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Young Men on the Move: 2 Stories of Migration, Race, and Class

Posted on May 17, 2021

Border, Tijuana, CA, USA. By Barbara Zandoval. Public domain.

"And to think I swore I’d stay out of trouble on this side of the world," reflects Liberio, the wry, profane teenage narrator of Aura Xilonen's prize-winning Mexican novel The Gringo Champion. Liberio, an undocumented migrant farm worker, has the honesty and desperation of J.D Salinger's Holden Caulfield, but without Holden's aura of privilege.

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5 Great Poems and Stories for AAPI Heritage Month

Posted on May 12, 2021

A poem about a film about a boy diver in the Philippines . . .
This month, the U.S. is celebrating Asian & Pacific Islander Heritage. Here are 5 short, engaging online readings to launch an exploration:
  1. A joyful thousand-year-old Chinese love poem
  2. A Korean YA story about two girls who grow close during a (fictional) pandemic
  3. A Filipino poem about an indigenous boy's cultural identity and its representation
  4. A Japanese story featuring a teenage "fake psychic"
  5. A Vietnamese poem that imagines the past and future lives of a discarded chair
Want more? Visit our large collections of short readings from Japan, China, and Korea (including new stories about love and fathers)!

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"Seeing" Translation

Posted on April 28, 2021

Open palm with a wooden image of an eye and the word "Yes." Photo by Jen Theodore on Unsplash.

There is one thing almost all the literature on this site has in common: it has been translated into English from another language.

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