen year-old Jesminder's parents want her to be a nice, conventional Indian girl. But she just wants to play soccer like her hero, David Beckham. For Jess, that means kicking a ball around the local park with the lads until she's spotted by Jules, who invites her to join the local women's team.
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  The Color of Pomegranates (1969)

  Stylized biography of noted eighteenth century Armenian poet and troubadour Sayat Nova, based on his writings. It depicts the poet's life in eight sections, from childhood to death, rich with symbols of sacred and secular Armenian life.
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  Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

  Evelyn Wang, a flustered immigrant mother, is contacted from a parallel universe and told that only she can save the world. The unlikely hero must learn to channel her newfound powers and fight through the splintering timelines of the multiverse to save her home, her family, and herself in this big-hearted and irreverent adventure.
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  Ikiru (1954)

  Discovering that he is in the terminal stages of cancer, a clerk spends his last months in search of the meaning to life. After his pursuit of pleasure has failed, he finds self-realization in bringing about the building of a children's playground in the slums and dies quietly fulfilled.
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  In the Mood for Love (2000)

  The story of two lonely people who discover in each other the intimacy they have lost in their marriages.
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  Parasite (2019)

  Kim Ki-taek's family are all unemployed and living in a squalid basement. When his son gets a tutoring job at the lavish home of the Park family, the Kim family's luck changes. One by one they gradually infiltrate the wealthy Parks' home, attempting to take over their affluent lifestyle.
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  Princess Mononoke (1997)

  Cursed warrior Ashitaka stumbles into a bitter war where a girl raised by wolves defends her forest home against the people of Iron Town in this epic masterpiece from Hayao Miyazaki about the clash between mankind and nature.
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  Sacred Rivers: Episode 2 - The Ganges

  History, adventure and travelogue combine as Simon Reeve explores three of the world's major rivers: the Nile, Yangtze and Ganges. Through the stories of the people who live alongside these great waterways, he uncovers their vast influence, and reveals how they unite, and divide, some of the most extraordinary parts of the world. Travel from the twin temples of Abu Simbel to the Nile delta; down the Yangtze from the giant Buddha of Leshen to the Three Gorges Dam and on to Shanghai; and along the great mother Ganges in a world caught between ancient traditions and astonishing modernity.