Chinese American Museum of Chicago

By John Rohsenow

This Chinese-English dictionary of proverbs (yanyu) consists of approximately 4,000 Chinese proverbs alphabetically arranged by the first word(s) (ci) of the proverb according to the Hanyu Pinyin transcription and Chinese characters (standard simplified), followed by a literal (and when necessary also a figurative) English translation. Additional data such as brief usage notes, sources, parallel expressions, cross-references, and famous instances of use are provided where available. The proverbs are supplemented by an index of key words (both Chinese and English) found in all entries and of all topics addressed. The author has provided a scholarly introduction analyzing the definition, structure, usage, and history of these yanyu in traditional and contemporary China as well as a bibliography of collections and relevant scholarly studies of yanyu.

This work, the first such scholarly collection to appear since the Reverend Scarborough’s 1926 collection, will be of use not only to sinologists in a wide variety of fields, including anthropology, literature, sociology, psychology, and history, but also to non-Chinese readers interested in Chinese culture or comparative ethnolinguistic and paremiological research.

Author: John S. Rohsenow
Publisher: University of Hawai’i Press
Year: February 28, 2003
Pages: 176
Dimensions: 6.3 x 0.61 x 9.26 inches
Cover: Paperback
Language: English

By Muchen Wang & Mari Miller

How do you live with grief?

Artist Muchen Wang mulls over everyday moments, chews on messy memories, obsesses about clouds, and finds peace in grieving her dog Xueli through multiple art forms, from oil paintings to jewelry.

By grieving as imperfect human beings, we can honor our humanity, keep in touch with the versions of ourselves that our loved ones cherished, and find balance in life.

Artist: Muchen Wang
Curator: Mari Miller
Publisher: The Beautiful Cat
Year: 2025
Pages: 20
Dimensions: 8.5” × 5.5”
Cover: Paperback
Language: Chinese, English

By Wayne Hung Wong

In the early and mid-twentieth century, Chinese migrants evaded draconian anti-immigrant laws by entering the US under false papers that identified them as the sons of people who had returned to China to marry. Wayne Hung Wong tells the story of his life after emigrating to Wichita, Kansas, as a thirteen-year-old paper son. After working in his father’s restaurant as a teen, Wong served in an all-Chinese Air Force unit stationed in China during World War II. His account traces the impact of race and segregation on his service experience and follows his postwar life from finding a wife in Taishan through his involvement in the government’s amnesty program for Chinese immigrants and career in real estate. Throughout, Wong describes the realities of life as part of a small Chinese American community in a midwestern town.

Author: Wayne Hung Wong
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Year: 2006
Pages: 192
Dimensions: 5.5” x 8.25”
Cover: Paperback
ISBN: 978-0-252-07263-5
Language: English

By He Bian

Know Your Remedies presents a panoramic inquiry into China’s early modern cultural transformation through the lens of pharmacy. In the history of science and civilization in China, pharmacy—as a commercial enterprise and as a branch of classical medicine—resists easy characterization. While China’s long tradition of documenting the natural world through state-commissioned pharmacopeias, known as bencao, dwindled after the sixteenth century, the ubiquitous presence of Chinese pharmacy shops around the world today testifies to the vitality of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Rejecting narratives of intellectual stagnation or an unchanging folk culture, He Bian argues that pharmacy’s history in early modern China can best be understood as a dynamic interplay between elite and popular culture.

Author: He Bian
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Year: 2022
Pages: 264
Dimensions: 6.13” x 9.25”
Cover: Paperback
ISBN: 9780691200132
Language: English

Color: Light blue
Size: 12” x 13”
Material: Canvas

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Discussions and attempts to understand often struggle to escape the limitations of human centrism. Trapped in a persistent ethical dilemma, we find it difficult to navigate the unequal power dynamics that confine us. As the urgency of environmental and ecological issues intensifies, a question repeatedly emerges: Is it possible for us to construct a relatively equal multi-species world? Can we, with greater humility and introspection, relearn how to coexist with the Others? This fourth issue does not offer answers; instead, it comprises reflections and imaginations, as most contributors have long-standing experiences with or ongoing research on non-human animals. Through observation, education, painting, writing, and image-making, they seek to loosen the existing “ethical relationships” and “orderly rules.” Returning to the interior of the body, each vertebra of the spine accumulates traces of human transitions and memories that have yet to dissipate. However, the spine has never fully completed its evolution; its flaws are evident, and the hidden pain it causes always accompanies the body. Perhaps it is this persistent pain that continually reminds us that suffering, which may seem unrelated to us, can be perceived anew from the fissure of spines. By stepping into the bodies of Others, to feel and acknowledge them, a slow exchange occurs that reopens our imagination and generates a relationship that has yet to be named.

Publisher: te editions
Year: 2026
Pages: 172
Dimensions: 7.28” x 10.23”
Cover: Paperback
ISBN-13: 979-8-9890170-5-8
Language: Chinese, English

By Kanthy Peng

Kanthy Peng’s debut artist book, Ground Sea, weaves a visual narrative exploring depression, memory, and loss through 73 photographs.

In Ground Sea, Peng re-orchestrates photographs spanning over a decade and multiple projects into a new diptych-structured work. The first part, Sunset Watchers, unfolds through black-and-white portraits of three women reenacting a phantom folktale following the 1896 tsunami in Japan—images that also allude to the anxious premonition of those living with depression. Interspersed colored photographs recall Peng’s bodily memory of being bedridden due to illness. The second part, Kuāfù Chases The Sun, carries stills from two video works about Peng’s father, who retired from the People’s Liberation Army ten years after his daughter left home. In these images, his body is constantly propelled forward by the cogs of a system, breaking the stagnation of the first part, only to fall into nothingness ultimately.

