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ISBN:9780615182988 Author: Foo, Lora Jo
Year: 2008 Place: San Francisco
Edition: First Edition
Binding: Hardcover Condition: New Special Events: See below for book tour schedule beginning July 12th. The author's photography is also available through this website. Description: A book of Chinese American stories as told through narrative and color photography. Consisting of 28 vignettes and 53 color nature photographs, Earth Passages tells the author's story, the story of a girl born and raised in family of eight in the inner city ghetto of San Francisco's Chinatown where her mother worked six days a week, twelve hours a day in a garment sweatshop. In the girl's rare escapes into the woods she discovers a magical world so unlike the ghetto in which she lives. The stories from childhood are paired with color nature photographs taken by the author as an adult. The photographs capture the emotional weight of growing up in the barrenness of a ghetto. They are also images of mother nature giving the girl what she did not receive from her overworked mother--the folds of the earth that cradle, the caressing of boulders and trees, and the warm embrace of early morning and late afternoon sunlight. About the Author: Lora Jo Foo is author of Asian American Women: Issues, Concerns, and Responsive Human and Civil Rights Advocacy, recently published by the Ford Foundation. From the age of 11, Lora worked as a garment worker in San Francisco’s Chinatown. She is an accomplished attorney and advocate for worker rights, and is also a nature photographer. She will be promoting Earth Passages beginning with a book launch July 12, 2008 at Eastwind Books of Berkeley. Time of event is 3:30pm. Her photography will also be available for sale at Eastwind Books of Berkeley EARTH PASSAGES 2008 READINGS California:
| March 21, 2009 2:30 pm
| Chinatown Branch, San Francisco Public Library Lower Auditorium 1135 Powell Street @ Washington San Francisco, CA 94108
| | April 2, 2009 7:00 pm
| Asian Pacific Islander Sisterhood Alliance Mills College Student Union 5000 McArthur Blvd.
Oakland, CA 94613 | Other States: May 4th, 2009 3:30 pm
| Women's Center Conference Room - Cunningham Hall University of Washington Seattle, WA
| What people are saying: Earth Passages gives readers tantalizing glimpses into Lora Jo Foo's memories of childhood and especially of her mother, whom she can forgive after she is able to describe the pain in expressive vignettes and attempt to heal it with images of nature that she captures with the eyes and heart of an artist: sensuous rock formations, snow-capped mountain tops, misty seascapes, and especially trees, their gnarled trunks and lacy branches seeming to offer support and even a loving embrace. Elaine Kim, Professor. University of California, Berkeley ********** "Lora Jo Foo's stories are touching, painful and deeply honest. She gives us a window into life behind the restaurants and souvenir shops of Chinatown and shows us the healing process that nature provides. It's the kind of book that takes a lifetime to write." Wendy Tokuda, Journalist **********
"In classical China, artists-literati often inscribed a poem directly onto a prized landscape painting. In modern times, one of the mantras that help poor and working class children keep on keeping on is, "The grass always grows through the concrete. Lora Jo Foo's achingly beautiful photographs of raw nature are similarly inscribed with highly personal and poetic sketches of her childhood in San Francisco's Chinatown. Like myself, Lora too lived in the "Pings," those government housing projects embedded smack dab in the middle of our Jim Crow created community. "Grass always grows through the concrete," and her vignettes do not shirk from the concrete harshness she faced time and again, and that at times may have buried her spirit. But it didn't and so Lora has not only sprouted through, but as flowered and flowered again, as an activist, a labor lawyer, and now too, as an artist and published writer. William Poy Lee, Author of the critically acclaimed memoir, THE EIGHTH PROMISE: An American Son Pays Tribute to His Toisanese Mother. TheEighthPromise.com **********
The book juxtaposes distilled memories of growing up in San Francisco's gritty Chinatown with breathtaking photographs of her forays into the beauty and safety of nature. Leonore Simon, Professor. East Tennessee State University ********** The vignettes of childhood and nature photos operate with a similar economy and profound emotion – spare snapshots of growing up poor in a urban ghetto; intimate, knowing images of desert and rainforest, stone and seashore, trees and water... landscapes very much informed by the path taken to get there. Linda Li, artist. San Francisco
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