A Letter from the Director

Dear Friends of the Center for Asian Studies,

In western art, the “Wheel of Fortune” represents the disruptive role that Chance – often described as “blind” and “fickle” – and unexpected change play in human affairs. As 2021 nears its conclusion, the Corona virus keeps mutating, and the Wheel shows no signs of slowing down. I cannot, of course, predict whether or in what ways the Pandemic might affect the Center’s programming in 2022. I can predict that we will continue to focus our attention on fostering reciprocal understanding and productive engagement with Asia and Asian America.

That commitment requires purposeful change: In the first CAS Newsletter of 2022 (that you will receive in mid-January), you will find information about developments related to the Center’s intensifying interest in Asian American and Asian Diaspora studies. The New Year will begin, for example, with a virtual event that reflects that emphasis- a conversation with two Asian American students about their educational experience and ambitions:

The January schedule also includes the Center’s first “in person” event since 2019. As part of our Asian Culture Forum series, Daniel Chen, Conductor of the Hua Yun Chinese Orchestra of Dallas, will discuss (and demonstrate) traditional Chinese music and musical instruments.

The Spring schedule will include the opening of a major exhibit at the convergence of art, science and commerce: Rare Earth: The Art and Science of Chinese Stones:

Even though the Center will be closed between December 23 and January 3, opportunities to learn continue. Six years ago, while visiting Iceland, I learned about a Christmas Eve tradition there called Jolabokaflod (or “Yule Book Flood”) that involves exchanging, unwrapping and then spending the evening reading new books. I hope that you will devote time during the Holiday Break to read at least one book about Asia and/or Asian America. Beginning with the January edition, the CAS Newsletter will include a column “What We’re Reading” and we actively solicit your recommendations. At the conclusion of this letter, you will find a few recommendations from me focused on recent fiction, as well as a thoughtful essay about Asia-related Fantasy and Science Fiction by Ally Duong, a UTD undergraduate and Interim Chair of the Center’s Student Advisory Council.

Finally, I want to thank you for your attending, participating in, and supporting the Center’s efforts on behalf of international understanding, and engagement. Fortune may seem capricious; but our resolve remains constant to nurture a welcoming environment of intellectual exploration, productive interaction, and mutual respect. I have just made my “end of year” gifts to several organizations – including, of course, the Center for Asian Studies. I hope that you will consider supporting our mission. A link to make an online gift is attached:

The Center welcomes expressions of support any time – at the beginning, middle or end of the year. It is always a good time to promote knowledge, understanding and harmony across cultures.

With my wish for a healthy, fulfilling and adventurous year,

Dennis

Dennis M. Kratz

Senior Associate Provost

Director, Center for Asian Studies

Ignacy and Celina Rockover Professor of Humanities

Works of fiction can provide unique insights into other cultures – from everyday assumptions to profound philosophical principles. Here are a few recommendations, along with the publishers' descriptions, from my recent readings:

It is 1995, and Anvar Faris is a restless, rebellious, and sharp-tongued boy doing his best to grow up in Karachi, Pakistan. As fundamentalism takes root within the social order and the zealots next door attempt to make Islam great again, his family decides, not quite unanimously, to start life over in California. Ironically, Anvar's deeply devout mother and his model-Muslim brother adjust easily to life in America, while his fun-loving father can't find anyone he relates to. For his part, Anvar fully commits to being a bad Muslim.

At the same time, thousands of miles away, Safwa, a young girl living in war-torn Baghdad with her grief-stricken, conservative father will find a very different and far more dangerous path to America. When Anvar and Safwa's worlds collide as two remarkable, strong-willed adults, their contradictory, intertwined fates will rock their community, and families, to their core.

The Bad Muslim Discount is an irreverent, poignant, and often hysterically funny debut novel by an amazing new voice. With deep insight, warmth, and an irreverent sense of humor, Syed M. Masood examines universal questions of identity, faith (or lack thereof), and belonging through the lens of Muslim Americans.

Willis Wu doesn’t perceive himself as the protagonist in his own life: he’s merely Generic Asian Man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but always he is relegated to a prop. Yet every day, he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He’s a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy—the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. Or is it?

After stumbling into the spotlight, Willis finds himself launched into a wider world than he’s ever known, discovering not only the secret history of Chinatown, but the buried legacy of his own family. Infinitely inventive and deeply personal, exploring the themes of pop culture, assimilation, and immigration—Interior Chinatown is Charles Yu’s most moving, daring, and masterful novel yet.

