Peter Beinart started his talk at the Heard Museum in Phoenix with praise for Israel. Israel’s creation, Beinart said, has been a blessing for the Jewish people. It has provided a homeland and r...
by Jonathan Guyer
CAIRO — The cityscape looks a bit different these days. Buildings are sporting a darker layer of dust, and graffiti—provocative, elaborate, and in defiance of the regimeâ€...
I open my eyes again. So be it,
good. Don’t leave. The dark slides into slippers
easily. The quiet finds a robe. The room
rises and is falling with your
breathing. As if
I’d never seen you sleeping,
in this house and warmth,
at this hour, this bed
I can’t quite
put my finger on
and like.
The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America
by Mae Ngai
Hyphenated cultures seem to be a natural part of California’s landscape today, but it wasn’t always so. The Lucky Ones by Mae Ngai offers a fresh look at California history by reconstructing the lives of immigrant and second generation pioneers who lived between cultures when it was not such a common phenomenon. Ngai’s narrative brings Chinese Americans into a richer tradition of historical storytelling by humanizing an ambivalent, middle-class immigrant family, situating their lives within the more well-known histories of Chinese laborers and those who suffered from the 1882 Exclusion Act.
