Must-Read Books for Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month

Emma Lovewell is a star instructor at Peloton, but her journey to success began with a simple realization: Change is inevitable, but growth is optional. She chose to grow. In Live Learn Love Well, she shares the moments in her life that shaped her into the woman she is today―from growing up in a modest home amidst the affluence of Martha’s Vineyard, to struggling with her biracial identity and fitting in, both in the white community and the Asian American community, to health setbacks and relationship challenges, to moving to New York and striving for a career in dance and fitness.

House of Many Gods is an epic and inventive story that follows Ana, a Hawaiian physician, and Nikolai, a Russian filmmaker, across decades and continents. When Nikolai comes to Kaua’i to unearth the ecological horrors that are afflicting the islands, he meets Ana and suddenly their lives become intertwined in a way neither thought possible. It is an unforgettable novel of loss and remembrance, of the search for family and identity, and ultimately, of the redemptive power of love.

The heartfelt memoir of a trans pageant queen from the Philippines who went back into the closet to model in New York City. But as her star rose, her sense of self eroded. She craved acceptance as her authentic self yet had to remain vigilant in order to protect her dream career. Finally, Geena realized that living her truth was the only way to step into her full power. A dazzling testimony from an icon who sits at the center of transgender history and activism, Horse Barbie is a celebratory and universal story of survival, love, and pure joy.

In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of his mother’s death, embodying the paradox of sitting within grief while being determined to survive beyond it. At once vivid, bare, and propulsive, Vuong’s poems circle fragmented lives to find both restoration as well as the epicenter of the break.

Nestled in New York’s Hudson Valley is a luxury retreat boasting every amenity. The catch? For nine months, you cannot leave the grounds while you dedicate yourself to the task of producing the perfect baby. For someone else. Jane, an immigrant from the Philippines, is in desperate search of a better future when she commits to being a “Host” at Golden Oaks. But now pregnant, fragile, consumed with worry for her family, Jane is determined to reconnect with her life outside.

How do we understand ourselves when the story about who we are supposed to be is stronger than our sense of self? What do we stand to gain—and lose—by taking control of our narrative? These questions propel Prachi Gupta’s heartfelt memoir and can feel particularly fraught for immigrants and their children who live under immense pressure to belong in America.

Tasked with finding the reincarnation of a great lama — a spiritual teacher who may have been born anywhere in the vast Mongolian landscape — the young monk Chuluun sets out with his identical twin, Mun, who has rejected the monastic life they once shared. Their relationship will be tested on this journey through their homeland as each possesses the ability to hear the other’s thoughts.

A stunning debut novel about an immigrant Vietnamese family who settles in New Orleans and struggles to remain connected to one another as their lives are inextricably reshaped.

Following two families from Pakistan and Iraq in the 1990s to San Francisco in 2016, The Bad Muslim Discount is an inclusive, comic novel about Muslim immigrants finding their way in modern America.

Four mothers, four daughters, four families whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who’s “saying” the stories. In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club.

As an Indian wedding gathers a family back together, parents Rafiq and Layla must reckon with the choices their children have made. A Place for Us takes us back to the beginning of this family’s life: from the bonds that bring them together, to the differences that pull them apart. 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.

A singular, beautifully written coming-of-age memoir of a Filipino boy with albinism whose story travels from an immigrant childhood to Harvard to a gender transition and illuminates the illusions of race, disability, and gender.

In this exhilarating novel, two friends — often in love, but never lovers — come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality. Spanning thirty years, Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love.

In these nine stunningly original, provocative, and poignant stories, Ted Chiang tackles some of humanity’s oldest questions along with new quandaries only he could imagine.

Know My Name will forever transform the way we think about sexual assault, challenging our beliefs about what is acceptable and speaking truth to the tumultuous reality of healing. It also introduces readers to an extraordinary writer, one whose words have already changed our world. Entwining pain, resilience, and humor, this memoir will stand as a modern classic.

For a group of swimmers, the local community pool is a refuge from daily life. There they can find solace in the routine, surrounded by familiar faces but able to only concentrate on the laps ahead of them. But when a crack appears at the bottom of the pool, they are all cast out into an unforgiving world without comfort or relief. This is especially hard for Alice, a woman who is slowly losing her memory, and her estranged daughter who reenters her mother’s life just in time to watch her decline.

An increasingly relevant story told with startling lucidity, humor, and an uncanny ear for the intimacies and shorthand of family ritual, America Is Not the Heart is a sprawling, soulful debut about three generations of women in one family struggling to balance the promise of the American dream and the unshakeable grip of history.

A floundering second-generation teenager growing up in the Bush-era Atlanta suburbs, Neil Narayan is funny and smart but struggles to bear the weight of expectations of his family and their Asian American enclave. He tries to want their version of success, but mostly, Neil just wants his neighbor across the cul-de-sac, Anita Dayal. When he discovers that Anita is the beneficiary of an ancient, alchemical potion made from stolen gold — a “lemonade” that harnesses the ambition of the gold’s original owner — Neil sees his chance to get ahead. But events spiral into a tragedy that rips their community apart. Years later in the Bay Area, Neil still bristles against his community’s expectations — and finds he might need one more hit of that lemonade, no matter the cost.

Holding Pattern. Noun

1. 1. A state of suspended progress.

 

2.The awkward way your mother tries to hug you now that you live with her. Again.

Brilliantly observant, tender, and warm, Holding Pattern is a hopeful novel about immigration and belonging, mother-daughter relationships, and the many ways we learn to hold each other.

