Ocean State Libraries

Meet the Wu family—father Nan, mother Pingping, and son Taotao. They are arranging to fully sever ties with China in the aftermath of the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square, and to begin a new, free life in the United States. At first, their future seems well-assured. But after the fallout from Tiananmen, Nan's disillusionment turns him toward his first love, poetry. Leaving his studies, he takes on a variety of menial jobs as Pingping works

...

Michael Tang and his sister, Emily, have both struggled to forge a sense of identity in their parents' adopted homeland. Emily, an immigration lawyer in New York City, baffles their mother, Ling, by refusing to have children. At twenty-six, Michael is unable to commit to a relationship or a career-or come out to his family. And now their father, after a lifetime of sacrifice, has passed away. When Michael finds a letter to his father from a long-ago...

Two dead bodies lead an NYPD detective all the way to Seattle's Chinatown, in this "gripping police procedural full of surprising twists" (The Kansas City Star).

The corpses of a young man and woman are discovered at an address on the Bloody Angle, the historic Tong battleground in New York's Chinatown. Is it a simple murder-suicide? The grieving families want Detective Jack Yu to keep a lid on any stories

...

"A novel about a young Chinese woman whose graduate studies in chemistry go off track and lead her to discover the truths about her goals and desires"-- "Three years into her graduate studies at a demanding Boston university, our unnamed narrator finds her one-time love for chemistry is more hypothesis than reality. Tormented by her failed research, there's another, nonscientific question looming: the marriage proposal from a fellow scientist, whose...

The lives of Jason Wilder and Meili Wen intersect in the delinquent-proof room for in-school suspension, known as the Rubber Room, and Jason's growing, fierce protectiveness of Meili explodes into violence when her chance to return to her wealthy lifestyle in Hong Kong--and his opportunity to escape poverty, loneliness, and the past--is threatened.

"From the universally admired, award-winning author of Waiting and The Boat Rocker, an urgent, timely novel that follows a famous Chinese singer severed from his country as he works to find his way in the United States. After popular singer Yao Tian takes a private gig in New York at the end of a tour with his state-supported choir, expecting to pick up some extra cash for his daughter's tuition fund, the consequences of his choice spiral out of control....

"Holding Pattern is a novel about immigration and belonging, mother-daughter relationships, and the many ways we can learn to hold each other. At 28, Kathleen Cheng returns home to live with her single mother, Marissa, an immigrant from China. Her mother, to Katheen's surprise, is in love, and Kathleen helps her mother plan her wedding to a tech entrepreneur. Kathleen takes a job working for an unusual start-up, and as mother and daughter peel back...

"Daiyu never wanted to be like the tragic heroine for whom she was named, revered for her beauty and cursed with heartbreak. But when she is kidnapped and smuggled across an ocean from China to America, Daiyu must relinquish the home and future she imagined for herself. Over the years that follow, she is forced to keep reinventing herself to survive. From a calligraphy school, to a San Francisco brothel, to a shop tucked into the Idaho mountains,...