Ricardo Salinas is founder and chairman of media, retail, and banking giant Grupo Salinas. Before talking about microfinance, philanthropy, and Mexico’s past and future in New York, he gamely st...
by JP Reese
Jigsaw men smoke behind cinder block walls,
assemble the pieces of people they've been.
Second-hand voices seep under the door
of the coffee-cup room severing “Al” from “A...
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.
