May is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage month, and we are sharing books from AAPI creators to be read and celebrated by students all year long.
Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. 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.
Nicole Chung tells of her search for the people who gave her up for adoption, which coincided with the birth of her own child. All You Can Ever Know is a profound, moving chronicle of surprising connections and the repercussions of unearthing painful family secrets—vital reading for anyone who has ever struggled to figure out where they belong.
This is a dual first-person memoir by the acclaimed Vietnamese-American novelist and her thoroughly American teenage daughter. Family in Six Tones speaks both to the unique struggles of refugees and to the universal tug-of-war between mothers and daughters.
This sweeping, unforgettable reimagining of Romeo and Juliet tells the story of an interracial couple in 1990s New York City who are determined to protect their love against all odds. The poetry of Angel and Hannah’s relationship is dynamic, arresting, observant, and magical, conveying the intimacies and sacrifices of love and family and the devastating realities of struggle and loss.
This graphic memoir recounts George Takei’s childhood imprisoned within American concentration camps during World War II. They Called Us Enemy is Takei’s firsthand account of those years behind barbed wire, the joys and terrors of growing up under legalized racism, his mother’s hard choices, his father’s faith in democracy, and the way those experiences planted the seeds for his astonishing future.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
This is award-winning poet Ocean Vuong’s debut novel, a portrait of a family, and a testament to the redemptive power of storytelling. With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how to heal and rescue one another without forsaking who they are.
A rediscovered classic of linked short stories set in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Mrs. Spring Fragrance portrays Chinese Americans as they fall in love, encounter racism, and wrestle with their new, hyphenated identities—a century before writers like Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan.
Carlos Bulosan (1911–1956) wrote one of the most influential working class literary classics about the U.S. pre-World War II. Bulosan’s semi-autobiographical novel is about the United States in the 1930s from the perspective of a Filipino migrant laborer who endures racial violence and struggles with the paradox of the American dream. This edition includes a foreword by novelist Elaine Castillo.
Tracing one family’s history from Taiwan to America, from Arkansas to California, Bestiary is a novel of migration, queer lineages, and girlhood. Three generations of Taiwanese American women are haunted by the myths of their homeland in this corporeal debut about one family’s buried secrets.
Written in an indelible voice that dramatizes the tensions of an immigrant girl growing up between two cultures, surrounded by a language and world only half understood, Girl in Translation is an unforgettable and classic novel of an American immigrant-a moving tale of hardship and triumph, heartbreak and love, and all that gets lost in translation.
A Place for Us is a novel of identity and belonging, and a resonant portrait of what it means to be an American family today. All the joy and struggle of family life is here, from Rafiq and Layla’s own arrival in America from India, to the years in which their children—each in their own way—tread between two cultures, seeking to find their place in the world, as well as a path home.
Visit our course catalog for books in the following categories:
People and Cultures of the Pacific
