The Asian American Literary Review
The Asian American Literary Review is a space for writers who consider the designation “Asian American” a fruitful starting point for artistic vision and community. In showcasing the work of established and emerging writers, the journal aims to incubate dialogues and, just as importantly, open those dialogues to regional, national, and international audiences of all constituencies. It selects work that is, as Marianne Moore once put it, “an expression of our needs…[and] feeling, modified by the writer’s moral and technical insights.”
Published biannually, AALR features fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, comic art, interviews, and book reviews. Discover Nikkei will feature selected stories from their issues.
Visit their website for more information and to subscribe to the publication: www.asianamericanliteraryreview.org
Stories from this series
Instructions to All Persons of Muslim Ancestry
Feb. 13, 2011 • Tyrone Nagai
WESTERN DEFENSE COMMAND AND FOURTH ARMY WARTIME CIVIL CONTROL ADMINISTRATION Presidio of San Francisco, California May 16, 2012 INSTRUCTIONS TO ALL PERSONS OF MUSLIM ANCESTRY Living in the Following Area: All that portion of the County of King, State of Washington, within that boundary beginning at a point about midway between the Cities of Tacoma and Seattle (east of Des Moines) at which U. S. Highway 99 intersects Washington State Highway No. 5A; thence easterly along said Highway No. 5A …
From Gently to Nagasaki - Part 3
Jan. 23, 2011 • Joy Kogawa
Read Part 2 >> The word “rape,” the word “murder,” the word “horror,” the word “atrocity,” the word “massacre,” none can adequately describe ‘that for which there is no word.’ Minnie Vautrin and Iris Chang were both, in the end, swallowed up in the quick sand. Iris Chang, a young woman of thirty-six committed suicide in 2004, driving away from home at 3:00 a.m. with a revolver, leaving a two-year-old son and a husband. I am told by a friend …
From Gently to Nagasaki - Part 2
Jan. 16, 2011 • Joy Kogawa
Read Part 1 >>Where, dear Goddess, on the arid landscape of the battle of words, does caring lurk? How, dear Cherry Tree, can we come to the place of caring? Is it in the flight of the wisp through curtains of stone words? It is, she tells me in the spaces between words and stones, in the spaces within sound and no sound. Caring comes to walk with us in the cracks of the day and the night, as we …
From Gently to Nagasaki - Part 1
Jan. 9, 2011 • Joy Kogawa
Marjorie Chan and I sat in the teal blue armchairs in my apartment nibbling rice crackers and sipping green tea. I’d seen her harrowing play, A Nanking Winter, a few months earlier. It addressed one of the roots of the ongoing animosity between China and Japan—the deep historical traumas of Nanking, 1937. When we began the conversation, we were simply two writers, one young, one old, one of Chinese ancestry, one of Japanese, and from our great distance of time …
The Orient Express - Part 2
May 16, 2010 • David Mura
>>> Read Part 1Why am I here? That’s a good question. I could say it’s the conference I’m attending, the one for H.R.s and diversity management, a few credits that might provide my stalled academic career with a few more options. Or I could say I needed to get out of Chi-town for a while, haven’t had a break like this from the family and missus for, well, I can’t really remember. I’m a good J.A. boy, someone had to …
The Orient Express - Part 1
May 9, 2010 • David Mura
It’s the middle of the desert, and I’m surrounded by a lush and verdant rainforest, a jungle unlike any on earth. Palm trees tower above me. At my feet a lagoon meanders through the orchids and bromeliads and birds of paradise. The crash of a waterfall, cascading with furious force. Mist drifts through like a swirling visible breeze, condensing on a rainbow of tropical flowers. Above me spires a hundred foot high Plexiglas dome, the type of pod our forebears …