The CALA Best Book Award subcommittee is pleased to announce the following recipients of the 2024 CALA Best Book Awards. The annual CALA Best Book Award recognizes outstanding books, published in English or Chinese, and exhibit excellence in addressing China, Chinese, people of Chinese origin or Chinese cultural heritage and written by Chinese authors or authors of Chinese descent. The Award is to raise awareness of these topics and authors in North America.

CALA最佳图书奖评审小组荣幸地宣布2024年度CALA最佳图书奖的获奖者名单。一年一度的CALA最佳图书奖旨在表彰以英文或中文出版、在描写中国、华人、华裔或中华文化遗产方面有出色表现，并由华人或华裔作者创作的优秀书籍。该奖项旨在提高北美地区对这些作品主题和作者的认识和关注度。

The following are the recipients of the Best Book Awards. We congratulate the authors for their outstanding works representing the diversity of the Chinese experience.

以下是本次最佳图书奖的获奖者名单。我们向这些出色作品的作者表示衷心的祝贺，他们的作品展现了华人经历的多样性。

Children’s Fiction 儿童读物—小说类

The Many Masks of Andy Zhou by Jack Cheng

Andy Zhou is used to being what people need him to be: the good kid for his parents and, now, his grandparents in from Shanghai, or the helpful sidekick for his best friend Cindy’s plans and schemes. So when Cindy decides they should try out for Movement on the first day of sixth grade, how can Andy say no? But between feeling out of place with the dancers after school, being hassled by his new science partner Jameel in class, and sensing tension between his dad and grandfather at home, Andy feels all kinds of weird. Then over anime, Hi-Chews, and art, things start to shift between Andy and Jameel, opening up new doors—and new problems. Because no matter how much Andy cares about his friends and family, it’s hard not to feel pulled between all the ways he’s meant to be, all the different faces he wears, and harder still to figure out if any of these masks is the real him.

ISBN: 9780525553830

Publisher: Dial Books for Young Readers, New York, 2023; 309 pages

Children’s Non-fiction 儿童读物—非小说类

On the Tip of a Wave: How Ai Weiwei's Art Is Changing the Tide by Joanna Ho and Catia Chien

Told in Joanna Ho’s signature lyrical writing, this is the story that shines a light on Ai Weiwei and his journey, specifically how the Life Jackets exhibit at Konzerthaus Berlin came to be. As conditions for refugees worsened, Ai Weiwei was inspired by the discarded life jackets on the shores of Lesbos to create a bold installation that would grab the attention of the world. Cátia Chien masterfully portrays the intricate life of Ai Weiwei with inspirations from woodblock printing and a special emphasis on the color orange, the same color of the life jackets that became a beacon of hope. Through Cátia’s dynamic and stunning illustrations, we see how Ai Weiwei became the activist and artist he is today while proving the power of art within humanity.

ISBN: 9781338715941

Publisher: Orchard Books/Scholastic Inc., New York, 2023; 48 pages

Young Adult Fiction 青少年读物—小说类

An Echo in the City by K. X. Song

Sixteen-year-old Phoenix knows her parents have invested thousands of dollars to help her leave Hong Kong and get an elite Ivy League education. They think America means big status, big dreams, and big bank accounts. But Phoenix doesn’t want big; she just wants home. The trouble is, she doesn’t know where that is … until the Hong Kong protest movement unfolds, and she learns the city she’s come to love is in danger of disappearing.

Seventeen-year-old Kai sees himself as an artist, not a filial son, and certainly not a cop. But when his mother dies, he’s forced to leave Shanghai to reunite with his estranged father, a respected police officer, who’s already enrolled him in the Hong Kong police academy. Kai wants to hate his job, but instead, he finds himself craving his father’s approval. And when he accidentally swaps phones with Phoenix and discovers she’s part of a protest network, he finds a way to earn by infiltrating the group and reporting their plans back to the police.

As Kai and Phoenix join the struggle for the future of Hong Kong, a spark forms between them, pulling them together even as their two worlds try to force them apart. But when their relationship is built on secrets and deception, will they still love the person left behind when the lies fall away?

ISBN: 9780316396820

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company, Hachette Book Group, New York, 2023; 352 pages

Young Adult Nonfiction 青少年读物—非小说类

The Boy from Clearwater: Book 1 by Yu Pei-Yun; illustrated by Zhou Jian-Xin; translated by Lin King

Part I: Taiwan, 1930s. Tsai Kun-lin, an ordinary boy born in Qingshui, recounts a carefree childhood despite the Japanese growing up happily with the company of nursery rhymes and picture books on Qingshui Street. As war emerges Tsai's memories shift to military parades, air raids, and watching others face conscription into the army. It seems no one can escape. After the war, the book-loving teenager tries hard to learn Mandarin and believes he is finally stepping towards a comfortable future; but little does he know, a dark cloud awaits him ahead.

