Welcome to AsiaBookCenter! Your source for Asian American literature, Asian studies, Ethnic Studies, language learning, traditional Chinese medicine and martial arts books.
This online website is operated by Eastwind Books of Berkeley which has been serving the reading public since 1982. Individual and institutional special orders are welcomed. If you cannot locate a title on our database, please fill out the contact form on the left and let us know what titles you need.
Store Hours: 11-6 PM Monday through Saturdays, Sundays 12noon-5PM. Pacific Time.
Upcoming Readings At Eastwind Books:
Maggie Gee Reading: Sky High: The True Story of Maggie Gee
Sunday, April 18th, 3:00 PM
Highlighting the stories of three generations of Chinese American women, this inspirational tale beautifully demonstrates that determination and bravery are not bound by race or gender. Readers will be captivated by Maggie Gee, a real girl who refused to let obstacles stand in the way of her dreams. Author’s note includes photos of Maggie Gee then and now, as well as background on the U.S. Air Force during WWII.
Ed Lin Reading: Snakes Can't Run
Friday, April 30th, 7:00 PM
Set in New York City in the mid 70's, Ed Lin's new novel, Snakes Can’t Run, is a sequel to 2007's This is a Bust, again starring Chinese-American NYPD detective Robert Chow. These days, Chow finds himself cut off from the action as he works undercover while the rest of his department handles a major investigation. When a double murder surfaces in Chinatown, Chow gets his chance to track down a criminal kingpin who has been smuggling humans.
Peter Bacho Reading: Leaving Yesler
Saturday, May 1st, 3:00 PM
Leaving Yesler encounters seventeen year-old Bobby Vicente in the wake of his older brother’s military death; faced with the challenge of caring for his aging father, this young man from urban Seattle’s housing projects is forced to take control of his life and identity as he traverses a period of life-altering change marked by new interests, new challenges, and ultimately, new life.
Peter Bacho explores themes of belief/disbelief, arrival/departure, and love/violence, through which he achieves a portrait of embodied strength in his protagonist. Bobby Vicente is sensitive, faithful, and determined not to be defined or limited by anyone other than himself. Out of Bobby's sexual and emotional growth emerges a great capacity for forgiveness, a penchant for cooking, and a deep commitment to family.
Karen Yamashita Reading: I Hotel
Saturday, May 8th, 3:00 PM
Dazzling and ambitious, this hip, multi-voiced fusion of prose, playwriting, graphic art, and philosophy spins an epic tale of America’s struggle for civil rights as it played out in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Divided into ten novellas, one for each year, I Hotel begins in 1968, when Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, students took to the streets, the Vietnam War raged, and cities burned.
As Karen Yamashita’s motley cast of students, laborers, artists, revolutionaries, and provocateurs make their way through the history of the day, they become caught in a riptide of politics and passion, clashing ideologies and personal turmoil. And by the time the survivors unite to save the International Hotel—epicenter of the Yellow Power Movement—their stories have come to define the very heart of the American experience.
STAND UP: An Archive Collection of the Bay Area Asian American Movement, 1968-1974 Asian Community Center Archive Group.
Stand Up chronicles the beginning of the Bay Area Asian American movement through an unprecedented collection of period newspaper articles, documents, and photographs. From the Third World Liberation Front student strikes at San Francisco State College and University of California Berkeley campuses, to the formation of the Asian American Political Alliance, this book traces the origins of student concerns and follows the movement into the Asian American communities, by focusing on the International Hotel tenants fight against eviction and the formation of the Asian Community Center in San Francisco Chinatown-Manilatown.
"The Asian American Movement of the 1960s-70s has been largely ignored by those who have researched and written about the civil rights and social justice movements of those turbulent decades. Asian Community Center Archive Group has done an excellent job of compiling the key documents that give us a historical overview of the issues and organizations that contributed to the emergence of the Asian American Movement. Most importantly, it will be an important organizational tool for today's activists in their efforts to educate youth in their communities about the historic role Asian Americans have played in our nation's history of struggles for racial/ethnicand social justice."
(Carlos Muñoz, Jr., author of "Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement")
ISBN 978-0-615-27903-9 Price $20. 222 pages. 8.5 x11 inches. Trade paperback. Publisher: Eastwind Books of Berkeley.
How do we survive our family, stay bound to our community, and keep from losing ourselves? In All That Work and Still No Boys, Kathryn Ma exposes the deepest fears and longings that we mask in family life and observes the long shadows cast by history and displacement. Here are ten stories that wound and satisfy in equal measure. Ma probes the immigrant experience, most particularly among northern California’s Chinese Americans, illuminating for us the confounding nature of duty, transformation, and loss. Intimate in detail and universal in theme, these stories give us the compelling voice of an exciting new author whose intelligence, insight, and wit impart a sense of grace to the bitter resentments and enduring ties that comprise family love. Even through the tensions Ma creates so deftly, the peace and security that come from building and belonging to one’s own community shine forth.
Price: $16.00
Three Kingdoms Vol. 1 (Unabridged)
"Three Kingdoms" gives us the Iliad of China. The first of the five great works of traditional prose fiction, this master narrative transforms history into epic and has thereby educated and entertained readers of five centuries with unforgettable exemplars of martial and civic virtue, of personal fidelity and political treachery.
Year of the Tiger:Tales from the Chinese Zodiac by Oliver Chin.
Oliver Chin has continued his entertaining stories of the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac with another story that teaches both Eastern and Western values to children. Courage, friendship, and personal growth are all displayed in this story of a young tiger learning his place in the jungle and among humans.
