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Chinese Prodigal: A Memoir in Eight Arguments

Chinese Prodigal: A Memoir in Eight Arguments

Audio Book

Biographies GeneralAsian American Studies

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN13: 9798874698188
Publisher: Tantor Audio
Published: Feb 20 2024
Language: English
After his father's passing, David Shih sought to unravel the underlying tensions that defined the complex relationship between him and his parents. Ultimately, this forced a reckoning with the expectations he encountered as the only son of Chinese immigrants, and with the realities of what it means to be Asian in a de facto segregated country. At a moment when anti-Asian racism is increasingly overt, Chinese Prodigal is a work of rare subtlety, offering a new vocabulary for understanding a racial hierarchy too often conceived as binary.

In public life and in Shih's own, Asian Americanness has changed shape constantly, directed by the needs of the country's racial imaginary. A memoir in essays, Chinese Prodigal examines the emergence of Asian American identity in a post-Civil Rights America in the wake of Vincent Chin's death. Shih guides us through the roles offered to Asian Americans to play, illuminating what these issues have to teach us about American values and about the vexed place Asians and Asian Americans inhabit today. Shih masterfully captures the intimate costs of becoming an American.

Chinese Prodigal knits together the personal, the historical, and the present, offering an incisive examination of a society and the people it has never made space for. It is a moving testimony of a son, father, and citizen.

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Shih, David

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Biographies General