Showing results by narrator "James Chen" in All Categories

Inspired by three figures who lived at pivotal moments in Chinese American history, and drawing on his own mixed-race experience, Peter Ho Davies plunges us into what it is like to feel and be treated like a foreigner in the country you call home. Ranging from the mouth of the Pearl River to the land of golden opportunity, this remarkable audiobook spans 150 years to tell a tale of familial bonds denied, of tenacity and pride, of prejudice and the universal need to belong.

A harrowing journey into a milestone event of Canadian history: the use of Chinese coolies to help build the Canadian Pacific Railway in British Columbia in hazardous conditions. After the CPR is built in 1885, Yang Hok, a former coolie, treks along the railway to return his half-Chinese/half-Native son to the boy's mother, where he confronts the conflicts arising from road-building among the Chinese and Native peoples.

Chinese Yankee by Ruthanne Lum McCunn tells the true story of Hong Kong born Thomas Sylvanus (Ah Yee Way), an orphan brought to America for schooling in the mid-1850s, but enslaved in Baltimore. Only sixteen at the outbreak of war, Thomas ran north, joined the Freedom Army, and was blinded in the first major campaign. He failed to fully recover his sight and, deemed incapable of performing the duties of a soldier, was discharged.

What happens when a thirty-something, newly divorced man discovers courage and adventure, thanks to a karaoke contest? In Adventures of the Karaoke King, Harold Taw introduces us to Guy Watanabe, a man marginally aware of his Asian background and decidedly unaware of how poorly he has planned for his future. In this riotous, often thoughtful, and always entertaining novel, readers are taken on a memorable journey that crosses America, Asia, and back, with the last leg spent in a shipping container.

Logan Solomon is a Southern gentleman who has lived in Beijing far too long. Aside from the shady business deals, surveillance jobs, and the often decadent lifestyle of the jaded foreigner, he has also managed to alienate his wife Li Na while associating himself with very rough characters - some who might not even be human. Following a seemingly chance encounter aboard a train, a chain of events is set in motion that will change Logan's destiny forever, and leave a trail of dead in the wake.

Is it too much to ask for an ordinary, boring life? Bai Jian is a typical Chinese boy growing up in a big city. But his life is far from typical: his mother abandoned him when he was a baby, and his father, Hei Jian, is always out of work, always fighting with his long parade of girlfriends, always getting the two of them involved in some harebrained scheme.