American Eyes: New Asian-American Short Stories for Young Adults by Lori M. Carlson

ISBN-10: 0449704483
Pages: 160
Published: 1995

From Publishers Weekly

"There is no subject that is off-limits for an Asian writer, just as there is no subject that is off-limits to a writer of any race," writes Cynthia Kadohata in her hard-hitting introduction to this anthology. The 10 stories here, strikingly diverse in both form and content, prove her point. "Fortune Teller," by Nguyen Duc Minh, for example, affectingly measures the pain and frustration of an adolescent crush by examining the experiences of a Vietnamese American boy whose father has only recently returned from seven years in a "reeducation" camp. And in Kadohata's "Singing Apples," the 12-year-old daughter of migrant workers in California conveys the persistent meanness of her grandmother, as well as the guilt the grandmother inculcates in her. An absorbing excerpt from Fae Myenne Ng's novel Bone, set in San Francisco's Chinatown, focuses on characters struggling to make it financially and emotionally in a fragmented world where trust is dangerous. While common concerns-such as home, American pop culture and generational difference-link the themes of these stories, the volume as a whole celebrates differences and the beautifully multiple variables of American life. Ages 12-up.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From School Library Journal

Grade 7 Up?Home?what does it mean to Asian-American adolescents growing up in a country that often regards them as aliens? This intriguing collection of short stories presents answers as individual as each writer's voice?answers that transcend the color of skin, hair, and eyes?and speak to the human heart. The search for identity sometimes leads back to Asian roots: in one selection, an adoptee journeys to her native Korea to find her biological parents. For others, the battle takes place on the home front. In the darkly funny, surreal, and painful "Knuckles," a Chinese-American girl stubbornly refuses to eat her mother's ethnic cooking. (You don't need to be Chinese to understand the issues of control and self-destruction depicted here.) Immigrants from Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines tell their stories as well, and each selection is firmly anchored in a particular time and place. This collection surpasses Laurence Yep's American Dragons (HarperCollins, 1993) in the uniformly excellent quality of its writing, the acuteness of characterization, and the sophistication of its themes. American Eyes crackles and burns, warms and illuminates.?Margaret A. Chang, North Adams State College, MA
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

What I would do with this in a classroom
This is a book of short stories, which would switch it up for my students. Maybe we could read one every other day. It would be an interesting unit, and one I feel that isn't covered very often. There is some great poetry and short story out there by Asian-Americans.