The Four Words for Home - Softcover

Chuang, Angie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0989735745 ISBN 13: 9780989735742

Publisher: Aquarius Press/Willow Books, 2014

Synopsis

Literary Nonfiction. Asian & Asian American Studies. Middle Eastern Studies. Women's Studies. Angie Chuang takes on an assignment to "find the human face of the country we're about to bomb" weeks after the 2001 terrorist attacks. Her five-year journey into the lives of the Shirzai family transports her far beyond journalism. She travels to their homeland Afghanistan, and becomes intimately involved with the family's story of loss and triumph over war. As she is drawn ever deeper into the Shirzais's lives, Chuang confronts unknown territory closer to her own home. Her own immigrant family from Taiwan is falling apart. Mental illness, divorce, and deeply rooted cultural taboos have shattered her own family's American Dream. Ultimately, she finds the two families are more similar than she had imagined. It is in journeying far away from her own home and family that she is drawn back to discover her own roots—and to confront the hard truths and broken places that lie at the heart of so many stories of migration and intergenerational struggle.

About this title

About the Author

Angie Chuang is a literary nonfiction writer and educator based in Washington, D.C. She is the winner of the 2013 Willow Books Grand Prize in Prose. Angie was a Ragdale resident in 2012, where she finished her manuscript, and again in 2013. Her work has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, The Asian American Literary Review, and multiple editions of The Best Women's Travel Writing. She has also received fellowships and residencies from Yaddo, Hedgebrook, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Jentel, and others. She is on the Journalism faculty of the American University School of Communication.

Review

A journalist's search for the human face of a world at war becomes a compelling personal quest to find family in the hearts of strangers. --Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, Hiroshima in the Morning

This serious and lovely experiment from Angie Chuang deserves your attention. If you are serious about reading news about kinship, the rigors of family, the by-blows of war, the way to making peace piecemeal (the only way for most of us), this is a book you need. --Alan Cheuse, National Public Radio

Chuang takes us on a compelling journey where the discovery of identity and place reveals the complexity of family, belonging, and home. This intertwining of two stories captures the imagination and brings us to a new vision of the way borders blur and become fluid. --Pauline Kaldas, Letters from Cairo

About this edition

• Publisher: Aquarius Press/Willow Books
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0989735745
• ISBN 13: 9780989735742
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 268