Russell Leong – författare

Asian American Sexualities works to dispel the stereotype of oriental sexual decadence, as well as the "model minority" heterosexual Asian sterotype in the US. Writing from an impressive array of interdisciplinary perspectives, the contributors discuss a variety of topics, including sexuality and identity politics; community activism and gay activism; transnational aspects of love between women in Thailand; queer South Asian culture in the US; gay and lesbian filmmakers; same-sex sexuality in Pacific literature; and Asian American male homosexuality and AIDS. The relationship of the gay and lesbian experience to Asian American studies and Ethnic Studies is also explored.

When the world thinks of Burma, it is often in relation to Nobel laureate and icon Aung San Suu Kyi. But beyond her is another world, one that complicates the overdetermination of Burma as a pariah state and myths about the “high status” of Southeast Asian women. Highlighting and critiquing this fraught terrain, Tamara C. Ho’s Romancing Human Rights maps “Burmese women” as real and imagined figures across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. More than a recitation of “on the ground” facts, Ho’s groundbreaking scholarship—the first monograph to examine Anglophone literature and dynamics of gender and race in relation to Burma—brings a critical lens to contemporary literature, fi lm, and politics through the use of an innovative feminist/queer methodology. She crosses intellectual boundaries to illustrate how literary and gender analysis can contribute to discourses surrounding and informing human rights—and in the process off ers a new voice in the debates about representation, racialization, migration, and spirituality.Romancing Human Rights demonstrates how Burmese women break out of prisons, both real and discursive, by writing themselves into being. Ho assembles an eclectic archive that includes George Orwell, Aung San Suu Kyi, critically acclaimed authors Ma Ma Lay and Wendy Law-Yone, and activist Zoya Phan. Her close readings of literature and politicized performances by women in Burma, the Burmese diaspora, and the United States illuminate their contributions as authors, cultural mediators, and practitioner-citizens. Using flexible, polyglot rhetorical tactics and embodied performances, these authors creatively articulate alter/native epistemologies—regionally situated knowledges and decolonizing viewpoints that interrogate and destabilize competing transnational hegemonies, such as U.S. moral imperialism and Asian militarized dictatorship.Weaving together the fi ctional and non-fi ctional, Ho’s gendered analysis makesRomancing Human Rights a unique cultural studies project that bridges postcolonial studies, area studies, and critical race/ethnic studies—a must-read for thosewith an interest in fi elds of literature, Asian and Asian American studies, history, politics, religion, and women’s and gender studies.

Together, the five stories and novella in this collection follow the lives of first- and second-generation Indian Americans living in contemporary California. The characters share a similar sensibility: a sense that immigration is a distant memory, yet an experience that continues to shape the decisions they make in subtle and surprising ways as they go about the complicated business of everyday living. The collection is anchored by the title novella about a love triangle between an aging, blind writer, his younger beautiful wife, and a young man desperate to start a writing life. Over several months, the three will get to know one another and move toward a moment that will change the lives of each of them forever.

Ship of Fate tells the emotionally gripping story of a Vietnamese military officer who evacuated from Saigon in 1975 but made the dramatic decision to return to Vietnam for his wife and children, rather than resettle in the United States without them. Written in Vietnamese in the years just after 1991, when he and his family finally immigrated to the United States, Tran Dinh Tru's memoir provides a detailed and searing account of his individual trauma as a refugee in limbo, and then as a prisoner in the Vietnamese reeducation camps.In April 1975, more than 120,000 Indochinese refugees sought and soon gained resettlement in the United States. Given the chaos of the evacuation, however, approximately 1,500 Vietnamese men and women insisted in no uncertain terms on being repatriated back to Vietnam. Tru was one of these repatriates.To resolve the escalating crisis, the U.S. government granted the Vietnamese a large ship, the Viet Nam Thuong Tin. An experienced naval commander, Tru became the captain of the ship and sailed the repatriates back to Vietnam in October 1975. On return, Tru was imprisoned and underwent forced labor for more than twelve years. Tru's account reveals a hidden history of refugee camps on Guam, internal divisions among Vietnamese refugees, political disputes between the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the U.S. government, and the horror of the postwar “reeducation” camps. While there are countless books on the U.S. war in Vietnam, there are still relatively few in English that narrate the war from a Vietnamese perspective. This translation adds new and unexpected dimensions to the U.S. military’s final withdrawal from Vietnam.