Let’s Talk About It: York University Libraries Authors Series

This new anthology brings together some of the most exciting works of fiction by contemporary Chinese Canadian writers. Representing three generations of Chinese from a variety of backgrounds, including writers born in Canada as well as places outside, presenting a diversity of themes and styles, and set in various geographical locations and time periods, Strike the Wok is a truly kaleidoscopic look at Chinese life from modern Canadian perspectives. Internationally renowned as well as newer voices are included.

This study analyzes the manner in which important Asian American and Asian Canadian writers appropriate the short-story cycle as a tool for both self-representation and empowerment. This work specifically analyzes a number of major works by writers such as Amy Tan, Rohinton Mistry, Sara Suleri, Garrett Hongo, Terry Watada,Sylvia Watanabe, MG Vassanji, and Wayson Choy, among others.

Inscrutable Belongings brings together formalist and contextual modes of critique to consider narrative strategies that emerge in queer Asian North American literature. Collectively, the texts bring to mind foundational struggles for queer Asian North Americans (and other socially marginalized groups) and confront a broad range of issues, including interracial desire, the AIDS/HIV epidemic, transnational mobility, and postcolonial trauma.

Joy Kogawa, prolific author of poetry and prose, is most famously associated with her award winning first novel Obasan (1981): a semi-autobiographical chronicle of Japanese Canadian experiences during the Second World War. In addition to being a renowned author and poet, Kogawa has dedicated herself to community activism, notably the Japanese Canadian redress movement and the Toronto Dollar project. The essays in this collection explore Joy Kogawa's work, both literary and activist.

This book advances a new concept of the "Asian diaspora" that creates links between Asian American, Asian Canadian, and Asian Australian identities. Drawing from comparable studies of the black diaspora, it traces the histories of colonialism, immigration, and exclusion shared by these three populations.

An anthology of poetry on Nikkei incarceration, written by descendants of the WWII prisons and camps A tribute to the 150,000 people incarcerated by the United States and Canada during WWII, this anthology is the first of its kind. The poetry expresses a range of experiences and perspectives from the afterlife of this historical yet enduring injustice.

A story told in two parts as a graphic novel and novella, about elderly Wong Cho Sum's attempt to cope with the death of her husband by taking up bottle and can collecting. Denison Avenue explores the price of progress in cities like Toronto and those it leaves behind. A moving story told in visual art and fiction about gentrification, ageing in place, grief, and vulnerable Chinese Canadian elders.

Beginning with her mother's stroke in 2014, Teresa Wong takes us on a moving journey through time and place to locate the beginnings of the disconnection she feels from her parents.

Winner of a 2025 Canada-Japan Literary Award This revealing memoir by the former president of the National Association of Japanese Canadians describes the long journey towards resolution for the historic injustice that deprived Japanese Canadians of their basic human rights during and after World War II.

White Riot: The 1907 Anti-Asian Riots in Vancouver explores the conditions leading up to and the impact of a demonstration and parade in Vancouver, Canada, organized by the Asiatic Exclusion League and the ensuing mob attack on the city's Chinese Canadian and Japanese Canadian communities. Emblematic of a systemically racist era, White Riot reveals the social and political environment of the time, when racialized communities were targeted through legislated as well as physical acts of exclusion and violence.

Left behind in China by her father, who has gone to North America to find work, Choon-yi has made her living by selling her paintings in the market. When her father writes one day and asks her to join him, she joyously sets off, only to discover that he has been killed. Choon-yi sees the railway and the giant train engines that her father died for, and she is filled with an urge to paint them. But her work disappoints her until a ghostly presence beckons her to board the train where she meets the ghosts of the men who died building the railway. Will Choon-yi find a way to make peace with her father's death? Ghostly, magical, and redeeming, this masterful tale is superbly illustrated by Harvey Chan.

This richly detailed chronicle of vision, frustration and success intersperses a lively text with vivid photographs of the railways that wen tot make up CN and the men who believed in the Asian Dream.

After the Canadian Pacific Railway was completed in 1885--construction of the western stretch was largely built by Chinese workers--the Canadian government imposed a punitive head tax to deter Chinese citizens from coming to Canada. The exorbitant tax strongly discouraged those who had already emigrated from sending for wives and children left in China--effectively splintering families. After raising the tax twice, the Canadian government eventually brought in legislation to stop Chinese immigration altogether. The ban was not repealed until 1947. It was not until June 22, 2006, that Prime Minister Stephen Harper formally apologized to the Chinese Canadian community for the Government of Canada's racist legacy. Until now, little had been written about the events leading up to the apology.

The artists, activists, community organizers, creative writers, poets, scholars, and visual artists that contribute to this exciting new volume make visible the complicated intertwining of sexuality with race, class, gender, and ethnicity. Sections address activism, radicalism, and social justice; transformations in the meaning of Asian-ness and queerness in various mass media; issues of queerness in relation to settler colonialism; and explorations of bodies, health, disability, gender transitions, death, healing, and resilience.