Fiction. Asian Studies. BUTTERFLY TEARS is a collection of seventeen pieces of short fiction that depict the experiences of Chinese immigrant women facing the challenges of life in a new country. The stories are set in different parts of China, Canada, and to a lesser extent in the United States and examine Chinese women's cross-cultural experiences in North America as well as women's issues and political discrimination in China. The stories, or parts of stories, set in China give the reader interesting glimpses into events such as the cultural revolution and Mao's death.The immigrant experience, the predominant theme, encompasses a number of aspects ranging from issues such as language and food to education. Feminism and changing male/female relationships form another important theme that also runs through many of the stories.

Fiction. Asian American Studies. THE LONG ROAD HOME is the story of three generations of women, beginning with a grandmother who as a young woman went to China as a Canadian missionary nurse and fell in love with a Chinese medical student acting as her interpreter. Shortly after anti-western sentiment sends her home to Nova Scotia, she discovers she is pregnant. Attempts by her, and later their daughter, to contact him fail. Her daughter, Meihua, goes to China to look for her father and winds up marrying a Chinese man and teaching art. The cultural revolution sees her sent to prison as a American spy and anti-revolutionary, and her husband confined to a gulag. Their children, still at home, are raised by the family's illiterate servant, Yao. Yao's crude manner and resourcefulness partly shield Yezi, Meihua's daughter, and the novel's main character, as well as her brother, from family tragedy, poverty and political discrimination, negotiating their survival during the revolution that she barely understands. Only after her mother is released, does Yezi learns about her foreign grandmother, Agnes, who now lives in Boston and has lost contact with the family since Yezi's birth. Curious about her American ancestry, Yezi decides to join her grandmother in the U.S. Reading her grandmother's diaries helps Yezi get to know her grandmother as a young Canadian missionary and her life in China with the man who is her grandfather, and who her mother still longs to find.