East Asian Literature

[Anonymous]

I also read "Wild Swans" and it was astounding! I have suggested it to several of my students. It was interesting looking at Communism from the point of being "inside" and this history book has the sweep of an epic saga. It is also a very easy read and should be fine for even the readers who don't like the fact that it's 508 pages!

[Anonymous]

Way to go, Michael, congratulations. I just have one or two other things to say about Mishima's Confessions of a Mask. It is very deftly and poetically written but it is probably not a novel to read in school. There are too many references to things that need not be said during school hours. I'll leave it at that.

[Anonymous]

The book Geisha: A Unique World of Tradition, Elegance, and Art by John Gallagher was very pretty but it was no more than a coffee table book but Geisha by Liza Dalby was fascinating. Dalby, a foreigner and anthropologist, who "became" a geisha as fieldwork, knows first hand how it feels. She took classes in the arts, became a "little sister," and worked alongside other geisha. What I found interesting was her views not only as a geisha, but also as an anthropologist. She grew very close to the women and was able to give a wonderful account of the geisha life by stories from geisha and ex-geisha, wives, and many others. Read this book! Great for the classroom, too.[Edit by="pguest on Jan 31, 12:22:21 AM"][/Edit]

[Anonymous]

Nothing like doing this last minute, huh? Another book I read was Polite Lies: On Being a Woman Caught Between Cultures by Kyoko Mori. This would also be a good book for the classroom and it tells of a Japanese woman in Wisconson. This was not a book with a strong story line but rather vignettes or ideas based loosly on such chapter titles as Language, Rituals, A Woman's Place, and Lies. Mori has a subtle sense of humor and she compares her Japanese side with her American side flawlessly. She compared the symbols of the Japanese fruit salads with the Midwest Jell-O salad with such sly fun that I will never look at Jell-O salad again without smiling.

[Anonymous]

Golden Mountain: Beyond the American Dream by Irene Kai was an interesting book but not one for school. It was a memoir and was very readable with a modern writing style. In it, Kai tells her story replete with drugs, sex, divorce, and problems with her mother and her husband. She cites the problems of being an Asian woman trying to make it in the workplace and how so many American men discount Asian women as just "working until you meet a husband," or "just taking up space." It gave me something to think about but I didn't see it as a "must-read" kind of book. Has someone else read it? Did I miss something?

[Anonymous]

Katherine Sweeny uses The Sound of Waves at South. She swears by it and I think I am going to use it next year.[Edit by="pguest on Jan 31, 12:25:57 AM"][/Edit]

[Anonymous]

This was a great book. This memoir by Adeline Yen Mah is so sad. It's a sort of Cinderella story with the evil step-mother and the family split down the middle. The girls in your classes will love it! Mah has a terrible childhood and it just continues into her adult life with "Niang," her step-mother, like a wicked spider hunched around every corner. She came from Hong Kong to America eventually and became a physician and a writer but still had trouble with her own family and her husband. By the time the story ends you have to take a deep breath of relief that your own family is nowhere near Mah's. That might be a good thing for some of the students who think their lives are so awful because they received a used car instead of a new one for their birthday!

[Anonymous]

She has gotten even more energetic since "Wild Swans". Her new book (including the index) is 814 pgs. long. The "story ends on pg. 630, but then, notes and lists of interviewees take up nearly a couple hundred more pages!

[Anonymous]

I wasn't quite sure where to put this post, but it seems like East Asian Literature ia a good place. I am a seventh grade language arts and history teacher, but I teach only one history class. I have been pondering how I could incorporate the wonderful literature and materials that I have been given to bring East Asia into my Language Arts classroom. I recently started a unit called "poetry island". This assignment invites students to research and choose one poet to give presentations of his/her poetry. I encouraged the students to look into cultural poetry as well as well known poets. I also invited the students to have a look at the poetry section in my Asia Institute Binder, and was surprised to find such a great interest. One group actually chose Loa Tzu's poetry, and their presentations and analyzations of the poetry were amazing. The other students in class also found the poetry of Loa Tzu to be quite interesting. Simply taking the binder out and inviting students into it, has opened up a whole new genre of literature to explore. I would like to sincerely thatnk the Asia Institute for giving me the materials and knowledge to share East Asia in my classroom.

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