June 1, 7:30 pm: Lisa See and Nina Revoyr: Chinese and Japanese Americans: a sometimes uneasy relationship with America

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Only a handful of writers in America have explored the Chinese immigration experience as fully as Lisa See.  No one, however, has done it with as much variety, depth or reach to a wide audience.  From her thrilling family story, On Gold Mountain,  to her new novel, Dreams of Joy, Lisa See has mined individual, familial and collective Chinese American stories to produce a most wonderful window into what it means to be part of both cultures as a woman in the 20th and 21st centuries.  Remember Shanghai Girls? Remember how you didn’t want to let go of Pearl and May? See brings them back in Dreams of Joy, and moves the story forward to the late 1950’s, as young Joy leaves her mother Pearl in Los Angeles, and heads to China to find her father.  See’s China is daunting, frightening and thrilling all at once– with the spectre of Mao’s Cultural Revolution looming terrifyingly close.  Like other Lisa See novels, this is a story as much about relationships between mothers and daughters as it is one about individuals and their homeland.

 

Nina Revoyr, like Lisa See, studies the context of race in personal relationships, and the boundaries that race– and racism– establish. While Lisa’s focus is on Chinese Americans, Nina’s is on the sometimes uneasy contemporary  Japanese American experience.  Author of Southland and the magnificent and addictive novel The Age of Dreaming, Revoyr moves her new novel, Wingshooters, to rural Wisconsin, where a bigoted white grandfather fiercely protects his Japanese-American granddaughter from small town racists.  She is, quite simply, a wonderful writer.
At the MGM Building, 10250 Cosntellation Blvd., directly across the street from the Westfield Century City Shopping Center.  We suggest that you grab a drink and a bite at the shopping center, and walk directly across the street to the program.
Tickets, $20. Click here RSVP for this event at reservations@writersblocpresents.com, or writersblocpresents@gmail.com..