II Form Reading List: Asia

Loung Ung, one of seven children of a high-ranking government official in Phnom Penh, tells of her experiences after her family was forced to flee from Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge army, discussing her training as a child soldier in a work camp for orphans, and telling of how her surviving siblings were eventually reunited. (2000)

Nobel Prize-winner Pearl S. Buck traces the whole cycle of life in this great modern classic depicting life in China before the vast political and social upheavals that transformed an essentially agrarian country into a world power--its terrors, its passions, its ambitions, and rewards. (1931)

Starting in 1972 when she is nine years old, Ling, the daughter of two doctors, struggles to make sense of the communists' Cultural Revolution, which empties stores of food, homes of appliances deemed "bourgeois," and people of laughter. (2007)

Tells the story of the author's struggles after being orphaned at the age of three and how he held on to his dream of coming to the United States as he passed from one relative to another and was even sold to a Communist couple. (2001)

This is a lively, funny, and moving account of a young Yale graduate's experiences teaching English, and learning everything else, in China. (1986)

Set in 19th-century China, See's national bestseller tells a story of two young women who find solace with each other, developing a bond that keeps their spirits alive. (2006)

The story of a peasant woman in India, married as a child bride to a tenant farmer, working with her husband to wrest a living from land ravaged by droughts, monsoons, and insects. (1955)

In 1974 when her father leaves New Delhi, India, to seek a job in New York, Ashi, a tomboy at the advanced age of sixteen, feels thwarted in the home of her extended family in Calcutta where she, her mother, and sister must stay, and when her father dies before he can send for them, they must remain with their relatives and observe the old-fashioned traditions that Ashi hates. (2009)

In India in the early 1900s, twelve-year-old Leela's happy, spoiled childhood ends when her husband since age nine, whom she barely knows, dies, leaving her a widow whose only hope of happiness could come from Mahatma Ghandi's social and political reforms.(2007)

The story of a dancer who sacrifices her friends and family for her art. (2001)

In India, in 1941, when her father becomes brain-damaged in a non-violent protest march, fifteen-year-old Vidya and her family are forced to move in with her father's extended family and become accustomed to a totally different way of life. (2008)

With national pride and occasional fear, a brother and sister face the increasingly oppressive occupation of Korea by Japan during World War II, which threatens to suppress Korean culture entirely. (2002)

When the monsoons destroy the crops on her family's Nepal farm, her stepfather arranges for her to leave their village to become a maid for a rich lady in the city. Instead Lakshmi is sold into a Calcutta brothel, facing unspeakable cruelty and horror, her memories of home all she has to help her endure. (2006)

A boy and his elephant escape into the jungle when the Viet Cong attack his village immediately after the Vietnam war.

After the fall of South Vietnam, fourteen-year-old Mai, a young Vietnamese girl of Chinese descent, is torn from a life of privilege and forced to flee across the South China Sea to an island off the coast of Malaysia. Mai ends up in a refugee camp, where her greedy relative, Small Auntie, offers her a place to stay. Mai endures the hardships of the camp, hoping to be sponsored by her uncle for entry into America. Mai is forced to leave Small Auntie's family, and she meets Kien, a half-American boy who could be the only person who can keep her alive until she's sent to the United States.