Part II: Taiwan, 1950s. In his second year at Taichung First Senior High School, Tsai is arrested simply for joining a book club and subsequently tortured, deprived of civil rights, and sent to Green Island for "reformation." Lasting until his release in September 1960, Tsai, a victim of the White Terror era, spends ten years of his youth in prison on an unjust charge. But he is ready to embrace freedom.

ISBN: 9781646142804

Publisher: Levine Querido, Montclair, 2023; 352 pages

Adult Fiction 成人读物—小说类

Straw Dogs of the Universe: A Novel by Ye Chun

A sweeping historical novel of the American West from the little-seen perspective of those who helped to build it, Straw Dogs of the Universe traces the story of one Chinese father and his young daughter, desperate to find him against all odds.

After her village is devastated by famine, 10-year-old Sixiang is sold to a human trafficker for a bag of rice and six silver coins. Her mother is reluctant to let her go, but the promise of a better life for her beloved daughter ultimately sways her. Arriving in America with the profits from her sale and a single photograph of Guifeng, her absent father, Sixiang journeys across an unfamiliar American landscape in the hopes of reuniting her family.

As she makes her way through an unforgiving new world, her father, a railroad worker in California, finds his attempts to build a life for himself both upended and defined by along-lost love and the seemingly inescapable violence of the American West. A generational saga ranging from the villages of China to the establishment of the transcontinental railroad and the anti-Chinese movement in California, Straw Dogs of the Universe considers the tenacity of family ties and the courage it takes to survive in a country that rejects you, even as it relies upon your labor.

ISBN: 9781646220625

Publisher: Catapult, New York, 2023

Adult Non-fiction 成人读物—非小说类

Co-winners: Mott Street by Ava Chin & Orphan Bachelors by Fae Myenne Ng

Mott Street: A Chinese American Family's Story of Exclusion and Homecoming by Ava Chin

As the only child of a single mother in Queens, Ava Chin found her family’s origins to be shrouded in mystery. She had never met her father, and her grandparents’ stories didn’t match the history she read at school. Mott Street traces Chin’s quest to understand her Chinese American family’s story. Over decades of painstaking research, she finds not only her father but also the building that provided a refuge for them all.

Breaking the silence surrounding her family’s past meant confronting the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882—the first federal law to restrict immigration by race and nationality, barring Chinese immigrants from citizenship for six decades. Chin traces the story of the pioneering family members who emigrated from the Pearl River Delta, crossing an ocean to make their way in the American West of the mid-nineteenth century. She tells of their backbreaking work on the transcontinental railroad and of the brutal racism of frontier towns, then follows their paths to New York City.

In New York’s Chinatown she discovers a single building on Mott Street where so many of her ancestors would live, begin families, and craft new identities. She follows the men and women who became merchants, “paper son” refugees, activists, and heads of the Chinese tong, piecing together how they bore and resisted the weight of the Exclusion laws. She soon realizes that exclusion is not simply a political condition but also a personal one.

Gorgeously written, deeply researched, and tremendously resonant, Mott Street uncovers a legacy of exclusion and resilience that speaks to the American experience, past and present.

ISBN: 9780525557371

Publisher: Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, 2023; 400 pages

Orphan Bachelors: A Memoir by Fae Myenne Ng

In pre-Communist China, Fae Myenne Ng’s father memorized a book of lies and gained entry to the United States as a stranger’s son, evading the Exclusion Act, an immigration law which he believed was meant to extinguish the Chinese American family. During the McCarthy era, he entered the Confession Program in a failed attempt to salvage his marriage only to have his citizenship revoked to resident alien. Exclusion and Confession, America’s two slamming doors. As Ng’s father said, “America didn’t have to kill any Chinese, the Exclusion Act ensured none would be born.”

Ng was her parents' precocious first born, the translator, the bossy eldest sister. A child raised by a seafaring father and a seamstress mother, by San Francisco’s Chinatown and its legendary Orphan Bachelors -- men without wives or children, Exclusion’s living legacy. She and her siblings were their stand-in descendants, Ng’s family grocery store their haven.

Each Orphan Bachelor bequeathed the children their true American inheritance. Ng absorbed their suspicious, lonely, barren nature; she found storytelling and chosen children in the form of her students. Exclusion’s legacy followed her from the back alleys of Chinatown in the 60s, to Manhattan in the 80s, to the high desert of California in the 90s, until her return home in the 2000s when the untimely deaths of her youngest brother and her father devastated the family. As a child, Ng believed her father’s lies; as an adult, she returned to her childhood home to write his truth.

