Celebrating Asian Pacific Islander South Asian Heritage: Recommended Reading
May is Asian Pacific Islander South Asian Heritage Month, and the Popular Reading Display in the Hill Library's Learning Commons celebrates the struggles and family bonds of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Learn more about Asian Pacific Islander South Asian Heritage Month.
Published May 2024
Yellowface: A Novel
Author: R. F. Kuang
Yellowface grapples with racism, cultural appropriation, and the alienation of social media. Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars. After Athena dies in an accident, June steals her just-finished experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers during World War I. No matter how she tries to justify it, June can't escape Athena's shadow.
Take Out: Queer Writing From Asian Pacific America
Editors: Quang Bao and Hanya Yanagihara
Take Out captures the freshness of contemporary expressive culture in queer Asian Pacific America. It brings together established and emerging artists to define their personal and collective vision. The visual, literary, and performance works in this anthology probe topics including pop culture, camp, inter-generational relationships, domesticity, Hollywood, fairy tales, and Asia.
Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong's Rendezvous with American History
Author: Yunte Huang
Born into the steam and starch of a Chinese laundry, Anna May Wong emerged from turn-of-the-century Los Angeles to become Old Hollywood's most famous Chinese American actress. Over a century after her birth, Yunte Huang narrates Wong's tragic life story, retracing her journey from Chinatown to American television in its infancy.
Sigh, Gone: A Misfit's Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and the Fight to Fit in
Author: Phuc Tran
For anyone who has ever felt like they don't belong, Sigh, Gone shares an irreverent, funny, and moving tale of displacement and self-discovery woven together with poignant themes from beloved works of classic literature and punk rock. Phuc Tran immigrates with his family from Saigon to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a small town where the Trans struggle to assimilate into their new life.
Go Home!
Editor: Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
Asian diasporic writers imagine "home" in the twenty-first century through an array of fiction, memoir, and poetry. Both urgent and meditative, this anthology moves beyond the model-minority myth and showcases the singular intimacies of individuals figuring out what it means to belong.
Pachinko
Author: Min Jin Lee
In this gorgeous saga, four generations of a poor Korean immigrant family fight to control their destiny in 20th-century Japan. Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From the halls of Japan's finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Lee's complex and passionate characters survive and thrive through an indifferent arc of history.
Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls: A Memoir
Author: T Kira Madden
Acclaimed literary essayist T Kira Madden's raw and redemptive debut memoir is about coming of age and reckoning with desire as a queer, biracial teenager amidst the fierce contradictions of Boca Raton, Florida. The only child of wealthy parents continually battling drug and alcohol addictions, she found lifelines in the desperately loving friendships of fatherless girls.
Lady Friends: Hawaiian Ways and the Ties That Define
Author: Karen L. Ito
Many indigenous Hawaiians who have moved to the islands' cities are thought to have lost their cultural roots. Applying ethnopsychological strategies to the exploration of culture, Ito demonstrates cultural continuity thrives in communities of Hawaiian women who continue to maintain and express crucial aspects of their cultural heritage. Lady Friends brings a new dimension to Hawaiian research.
Both/And: A Life in Many Worlds
Author: Huma Abedin
The daughter of Indian and Pakistani intellectuals and advocates, Abedin grew up in the United States and Saudi Arabia and traveled widely. Both/And grapples with family, identity, faith, and motherhood with wisdom and clarity. Abedin launched into a college internship in the office of the First Lady in 1996, never imagining how her career would blossom or become an all-consuming way of life.