Author: Kanthy Peng
Poet: Geng Yao
Designer: Muxi Gao, Company Per Form
Publisher: te editions
Year: 2025
Pages: 176
Dimensions: 8” x 10.62”
Cover: Paperback
ISB-13: ISBN 979-8-9890170-4-1
Language: Chinese, English

By Kristin T. Lee

Being a Christian has nothing to do with being Chinese American--that's what Kristin T. Lee learned as a child. A fissure between her identity and what she was told to believe opened wide. In We Mend with Gold, she asks: What if we can bridge the divide?

Author: Kristin T. Lee
Publisher: Broadleaf Books
Year: 2026
Pages: 251
Dimensions: 5.71” x 8.66”
Cover: Paperback
ISBN-13: 979-8889835028
Language: English

By Hua Hsu

In the eyes of eighteen-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken—with his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity—is that he is exactly like everyone else. Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream; for Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, who makes ’zines and haunts Bay Area record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to. The only thing Hua and Ken have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn’t seem to have a place for either of them.

But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become friends, a friendship built on late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet.

Determined to hold on to all that was left of one of his closest friends—his memories—Hua turned to writing. Stay True is the book he’s been working on ever since. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.

Author: Hua Hsu
Publisher: Vintage Books
Year: 2023
Pages: 208
Dimensions: 5” x 8”
Cover: Paperback
ISBN: 9780593315200
Language: English

By Thomas Xavier Sarmiento

Examining Filipinx cultural representations in the Midwest since the early twentieth century, Thomas Sarmiento shrewdly considers the impact of American exceptionalism and U.S. imperialism in a region where white, middle class, heterosexual, and Christian is the norm. The Heartland of U.S. Empire offers a cogent analysis of the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair and its infamous Philippine Exhibit alongside minor museum displays and archives of Midwesterners in the Philippines. Sarmiento also considers the “exile literature” of Filipino/American writer Bienvenido Santos as well as the TV shows Glee and Superstore, which provide mainstream visibility of the queer Filipinx Midwest.

Author: Thomas Xavier Sarmiento
Publisher: Temple University Press
Year: 2026
Pages: 290
Dimensions: 6” x 9”
Cover: Paperback
ISBN-10: 1439927677
ISBN-13: 978-1439927670
Language: English

By Jeff Chang

Water Mirror Echo—a title inspired by Bruce Lee’s own way of moving, being and responding to the world—is a page-turning and powerful reminder. At the helm is Jeff Chang, the award-winning author of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, whose writing on culture, politics, the arts and music have made him one of the most acclaimed and distinctive voices of our time. In his hands, Bruce Lee’s story brims with authenticity.

Now, based on in-depth interviews with Lee’s closest intimates, thousands of newly available personal documents, and featuring dozens of gorgeous photographs from the family’s archive, Chang achieves the nearly impossible. He reveals the man behind the enduring iconography and stirringly shows Lee’s growing fame ushering in something that’s turned out to be even more enduring: the creation of Asian America.

Author: Jeff Chang
Publisher: Mariner Books
Year: 2025
Pages: 560
Dimensions: 6” x 9”
Cover: Hardcover
ISBN-10: 0358726476
ISBN-13: 978-0358726470
Language: English

By Monica Mong Trieu

In Fighting Invisibility, Monica Mong Trieu argues that we must consider the role of physical and symbolic space to fully understand the nuances of Asian American racialization. By doing this, we face questions such as, historically, who has represented Asian America? Who gets to represent Asian America? This book shifts the primary focus to Midwest Asian America to disrupt—and expand beyond—the existing privileged narratives in United States and Asian American history.

Author: Monica Mong Trieu
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Year: 2023
Pages: 184
Dimensions: 6” x 9”
Cover: Paperback
ISBN-10: 1978834284
ISBN-13: 978-1978834286
Language: English

By Corky Lee

Corky Lee’s Asian America traces Lee’s decades-long quest for photographic justice, following Asian American social movements for recognition and rights alongside his artistic development as an activist social photographer. Iconic photographs feature protests against police brutality in New York in the 1970s, a Sikh man draped in an American flag after 9/11, and a reenactment of the completion of the transcontinental railroad of 1869 featuring descendants of Chinese railroad workers, and his last photos of community life and struggle during the coronavirus pandemic. Asian American writers, artists, activists, and friends of Lee reflect on his life and career and provide rich historical and cultural context to his photographs, including a foreword from writer Hua Hsu and contributions from artist Ai Weiwei, filmmaker Renée Tajima-Peña, writer Helen Zia, photographer Alan Chin, historian Gordon Chang, playwright David Henry Hwang, and more.

Author: Corky Lee
Editors: Chee Wang Ng & Mae Ngai
Year: 2024
Pages: 320
Dimensions: 9” x 10”
Cover: Hardcover
ISBN: 9780593580127
Language: English

By Chuimei Hou & Raymond B. Lee

Growing Up in Chicago’s Chinatown: The Stories of Raymond Lee honors Raymond Lee’s contributions to the community and to the Chinese American Museum of Chicago. This first-person memoir gives an insider’s recounting of the history of Chicago Chinatown.

This book is written in Chinese.

Author: Chuimei Hou & Raymond B. Lee
Publisher: The Chinese American Museum of Chicago - Raymond B. & Jean T. Lee Center
Year: 2023
ISBN: 978-7-5113-9154-4