Disorientation, by Elaine Hsieh Chou

Elaine Hsieh Chou’s debut novel is a funny and biting satirical campus story. Ingrid Yang, the book’s protagonist, is studying a Chinese poet for her Ph.D. program when she discovers that the poet is actually a white man in yellowface. Based on the real controversy of poet Michael Derrick Hudson submitting poetry under the pseudonym Yi-Fen Chou, Disorientation takes the reader deep into the issues of racial identity and social-justice movements, and it handles them with insight and levity. Get the book.

They Called Us Enemy, by George Takei

In They Called Us Enemy, George Takei tells the story of his childhood experience in Japanese internment camps. He reflects on the conditions of day-to-day life within the camp, his father’s hope for democracy, and his mother’s resilience in the face of difficult decisions. Beautifully illustrated in a style that combines Japanese and American graphic arts, Enemy is both a page-turner and a resonant reminder of the injustice that persists in America. Get the book.

Bliss Montage, by Ling Ma

With this collection of short stories, Ling Ma established herself as a powerful voice in science fiction. Ma’s first novel, Severance, was called prophetic in its portrayal of a post-apocalyptic world during late-stage capitalism. Bliss Montage expands upon the dread and satire in these eight tales—about a woman dating on LoweredExpectations.com, a Chinese writer who gets criticized for telling an immigrant story, a drug that frees two friends from the male gaze, and more. Ma is imaginative, funny, and always incisive about our current societal trappings. Get the book.

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The Collected Schizophrenias, by Esmé Weijun Wang

Esmé Weijun Wang departed from her work as a fiction writer to pen this collection of personal essays about her experience dealing with schizoaffective disorder. Wang writes intimately about the hardships of getting diagnosed, navigating the medical system while mentally ill, and struggling with her symptoms of hallucinations and psychosis. The result is a moving and thoroughly researched collection that unpacks all the myths and misconceptions about schizophrenia. Get the book.

The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Now a must-watch HBO series, The Sympathizer was first a captivating novel about a North Vietnamese spy embedded in a South Vietnamese community exiled in the United States. Fascinating and ambitious, it uses the unique narrative technique of continuous commentary from the anonymous narrator on the events unfolding throughout the book, allowing for criticism at the same time as plot development. It effortlessly blends genre conventions from mysteries, spy fiction, and historical fiction to tell a story about the extremes of human loneliness and the extent of our capacity to feel sympathy for our fellow people. Get the book.

Beautiful Country, by Qian Julie Wang

A memoir published in 2021, Beautiful Country details the experiences of author Qian Julie Wang when she and her family first arrived in the United States as undocumented immigrants. The title is based on the direct English translation of the Chinese word for America. Wang describes the hardships and poverty she endured, giving important context to the struggles that immigrants are willing to overcome just to make a life in the United States. See America through her piercing yet discerning gaze. Get the book.

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The Rape of Nanking, by Iris Chang

The best-selling nonfiction book by American journalist Iris Chang is a painstakingly researched deep dive into the massacre that occurred in Nanjing, China, during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The conflicts during the Japanese occupation of World War II are not often discussed in American history classes, but here Chang provides detailed accounts of the events leading up to the massacre, as well as the war crimes and atrocities that ensued. The Rape of Nanking is one of the first works that brought awareness of the massacre to English-speaking readers. A work of historical importance, it has been praised for raising awareness about the incident, and for sparking public interest in the actions of Japanese occupation in various countries, such as Korea, the Philippines, and other areas of Southeast Asia. Get the book.

Love in a Fallen City, by Eileen Chang

The Chinese-born American writer Eileen Chang was well known for her talent for penning passionate feminist stories about love and the experiences of Chinese civilians during periods of sociopolitical upheaval. Chang lived through the Japanese occupation of China, getting her education and writing several of her renowned works during that time. One such work is Love in a Fallen City, which recounts the life of Bai Liusu, a divorced young woman in Shanghai who falls in love with a bachelor sent to court her younger sister. Their love endures the traumas of a country riven by war and under siege. Through many trials, they discover their devotion to each other. Get the book.

