Chin Woon Ping's "Hakka Soul" chronicles the dreams, ambitions and idiosyncrasies of her family, beginning with the death of her grandmother in pre-Independence Malaya. It was a tumultuous period when the occupying Japanese army had just been defeated, the British colonial government was losing its grip on the country and a Communist guerilla insurgency had broken out in the jungles of the Malay Peninsula. Her stories follow the family's move to the United States and a journey to China to visit her father's ancestral home. The family's migrations are part of the global diaspora of the Hakkas,...