Two novels about the Asian immigrant experience in America – the first about immigrants from China, the second, from Pakistan. Both weave such disparate threads of comedy, love, crime and trenchant political commentary into tales that are provocative, often moving and very funny. Yu’s novel received the National Book Award as the best work of American fiction published in 2020.

The train stopped with a short jolt. Surajdas edged towards the window, peered outside and squinted to read the name of the station. Mewar Junction. He looked again. As far as he knew, Mewar Junction was not on the way from Delhi to Bombay, it was to the west, towards Udaipur. Something was wrong.

Set in Bombay or Mumbai, the seven stories in this collection are subtle and evocative, and draw a cast of characters that captivates and unnerves. Precise, energetic prose transports the reader into the city's crowded chawls and posh residences, fancy restaurants and roadside tea stalls, and to beaches, clubs, cinemas, and train stations.

Taken together, the stories create a literary portrait of a city that is familiar yet confounding.

Jaina Sanga is a Dallas-based writer whom I had the good fortune to meet earlier this year. Her stories set in her home city Mumbai reminded me of the way that Anne Tyler (one of America’s most admired novelists) enters the minds and souls of people where I was born (Baltimore).

Gripping and compassionate, Land of Big Numbers traces the journeys of the diverse and legion Chinese people, their history, their government, and how all of that has tumbled—messily, violently, but still beautifully—into the present.

Cutting between clear-eyed realism and tongue-in-cheek magical realism, Chen’s stories coalesce into a portrait of a people striving for openings where mobility is limited. Twins take radically different paths: one becomes a professional gamer, the other a political activist. A woman moves to the city to work at a government call center and is followed by her violent ex-boyfriend. A man is swept into the high-risk, high-reward temptations of China’s volatile stock exchange. And a group of people sit, trapped for no reason, on a subway platform for months, waiting for official permission to leave.

With acute social insight, Te-Ping Chen layers years of experience reporting on the ground in China with incantatory prose in this taut, surprising debut, proving herself both a remarkable cultural critic and an astonishingly accomplished new literary voice.

This collection of stories is on my personal Jolabokaflod list. The reviews are impressive.

In the past fifty years, Asian Americans have helped change the face of America and are now the fastest growing group in the United States. But much of their long history has been forgotten. “In her sweeping, powerful new book, Erika Lee considers the rich, complicated, and sometimes invisible histories of Asians in the United States” (Huffington Post).

The Making of Asian America shows how generations of Asian immigrants and their American-born descendants have made and remade Asian American life, from sailors who came on the first trans-Pacific ships in the 1500 to the Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II. Over the past fifty years, a new Asian America has emerged out of community activism and the arrival of new immigrants and refugees. But as Lee shows, Asian Americans have continued to struggle as both “despised minorities” and “model minorities,” revealing all the ways that racism has persisted in their lives and in the life of the country.

Published fifty years after the passage of the United States’ Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, these “powerful Asian American stories…are inspiring, and Lee herself does them justice in a book that is long overdue” (Los Angeles Times). But more than that, The Making of Asian America is an “epic and eye-opening” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune) new way of understanding America itself, its complicated histories of race and immigration, and its place in the world today.

The United States is known as a nation of immigrants. But it is also a nation of xenophobia. In America for Americans, Erika Lee shows that an irrational fear, hatred, and hostility toward immigrants has been a defining feature of our nation from the colonial era to the Trump era. Benjamin Franklin ridiculed Germans for their "strange and foreign ways." Americans' anxiety over Irish Catholics turned xenophobia into a national political movement. Chinese immigrants were excluded, Japanese incarcerated, and Mexicans deported.

Today, Americans fear Muslims, Latinos, and the so-called browning of America. Forcing us to confront this history, Lee explains how xenophobia works, why it has endured, and how it threatens America. Now updated with an afterword reflecting on how the coronavirus pandemic turbocharged xenophobia, America for Americans is an urgent spur to action for any concerned citizen.

Prof. Lee (University of Minnesota) has written two profoundly important books about the role of immigration – and Asian immigration specifically – in American history. On February 24, she will deliver an online lecture (part of the Anlin Ku Lecture Series) on the subject of Asian America.

Finally, it is my pleasure to attach the link to this article (first published in the UTD Journal A Modest Proposal) about Asian Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Email: asianstudies@utdallas.edu
Website: https://asianstudies.utdallas.edu/
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