Taipei, by Tao Lin

Tao Lin’s third novel is also his most widely acclaimed. Born to Taiwanese parents in Alexandria, Virginia, Lin has been lauded for spearheading the new literary tradition of “autofiction” and the genre of alt-lit, which developed mostly over the Internet and broaches topics of urban alienation, modern loneliness, and existential anxiety. Taipei captures a specific moment in our contemporary society, following a young man as he wanders through a listless existence in the American art scene and his attempts to make meaningful connections with the people around him. Get the book.

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Interior Chinatown, by Charles Yu

A high-concept second novel by Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown won the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. It was also greenlit for a TV adaptation on Hulu starring Jimmy O. Yang. But don’t wait for the show to get familiar with the story. The protagonist, Willis Wu, portrays stereotypical background roles on a police procedural. Yu uses the framework of the novel to explore ideas of assimilation, immigrant experiences, and the limits of representation for AAPI-identifying people. It pushes boundaries of what a novel should look like, as well as the boundaries that the AAPI community faces while trying to live nuanced, multifaceted lives. Get the book.

Thank You, Mr. Nixon, by Gish Jen

One of our finest practitioners of the short-story form returns with Thank You, Mr. Nixon, a spiky collection distilling five decades of Chinese American life into eleven remarkable short stories. In the title story, a Chinese girl in heaven pens a cheerful thank-you note to “poor Mr. Nixon,” postmarked to his address in the ninth circle of hell. In another standout, Hong Kong parents go to desperate lengths to make contact with their “number-one daughter,” now in self-imposed exile across the globe. Elsewhere, a glamorous young woman’s romance with an older Chinese American man is squashed by his watchful mother, to hilarious effect. Wry and wise, these bighearted stories of immigration, identity, and exile linger. Get the book.

Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee

If you fell in love with Apple TV+’s sensational adaptation of Pachinko but haven’t read the award-winning source material yet, it’s time to get caught up. With the epic sweep of Zola or Dickens, Min Jin Lee chronicles four storied generations of a Korean immigrant family, beginning with a pregnant young woman’s decision to enter a marriage of convenience that ferries her to a new beginning in Japan. Her decision to leave home echoes across the generations, all of it playing out against the rich tapestry of an ever-changing twentieth-century Japan, where the Zainichi (Korean immigrants and their descendants) encounter brutal racism and class discrimination. The sheer bigness of this novel is majestic, as are its themes of joy, sacrifice, and heartbreak. Get the book.

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The Body Papers, by Grace Talusan

This intimate debut memoir by an electric Filipino American writer, awarded the Restless New Books Prize for Immigrant Writing, takes its title from the myriad ways that paper documents, like citizenship papers and medical records, have shaped the author’s life. Grace Talusan grew up in suburban New England during the seventies, grappling with secrets like her family’s undocumented status and her molestation at the hands of her grandfather. The Body Papers traces her journey through a litany of unbearable traumas and her emergence as a survivor of racism, cancer, immigration, and so much more. It’s a raw, fierce, and moving experience—one you won’t soon forget. Get the book.

Crying in H Mart, by Michelle Zauner

In this bittersweet memoir, the multihyphenate talent behind pop group Japanese Breakfast delivers a poignant story of grief and identity. Raised in the largely white town of Eugene, Oregon, then ascendant in an industry far from home, Michelle Zauner often felt distanced from her Korean heritage. After her mother’s death following a long battle with cancer, she cooked her way through grief, returning to her roots by way of ancestral dishes like jjigae and tteokbokki. In Crying in H Mart, she describes her heartbreak and healing, celebrating her mother’s life while reclaiming her gifts of food, language, and cultural identity. Get the book.

