Refugee/Immigrant Memoir
Here are some suggestions for your 2024 Book Bingo NW category: Refugee/Immigrant Memoir. Book Bingo is our annual adult summer reading program presented in partnership with Seattle Arts & Lectures. Annotations with attribution. GN=Graphic Novel
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Almost Brown
Almost Brown is an exploration of diasporic intermingling involving two eccentric parents from worlds apart and their half-brown children as they experience the paradoxes and conundrums of life as it’s lived between race checkboxes. (Publisher)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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The Best We Could Do
GN. Spanning her own experience as well as that of her parents in the French-occupied and ultimately war-torn country, this oral retelling takes readers down the path of three generations, presenting a firsthand glimpse into the history of Vietnam. (Library Journal)
Format: Graphic Novel
Availability: Available
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I Was Their American Dream
GN. Malaka Gharib's triumphant graphic memoir brings to life her teenage antics and illuminates earnest questions about identity and culture, while providing thoughtful insight into the lives of modern immigrants and the generation of millennial children they raised. (Publisher)
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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Children of the Land
Castillo recounts his and his family's encounters with a system that treats them as criminals for seeking safe, ordinary lives and…the decade that he spent waiting to return to his wife and children only to be denied reentry. (Publisher)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Stay True
When he was a student at Berkeley in the 1990s, New Yorker writer and Vassar professor Hsu lost his friend Ken to a senseless act of violence. Exploring identity, authenticity, and nostalgia as concepts and as feelings, this is an absolute stunner. (Booklist)
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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Feeding Ghosts
GN. Hulls's epic, elegantly etched graphic memoir debut tangles with trauma's long tentacles as she follows three generations of her family from Mao's China to Hong Kong in the 1960s and eventually to contemporary Northern California. (Publishers Weekly)
Format: Graphic Novel
Availability: All copies in use
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Ink Knows No Borders
YA. With authenticity, integrity, and insight, this collection of poems addresses the many issues confronting first- and second- generation young adult immigrants and refugees, such as cultural and language differences, homesickness, social exclusion, human rights, racism, stereotyping, and questions of identity. (Publisher)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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We Were Dreamers
Liu's memoir begins with a fateful call: he will be playing the first Asian superhero lead Marvel's Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. From there, he looks back and recounts how his life led to that point, beginning in China, where his parents came of age during the Cultural Revolution and fell in love. (Booklist)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Dispatches From Puerto Nowhere
Through family recollection, the constant banter volleyed across nets within Brooklyn's diverse tennis community…Robert Lopez paints a compassionate portrait of family that attempts to bridge the past to the present, and re-claim a heritage threatened by assimilation and erasure. (Publisher)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Defiant Dreams
A searing, deeply personal memoir of a tenacious Afghan girl who educated herself behind closed doors and fought her way to a new life. (Publisher)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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