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    Biting the Hand: Growing Up Asian in Black and White America
    Biting the Hand: Growing Up Asian in Black and White America
    Biting the Hand: Growing Up Asian in Black and White America
    Audiobook7 hours

    Biting the Hand: Growing Up Asian in Black and White America

    Written by Julia Lee

    Narrated by Julia Lee

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    "Lee's narration of her brilliant memoir is penetrating with insight, raw with confessions, radiant with fury. Her meticulous writing is already stupendous, but the unguarded emotions that flow through her candid voice are a remarkable enhancement. Her tears of frustration and gratitude will surely prove contagious." - Booklist (starred review)

    "Lee's narration is powerful. She communicates all of her anger and frustration at the racism she experiences and sees around her. She shatters the idea that Asian Americans are the 'model minority', clearly laying out her points while also imbuing her performance with intense emotions that come from living in America's racist society." - AudioFile Magazine


    This program is read by the author.

    In the vein of Eloquent Rage and Minor Feelings—a passionate, no-holds-barred memoir about the Asian American experience in a nation defined by racial stratification

    When Julia Lee was fifteen, her hometown went up in smoke during the 1992 Los Angeles riots. The daughter of Korean immigrant store owners in a predominantly Black neighborhood, Julia was taught to be grateful for the privilege afforded to her. However, the acquittal of four white police officers in the beating of Rodney King, following the murder of Latasha Harlins by a Korean shopkeeper, forced Julia to question her racial identity and complicity. She was neither Black nor white. So who was she?

    This question would follow Julia for years to come, resurfacing as she traded in her tumultuous childhood for the white upper echelon of elite academia. It was only when she began a PhD in English that she found answers—not in the Brontës or Austen, as Julia had planned, but rather in the brilliant prose of writers like James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. Their works gave Julia the vocabulary and, more important, the permission to critically examine her own tortured position as an Asian American, setting off a powerful journey of racial reckoning, atonement, and self-discovery that has shaped her adult life.

    With prose by turns scathing and heart-wrenching, Julia Lee lays bare the complex disorientation and shame that stems from this country’s imposed racial hierarchy to argue that Asian Americans must leverage their liminality for lasting social change alongside Black and brown communities.

    A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt & Company.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Audio
    Release dateApr 18, 2023
    ISBN9781250882585
    Biting the Hand: Growing Up Asian in Black and White America
    Author

    Julia Lee

    Julia Lee is a Korean American writer, scholar, and teacher. She is the author of Our Gang: A Racial History of “The Little Rascals” and The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel, as well as the novel By the Book, which was published under the pen name Julia Sonneborn. She is an associate professor of English at Loyola Marymount University, where she teaches African American and Caribbean literature. She lives with her family in Los Angeles.

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    Reviews for Biting the Hand

    4.5/5

    19 ratings2 reviews

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    • 5/5
      I am an indigenous student from just withdrew from the Ph.D. program! I was going through some hectic moments! This book helped me a lot !
    • 1/5
      The author sounds like a horrible, horrible person who thinks that the world should revolve around her. She hates everybody white, but of course the white are the racists. Everything she is talking about, her struggles and so, EVERYONE has them, regardless of the skin color. If you don’t have money, life if tough. But of course she has to blame it on the white people and racism, bla, blah, blah.