On May 30 at 3:30 p.m., the Berkeley Lab community is invited to join members of the Asian Pacific Islander Employee Resource Group to discuss questions raised by R.F. Kuang’s novel “Yellowface” about a writer who creates a fictional persona named Juniper Song, misrepresents the persona as Asian American then steals a friend’s novel as her own. Participants are asked to read the book in advance of the discussion. 

The “My Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander Experience” panel is a multicultural panel of employees from Lawrence Livermore, Sandia and Lawrence Berkeley national laboratories, who will share stories from their and their family’s journeys to and within the United States, as well as the experiences that helped shape who they are today.

Recommend registration ahead of time.

API ERG had a special lunchtime talk featuring Grace Loh Prasad, author of the The Translator's Daughter, a memoir about living between languages, navigating loss, and the search for belonging.  Prasad gave a brief presentation and reading from her memoir, followed by a Q&A and book signing. The APIERG provided Asian snacks for this special event.

More about Grace Loh Prasad and The Translator's Daughter:

Born in Taiwan, Grace Loh Prasad was two years old when the threat of political persecution under Chiang Kai-shek’s dictatorship drove her family to the United States, setting her up to become an “accidental immigrant.” The family did not know when they would be able to go home again; this exile lasted long enough for Prasad to forget her native Taiwanese language and grow up American. Having multilingual parents—including a father who worked as a translator—meant she never had to develop the fluency to navigate Taiwan on visits. But when her parents moved back to Taiwan permanently when she was in college and her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she recognized the urgency of forging a stronger connection with her birthplace before it was too late. As she recounts her journey to reclaim her heritage in The Translator’s Daughter, Prasad unfurls themes of memory, dislocation, and loss in all their rich complexity. The result is a unique immigration story about the loneliness of living in a diaspora, the search for belonging, and the meaning of home. Prasad's writing has appeared in The New York Times, Longreads, The Offing, Hyperallergic, Catapult, KHÔRA, and elsewhere.  A member of the Writers Grotto and the AAPI writers collective Seventeen Syllables, she lives in the Bay Area.