8 Books On the Asian American Experience to Read Today
In 2019, I visited Taiwan with my family and while I had been there multiple times before, something was different this time around. As I was laying in bed, listening to the sounds of the local elementary school next door, I realized that no matter how hard I tried, I would never, ever, ever understand what it’s like to truly be a local Taiwanese individual.
From the little things, like the sounds that trigger childhood nostalgia to larger things, like societal pressure and customs, there are just certain experiences that I, as a Taiwanese American individual who grew up outside the country will never fully be able to embody.
This understanding triggered a brief period of depression, but after talking to a friend about it, what clicked for me was that while there is a sense of grief for that loss of belonging, there is also a power that comes with reclaiming and reconnecting with your identity in a way that is truly authentic to your experience.
This entire time, I’ve been rejecting Asian American history as I felt that it wasn’t mine to claim--my family immigrated to America and had no immediate ties to the decades of Asian American history that came before them. One thing that I’ve gained clarity on these past few months has been that I, as an Asian American, actually get to claim this history. I am someone who is part of that collective group and someone who gets to take part in writing that history
With the recent attacks on the elderly Asian population in America, there’s been an outcry for the acknowledgment of the Asian American experience. As someone who is hoping to do the work of unpacking the internalized racism and prejudices that I hold, I’m starting with educating myself on this shared (and also nuanced) experience.
Here are 8 books by Asian Americans, for Asian Americans.
1. Minor Feelings, Cathy Park Hong
Why You Should Read It:
You’ll find this book listed as number one on many, many, many lists. Minor Feelings blends personal experience with clever criticism on the current racial climate in America. In a society where Asian American feelings and experiences are minimized, this book gives APPI the opportunity to reexamine and reclaim the experience.
Official Blurb:
“Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative—and its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world.
Binding these essays together is Hong’s theory of “minor feelings.” As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these “minor feelings” occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality—when you believe the lies you’re told about your own racial identity. Minor feelings are not small, they’re dissonant—and in their tension Hong finds the key to the questions that haunt her.
With sly humor and a poet’s searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and female friendship. A radically honest work of art, Minor Feelings forms a portrait of one Asian American psyche—and of a writer’s search to both uncover and speak the truth.”
2. The Making of Asian America, Erika Lee
Why You Should Read It:
How much of Asian American history do you know? I, for one, know very little. So much of what we’re taught in school is from the white man’s perspective. The Making of Asian America chronicles the Asian American history in the States that has long been neglected. In order to better move forward, we have to understand our history and what’s worked in the past.
Official Blurb:
“The Making of Asian America shows how generations of Asian immigrants and their American-born descendants have made and remade Asian American life, from sailors who came on the first trans-Pacific ships in the 1500 to the Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II. Over the past fifty years, a new Asian America has emerged out of community activism and the arrival of new immigrants and refugees. No longer a “despised minority,” Asian Americans are now held up as America’s “model minorities” in ways that reveal the complicated role that race still plays in the United States.”
3. Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri
Why You Should Read It:
Interpreter of Maladies is a Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of short stories that speak on biculturalism and cross-generational familial clashes. While this book was originally published in 1999, the themes are still relevant today for many children of immigrant families.
Official Blurb:
“Navigating between the Indian traditions they've inherited and the baffling new world, the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri's elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations. In "A Temporary Matter," published in The New Yorker, a young Indian-American couple faces the heartbreak of a stillborn birth while their Boston neighborhood copes with a nightly blackout. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession. Lahiri writes with deft cultural insight reminiscent of Anita Desai and a nuanced depth that recalls Mavis Gallant.”
4. The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan
Why You Should Read It:
A classic in Asian American literature. I have to admit that I hated this book in high school. Retrospectively, I probably disliked it so much because it triggered some feelings of repressed racism that I wasn’t ready to admit. Maybe it’s time to revisit this novel with a little more maturity.