In stories told in alternating voices, Jean Chen Ho’s debut novel peels back the layers of female friendship — the intensity, resentment, and boundless love — to probe the beating hearts of two young Taiwanese American women as they navigate friendship, sexuality, identity, and heartbreak over two decades.

Yiyun Li meets life’s deepest sorrows as she imagines a conversation between a mother and child in a timeless world. Composed in the months after she lost a child to suicide, Where Reasons End trespasses into the space between life and death as mother and child talk, free from old images and narratives. Deeply moving, these conversations portray the love and complexity of a relationship.

From the indie rockstar of Japanese Breakfast fame, and author of the viral 2018 New Yorker essay that shares the title of this book, an unflinching, powerful memoir about growing up Korean American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity.

The dramatic real life stories of four young people caught up in the mass exodus of Shanghai in the wake of China’s 1949 Communist revolution — a heartrending precursor to the struggles faced by emigrants today.

In a stunning collection that announces the arrival of an incredible talent, Kristiana Kahakauwila travels the islands of Hawai’i, making the fabled place her own. Exploring the deep tensions between local and tourist, tradition and expectation, façade and authentic self, This Is Paradise provides an unforgettable portrait of life as it’s truly being lived on Maui, Oahu, Kaua’i and the Big Island.

A senior at Harvard, Will fits comfortably in his carefully curated roles: a perfect student, an art history major, and eldest son who has always been his parents’ American Dream. But when a mysterious Chinese benefactor reaches out with an impossible — and illegal — job offer, Will finds himself something else as well: the leader of a heist to steal back five priceless Chinese sculptures, looted from Beijing centuries ago. Inspired by true events, Portrait of a Thief is equal parts beautiful, thoughtful, and thrilling. It is a cultural heist and an examination of Chinese American identity, as well as a necessary critique on the lingering effects of colonialism.

A searing, deeply candid memoir about a young woman’s journey to understanding her complicated parents — her mother an Okinawan war bride, her father a Vietnam veteran — and her own, fraught cultural heritage.

Like many six-year-olds, Mira Jacob’s half-Jewish, half-Indian son, Z, has questions about everything. At first they are innocuous enough, but as tensions from the 2016 election spread from the media into his own family, they become much, much more complicated. Trying to answer him honestly, Mira has to think back to where she’s gotten her own answers: her most formative conversations about race, color, sexuality, and, of course, love. Written with humor and vulnerability, this deeply relatable graphic memoir is a love letter to the art of conversation — and to the hope that hovers in our most difficult questions.

In a country that is already turned upside down by World War II, Meiko and her daughter, Aiko, were taken from their home in Seattle and sent to one of the internment camps in the Midwest. Meiko tries to make this transition as normal for Aiko as possible, but when a mysterious disease begins to spread, Meiko teams up with her fellow detainees to investigate. Though it is difficult to find answers, what they do know is that something sinister is at work in the camp… Inspired by Japanese folklore, The Fervor is a thrilling examination of the supernatural and the natural, and when it becomes difficult to decide which is worse.

A riveting debut novel set in contemporary Seoul, Korea, about four young women making their way in a world defined by impossible standards of beauty, after-hours room salons catering to wealthy men, ruthless social hierarchies, and K-pop mania.

When Qian and her family immigrated to America when she was seven-years-old, it wasn’t the “beautiful country” she had been envisioning. Before her parents worked as professors, but in New York City, they were “illegal” and lived in constant fear that they would be found out. But Qian finds little delights for herself: greasy slices of pizza and endless companions within the pages of the books at the public library. With clarity, charm, and strength, Qian Julie Wang has penned an essential American story about a family fracturing under the weight of invisibility, and a girl coming-of-age in the shadows, who never stops seeking the light.

In 1986, Henry Lee joins a crowd outside the Panama Hotel, once the gateway to Seattle’s Japantown. It has been boarded up for decades, but now the new owner has discovered the belongings of Japanese families who were sent to internment camps during World War II. As the owner displays and unfurls a Japanese parasol, Henry, a Chinese American, remembers a young Japanese American girl from his childhood in the 1940s — Keiko Okabe.

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.

Nearing the age at which his mother had migrated to the US, Albert Samaha began to question the ironclad belief in a better future that had inspired her family to uproot themselves from their birthplace. Tracing his family’s history through the region’s unique geopolitical roots in Spanish colonialism, American intervention, and Japanese occupation, Samaha fits their arc into the wider story of global migration as determined by chess moves among superpowers. Ambitious, intimate, and incisive, Concepcion explores what it might mean to reckon with the unjust legacy of imperialism, to live with contradiction and hope, to fight for the unrealized ideals of an inherited homeland.

In her award-winning book The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston created an entirely new form — an exhilarating blend of autobiography and mythology, of world and self, of hot rage and cool analysis. First published in 1976, it has become a classic in its innovative portrayal of multiple and intersecting identities — immigrant, female, Chinese, American.

Full of Ozeki’s signature humor and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.

In 1965, a new immigration law lifted a century of restrictions against Asian immigrants to the United States. Over the next forty years, millions would arrive, including Jay Caspian Kang’s parents. These immigrants came to this country looking for the American Dream, but found that they were forced to live in the fringes, neither truly white nor truly “people of color.” Kang recognizes this existential loneliness in himself and in other Asian Americans who try to locate themselves in the country’s racial binary. With the wave of rising anti-Asian violence, this book is now needed more than ever.