Time is a Mother, by Ocean Vuong

Ocean Vuong’s second collection of poetry is a bruising journey through the devastating aftershocks of his mother’s death. Like Orpheus descending into the underworld, Vuong takes us to the white-hot limits of his grief, writing with visionary fervor about love, agony, and time. Without his mother, he must remake his understanding of the world: What is identity when its source is gone? What is language without the cultural memory of our elders? Aesthetically ambitious and ferociously original, Time Is a Mother interrogates these impossibilities. “Nobody’s free without breaking open,” Vuong writes in one searing poem. Here he breaks open and rebuilds. Get the book.

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Minor Feelings, by Cathy Park Hong

In this radical exploration of the Asian American psyche, Cathy Park Hong writes masterfully about her experience of “minor feelings”: the painful cognitive dissonance you feel when the cultural messaging you receive contradicts the lived experience of your identity. Through cultural criticism, memoir, and historical investigation, she names and illuminates issues of race and gender that long went unnamed, creating a blistering new handbook on the state of race in America. With 70 percent of 2020’s 3,800 acts of anti-Asian violence committed against Asian women, Hong’s dissection of racism’s intersection with gender has renewed relevance. Get the book.

The Making of Asian America, by Erika Lee

From an award-winning historian comes a sweeping history of Asian Americans and their pivotal role in American life, beginning with the Asian sailors who arrived in the Americas through the first trans-Pacific voyages of the 1500s, and tracing through the ensuing centuries all the way to our contemporary moment. Erika Lee delineates the unique histories of Asian Americans descended from Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Hmong, and other ancestral groups while illuminating the many forms of discrimination they’ve faced in the United States. So too does Lee probe the corrosive stereotype of the “model minority.” The scope of this comprehensive history is downright epic, correcting centuries of national mythology and immigration narratives that long failed to highlight the vital part Asian Americans have played in shaping American life. Get the book.

Yellow Peril!, edited by John Kuo Wei Tchen and Dylan Yeats

This far-ranging visual compendium from two academic experts surveys the all-too-vast body of anti-Asian images and writing that pervade Western history, from paintings and photographs to propaganda and pop culture ephemera. Beginning with European colonialism and the Enlightenment, Yellow Peril! scrutinizes the xenophobia and racism that Asians have suffered in Eurocentric countries, considering how malevolent media gave rise to prejudice and abuse. For readers interested in the role media and cultural messaging play in promoting racism, this is an urgent and incisive primer on the subject. Get the book.

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The Myth of the Model Minority, by Rosalind S. Chou and Joe R. Feagin

In the expanded second edition of this timely text, two distinguished professors of sociology explore what they call the “double consciousness” of many Asian Americans, who experience pervasive daily racism coupled with pressure to conform to the harmful, monolithic stereotype of “the model minority.” Through hundreds of interviews, the authors shed light on the harassment and oppression Asian Americans endure on a daily basis. So too do they investigate the intersections of racism, gender, and sexuality, conducting interviews with Asian men who feel emasculated and Asian women who feel eroticized. In these carefully documented pages, a diverse symphony of voices rings out, lending visibility and dimension to what’s too often left unspoken. Get the book.

All You Can Ever Know, by Nicole Chung

In this stirring memoir, Nicole Chung recounts her upbringing in Oregon, where she was raised by white parents after her Korean biological parents placed her for adoption. In her predominantly white town, Chung rarely encountered other Asian Americans but hid the extent of the prejudice she faced from her parents. It wasn’t until she stood at the precipice of becoming a mother herself that Chung decided to track down her birth family, whose complicated and difficult history yielded challenging but revealing insights. Chung ruminates movingly on the nuances of transracial adoption, deconstructing the saccharine “happy ending” narratives that adoptees are often fed. In these mellifluous pages, she reflects beautifully on the complications of identity and belonging, making for a powerful story in which many transracial adoptees can see their struggles recognized. Get the book.

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