Official Blurb:
“Four mothers, four daughters, four families, whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's telling the stories. In 1949, four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, meet weekly to play mahjong and tell stories of what they left behind in China. United in loss and new hope for their daughters' futures, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Their daughters, who have never heard these stories, think their mothers' advice is irrelevant to their modern American lives – until their own inner crises reveal how much they've unknowingly inherited of their mothers' pasts.”
5. Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Why You Should Read It:
Care Work explores the intersection of race, gender, and ability. It celebrates the work that queer/POC individuals working with disabilities are doing in order to build community and lift each other up.
Official Blurb:
“In this collection of essays, Lambda Literary Award-winning writer and longtime activist and performance artist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explores the politics and realities of disability justice, a movement that centers the lives and leadership of sick and disabled queer, trans, Black, and brown people, with knowledge and gifts for all.
Care Work is a mapping of access as radical love, a celebration of the work that sick and disabled queer/people of color are doing to find each other and to build power and community, and a tool kit for everyone who wants to build radically resilient, sustainable communities of liberation where no one is left behind. Powerful and passionate, Care Work is a crucial and necessary call to arms.”
6. Interior Chinatown, Charles Yu
Why You Should Read It:
Finally, a novel! Interior Chinatown uses a clever play on Hollywood tropes to explore how the roles we are given by mass/pop media come to play with regards to race, culture, and assimilation.
Official Blurb:
“Willis Wu doesn’t perceive himself as a protagonist even in his own life: He’s merely Generic Asian man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but he is always relegated to a prop. Yet every day he leaves his tiny room and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He’s a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy—the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. At least that’s what he has been told, time and time again. Except by one person, his mother. Who says to him: Be more.”
7. The Astonishing Color of After, Emily X.R. Pan
Why You Should Read It:
The Astonishing Color of After is a beautifully written novel that transcends multiple realms of existence on the journey to establishing a self identity. It alternates between what is real and what is magic; what’s in the past, and what’s in the present. If you’re looking for a novel that will pull you in and keep you enchanted, look no further.
Official Blurb:
“Leigh Chen Sanders is absolutely certain about one thing: When her mother died by suicide, she turned into a bird.
Leigh, who is half Asian and half white, travels to Taiwan to meet her maternal grandparents for the first time. There, she is determined to find her mother, the bird. In her search, she winds up chasing after ghosts, uncovering family secrets, and forging a new relationship with her grandparents. And as she grieves, she must try to reconcile the fact that on the same day she kissed her best friend and longtime secret crush, Axel, her mother was taking her own life.
Alternating between reality and magic, past and present, hope and despair, The Astonishing Color of After is a luminous debut novel about finding oneself through family history, art, bravery, and love.”
8. Marriage of a Thousand Lies, S.J. Sindu
Why You Should Read It:
It’s rare to come across a novel that speaks on the queer experience that isn’t told from the white, male, gaze. Marriage of a Thousand Lies addresses common themes on claiming identity at the risk of losing the support of family, but with the added complexity of being from a minority community.
Official Blurb:
“Lucky and her husband, Krishna, are gay. They present an illusion of marital bliss to their conservative Sri Lankan–American families, while each dates on the side. It’s not ideal, but for Lucky, it seems to be working. She goes out dancing, she drinks a bit, she makes ends meet by doing digital art on commission. But when Lucky’s grandmother has a nasty fall, Lucky returns to her childhood home and unexpectedly reconnects with her former best friend and first lover, Nisha, who is preparing for her own arranged wedding with a man she’s never met.
As the connection between the two women is rekindled, Lucky tries to save Nisha from entering a marriage based on a lie. But does Nisha really want to be saved? And after a decade’s worth of lying, can Lucky break free of her own circumstances and build a new life? Is she willing to walk away from all that she values about her parents and community to live in a new truth? As Lucky—an outsider no matter what choices she makes—is pushed to the breaking point, Marriage of a Thousand Lies offers a vivid exploration of a life lived at a complex intersection of race, sexuality, and nationality. The result is a profoundly American debut novel shot through with humor and loss, a story of love, family, and the truths that define us all.”