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Spotlight on Erika Lee, Chinese Couplets Screening Panelist

Chinese Couplets is Now Showing @ ALA
Sunday, June 26, 2016 @ 10:30 a.m.
Location: Film Screening Area

 

Join us for the APALA sponsored screening of the film “Chinese Couplets” as part of Now Showing @ ALA Annual Conference. The film will be followed by a Q&A and panel discussion that includes:

  • Felicia Lowe, EMMY winning filmmaker,
  • Erika Lee, Director of the Immigration History Research Center and the Rudolph J. Vecoli Chair in Immigration History at the University of Minnesota,
  • Melissa I. Cardenas-Dow, Reference Librarian, University of California, Riverside, and
  • Gary Colmenar, Librarian, University of California, Santa Barbara, who will be moderating.

“Chinese Couplets” is part memoir, part history, and part investigation of the filmmaker’s search for answers about her mother’s emigration to America during the Chinese Exclusion era.  The film reveals the often painful price paid by immigrants who abandoned their personal identity, the burden of silence they passed on to their offspring, and the intergenerational strife between immigrants and their American born children.

 

Featured Panelist: Erika Lee

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One of the nation’s leading immigration and Asian American historians, Erika Lee teaches American history at the University of Minnesota, where she holds the Rudolph J. Vecoli Chair in Immigration History, is Director of the Immigration History Research Center, and is a Distinguished McKnight University Professor. The granddaughter of Chinese immigrants who entered the United States through both Angel Island and Ellis Island. She grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and received her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley.

 

She is the author of three award-winning books in U.S. immigration and Asian American history: At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943, Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America (co-authored with Judy Yung), which won the 2010 Asian Pacific American Award for Literature from the American Library Association, and most recently, The Making of Asian America: A History. Called “sweeping” and “comprehensive” by the New York Times and a “long overdue stirring chronicle” by Pulitzer-prize winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Making of Asian America has just received the 2015 Asian Pacific American Award for Literature from the American Library Association.

 


To learn more about APALA @ Annual, visit www.apalaweb.org