Orphan Bachelors weaves together the history of one family, lucky to exist and nevertheless doomed; an elegy for brothers estranged and for elders lost; and insights into writing between languages and teaching between generations. It also features Cantonese profanity, snakes that cure fear and opium that conquers sorrow, and a seemingly immortal creep of tortoises. In this powerful remembrance, Fae Myenne Ng gives voice to her valiant ancestors, her bold and ruthless Orphan Bachelors, and her own inner self, howling in Cantonese, impossible to translate but determined to be heard.

ISBN: 9780802162212

Publisher: Grove Press, New York, 2023; 256 pages

________________________________________

CALA Best Book subcommittee members chose Honor Books that are highly recommended for their literary contribution:

CALA最佳图书奖评审小组同时评选出了2023年度CALA荣誉图书以表彰作者们对文学界的贡献：

Children’s Fiction 儿童读物—小说类

Ghost Book by Remy Lai

July Chen sees ghosts. But her dad insists ghosts aren’t real. So she pretends they don’t exist. Which is incredibly difficult now as it's Hungry Ghost month, when the Gates of the Underworld open and dangerous ghosts run amok in the living world. When July saves a boy ghost from being devoured by a Hungry Ghost, he becomes her first ever friend. Except William is not a ghost. He’s a wandering soul wavering between life and death. As the new friends embark on an adventure to return William to his body, they unearth a ghastly truth—for William to live, July must die. Inspired by Chinese mythology, this dark yet resoundingly hopeful tale about friendship, sacrifice, and the unseen world of ghosts is a dazzling heir to beloved Studio Ghibli classics.

ISBN: 9781250810410

Publisher: Henry Holt and Co. BYR, New York, 2023; 320 pages

Children’s Non-fiction 儿童读物—非小说类

No Honor Book chosen 未评选出荣誉图书

Young Adult Fiction 青少年读物—小说类

Hungry Ghost by Victoria Ying

Valerie Chu is quiet, studious, and above all, thin. No one, not even her best friend, Jordan, knows that she has been bingeing and purging for years. But when tragedy strikes, Val finds herself reassessing her priorities, her choices, and her body. The path to happiness may lead her away from her hometown and her mother’s toxic projections―but first she will have to find the strength to seek help.

This beautiful and heart-wrenching young adult graphic novel takes a look at eating disorders, family dynamics, and ultimately, a journey to self-love.

ISBN: 9781250767004

Publisher: First Second, an imprint of Roaring Brook Press, New York, 2023; 208 pages

Young Adult Non-fiction 青少年读物—非小说类

No Honor Book chosen 未评选出荣誉图书

Adult Fiction 成人读物—小说类

The Chinese Groove: A Novel by Kathryn Ma

Eighteen-year-old Shelley, born into a much-despised branch of the Zheng family in Yunnan Province and living in the shadow of his widowed father's grief, dreams of bigger things. Buoyed by an exuberant heart and his cousin Deng's tall tales about the United States, Shelley heads to San Francisco to claim his destiny, confident that any hurdles will be easily overcome by the awesome powers of the "Chinese groove," a belief in the unspoken bonds between countrymen that transcend time and borders.

Upon arrival, Shelley is dismayed to find that his "rich uncle" is in fact his unemployed second cousin once removed and that the grand guest room he'd envisioned is but a scratchy sofa. The indefinite stay he'd planned for? That has a firm two-week expiration date. Even worse, the loving family he hoped would embrace him is in shambles, shattered by a senseless tragedy that has cleaved the family in two. They want nothing to do with this youthful bounder who's barged into their lives. Ever the optimist, Shelley concocts a plan to resuscitate his American dream by insinuating himself into the family. And, who knows, maybe he'll even manage to bring them back together in the process.

ISBN: 9781640096189

Publisher: Counterpoint, Berkeley, California, 2023; 304 pages

Adult Non-fiction 成人读物—非小说类

No Honor Book chosen 未评选出荣誉图书

________________________________________

Thank you to the CALA community, affiliates and supporters for nominating an array of books representing the Chinese diaspora.

感谢CALA会员、同仁和支持者为此奖项提名了一系列代表华人华裔的图书。

Sincerely,

谨此致以诚挚的问候，

The 2023-2024 CALA Best Book Award subcommittee 2023-2024年度CALA最佳图书奖评审小组

Wei Zhang 张薇, co-chair 联合主席

Yueyue Li, co-chair 联合主席

Crystal Chen, member 组员

Elaine Tai, member 组员

Mary Wu, member组员