Twice as Nice

Authors Ira Sukrungruang and Kao Kalia Yang visit Magers & Quinn Booksellers to discuss what it means to be Asian in America--Wednesday, August 4, at 7:30pm.

Talk Thai is the story of a first generation Thai-American growing up in a Thai family, and his constant attempts to reconcile cultural and familial expectations. It is a first-generation Asian American story, a mama’s boy story, a Chi-town Southsider story, a child of the 80s story, a child of a broken home story.

Ira Sukrungruang is a Thai American writer born in 1976 in Oak Lawn, Illinois, a suburb just south of Chicago. He now teaches in the MFA program at University of South Florida. Sukrungruang is the author, with his good friend Donna Jarrell, of What Are You Looking At? The First Fat Fiction Anthology and Scoot Over, Skinny: The Fat Nonfiction Anthology. Visit him online at www.sukrungruang.com.

When she was six years old, Kao Kalia Yang’s family immigrated to America.Her memoir The Latehomecomer evocatively captures the challenges of adapting to a new place and a new language. Through her words, the dreams, wisdom, and traditions passed down from her grandmother and shared by the entire Homng community have finally found a voice. The Latehomecomer won the 2009 Minnesota Book Awards Readers' Choice Award.

Together with her sister, Kao Kalia Yang is the founder of a company dedicated to helping immigrants with writing, translating, and business services. A graduate of Carleton College and Columbia University, Yang has recently screened The Place Where We Were Born, a film documenting the experiences of Hmong American refugees. Visit her website at www.kaokaliayang.com.

Details are here.--David E