Presents a collection of essays that examines Asian American literature from the late 19th century up through the contemporary experimental drama of Ping Chong. This book addresses the work of writers with Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Filipino, East Indian, and Pacific Island ancestry.

Written over the last decade, these poems include memories of the author's early childhood in Malaysia, immigration to America, and travel throughout the world, and affirmations of motherhood and maturity in the New World. From her background as a Malaysian Chinese later assimilated into Western culture, she has emerged with her own voice, combining bittersweet laughter and realistic affirmation. This unique voice establishes her as an important poet. Here are the lines of loss--of family, country, self--yet what is lost is found, and these poems probe a woman's many and changing truths in...

Shirley Geok-lin Lim's memoir is a courageously frank and deeply affecting account of a Malaysian girlhood and of the making of an Asian-American woman, writer, and teacher.

With insight, candor, and grace, Lim reveals the material poverty and violence of her childhood in colonized and then war-torn Malaysia after her father's business fails and her mother abandons the family, leaving Shirley to travel the road toward womanhood alone. Lim's decision in 1968 to leave Malaysia and the man she loves for a Fulbright Scholarship at Brandeis University marks a crucial turning point in her life....

Walking Backwards is about making a home when you are a nomad. It is about travel and restlessness and how endlessly absorbing the idea of home can be when we keep losing sight of it.