I've decided to post my C.O.R.A. Diversity Roll Call response here this week, because it's just been too quiet around here!May is designated Asian Heritage Month and so Susan is asking us to focus on Asia in some way. I'm going to talk about one of the books I'm currently reading, Water Ghosts (formerly entitled Locke 1928) by Taiwanese/Caucasian-American Shawna Yang Ryan.
I'm only on page 32 of Water Ghosts --and part of that was a prologue--so I'm really just getting my bearings in the story. The wife of one of the men (a Chinese immigrant in this Chinese town in California, in 1928) suddenly shows up uninvited, having made her way over with two other women, in a boat, because she wanted to be with her husband. She'd waited ten years for him to send for her.
That's all I know. But the history of Chinese immigrants in the western U.S. is fascinating to me, and I'm looking forward to learning more about Locke--the only town in the U.S. built exclusively by Chinese people, for Chinese people. The laws of the time discouraged Chinese workers from bringing their families with them to the U.S., because the government didn't want them settling here. And if a white woman married a Chinese man, she forfeited her citizenship. What kind of message does that kind of history send? It's embarrassing. And even more embarrassing is that our hospitality hasn't really improved all that much.
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The next Roll Call question will be posted tomorrow on Worducopia. I think it'll be about YA lit, unless another idea strikes my fancy between now and then. But, there's still time to answer this week's question!
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