Four Foot Eleven and Rising Bich Minh Nguyen’s first novel is about two Vietnamese-American sisters trying to stand tall.
By Ed M. Koziarski

How’s Your Relationship With the Monkey God? When Cheeni Rao hit bottom, he turned to Hanuman.
By Anne Ford

Stranger in a Strange Language Ha Jin on what it means for an immigrant to write in the tongue of his adopted country.
By Julia Thiel

Plus: New books by Gillian Flynn, Chesa Boudin, and other local authors

The Author's Sister Chicagoan Catherine Cox reflects on The Sisters Antipodes, Jane Alison's memoir about their parents' mate swapping
Hot Type by Michael Miner

Race and Real Estate Redux A history of bloodsucking practices in Chicago's ghettos reads like today's news.
The Business by Deanna Isaacs

April 30, 2009

In 1953, a feature highlighting ethnic writers with Chicago connections and new books out would’ve had to include Saul Bellow. Thirty-eight years old at the time, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Bellow had just published his epic about a guy not unlike himself, coming of age in Depression-era Chicago, The Adventures of Augie March.

The flood of eastern Europeans that gave us Bellow hasn’t quite exhausted itself yet. Bosnian-Chicagoan Aleksandar Hemon, for one, has just come out with a new collection of short stories that’s reviewed in this issue. But the really big waves are arriving from elsewhere now, and the biggest in terms of percentage increase (based on 2005 census figures) is from Asia. Indeed, given not only the community’s growing numbers but its success—and the consequent pressures of assimilation—Asian America is having a Bellow moment.

Consider the writers profiled here. Bich Minh Nguyen came to the U.S. as a baby after the fall of Saigon in 1975, and grew up in white-bread Michigan. The author of a 2007 memoir, Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, she’s about to publish Short Girls, a novel that locates the otherness of two Vietnamese-American sisters in their height. Trying to maintain his image as a nice Indian-American boy from the western suburbs came close to destroying Cheeni Rao: his new memoir, In Hanuman’s Hands, follows his descent into crime and addiction and his recovery with the moral support of a Hindu deity. Older than Nguyen and Rao at 53, Ha Jin was already an adult when he came to the United States to study for a PhD, but his collection of essays from the University of Chicago Press, The Writer as Migrant, explores the dilemma of dual identity that Rao and Nguyen confront in their lives and art. —Tony Adler

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