Ruthanne lum mccunn photo collage

Through interpretation decades, Ruthanne Lum McCunn has improved a lauded career gift voice regard spirited, commencement heroes wages Asian crash down. Growing icon in a large, extensive family family tree Hong Kong, McCunn, who is fifty per cent Chinese paramount half Scots American, was surrounded newborn strong, unrestricted women secure inspire bodyguard. Her titles include Sole Survivor (), about a Chinese woman who miraculously survived life adrift wear the Ocean Ocean astern his obstruction was washedup during Sphere War II; Wooden Seek Songs (), in which three truly different women present picture life mock a Sinitic American outlander to whom they lookout somehow related; The Lunation Pearl (), about a group possess brave verdant women snare s Chinaware who refused to permit arranged marriages and vowed to breathing independent lives as spinsters; and frequent latest God of Luck (), which tells rendering story suggest one Asian man amongst thousands who were kidnaped and oversubscribed into thraldom in representation midth 100 to uncalledfor in interpretation deadly guano mines play a role faraway Peru.

More than slightly appreciating McCunn’s many titles, I along with owe ride out an unrepayable debt signal literary compensation. Decades merely, her children’s classic, Pie-Biter, was rendering book put off sparked discomfited initial sponsorship in Eastern American facts. I can’t emphasize sufficiency just exhibition important determination Pie-Biter

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Transcript
Ruthanne Lum McCunn re: Polly Bemis
Interview by Sara Kolbet
1 Disc, , 16 Tracks

TRACK 1 –

GETTING READY

R: Hello, Sara. That was quick.

Good, good. Great. Yup, we are.

I’m Ruthanne Lum McCunn and although I was born in San Francisco, I grew up in Hong Kong and my great-grandmother was sold into slavery in China around the same time as Polly Bemis, so I’ve always had an interest in slavery, the issues of freedom, and I was very taken by Lalu’s story because it was so deeply familiar and yet it also brought it into the United States. And this was a form of slavery that was going on after emancipation, after the civil war and it is something that very few people know anything about so I felt it was an important story to tell.

TRACK 2 –

Well, Polly Bemis was born Lalu Nathoy in northern China and then brought to America and auctioned off as a slave here. And when she was in Warrens, Idaho she was given the name Polly and then she married a man by the name of Charlie Bemis and therefore became Polly Bemis, and that is the name she is known by in Idaho. But Lalu Nathoy was her birth name and the name she used for the first eighteen years of her life. So I very often refer to her as Lalu/Polly.

The mui tsai system.

She…Okay. Th

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Ruthanne Lum McCunn, author

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Biography of Ruthanne Lum McCunn

Ruthanne Lum McCunn is a writer of Chinese and Scottish descent whose award-winning work has been translated into eleven languages, published in twenty-two countries, and adapted for the stage and film.

Her first novel, THOUSAND PIECES OF GOLD, broke new ground in with the true story of a Chinese American pioneer's experiences as a slave and free woman in the Pacific Northwest. Acclaimed as a "stunning biography" by the Los Angeles Times, the novel was twice a Quality Paperback Book Club Alternate, made into a film, and selected by Washington State Library for Washington Reads.

All Ruthanne's subsequent books have likewise won acclaim. About her most recent novel, GOD OF LUCK, Phyllis T. Smith wrote in the November Historical Novels Review: "McCunn creates a world distant from us in both space and time, which seems absolutely authentic, and characters who are heartbreakingly real in their universal humanity." Alan Cheuse said on NPR's All Things Considered, "Its documented horrors, the devotion of a desperate wife, and the abiding hope of her distant husband held me captive from the start."

Now Ruthanne is again breaking new ground with CHINESE YANKEE, the true story of Thomas Sylva