Compiled by Chong Bretillon, Kay Liu and Holly Melgard
The list is by no means exhaustive in its representation of authors or characters of “Asian” descent living in America; it’s only a select few texts that we thought, placed together, provided a kaleidoscopic array of authors who are thinking and writing about heritage, language, and immigration, as well as those who are subverting the expectation that their identity necessitates that they write about those topics at all.
- Bestiary by K-Ming Chang (Fiction, 2020)
Myth and magical realism co-exists with sobering real life in America in this tale exploring three generations of Taiwanese women. Traversing the Pacific from Taiwan to Arkansas to California, Chang uses a lyrical and electric voice to explore queerness, migration, and family. - Bodega by Su Hwang (Poetry, 2019).
Poetry about the Korean immigrant struggle. Hwang tells of her family, Korean immigrants who owned a store in the Queensbridge projects. Daily life dealing with commuting, integrating. - The Body Papers by Grace Talusan (Memoir, 2020)
Talusan writes about her experiences as a Filipino immigrant growing up in the 1970s in New England. She suffered sexual abuse as a child when her grandfather came to visit every spring, and her family lost their documented status when her father’s visa expired. “There is no paper trail to document what happened to my body,” she writes. A survivor of abuse and of cancer, she writes about the deep pull of family. - Bright Lines: A Novel by Tanwi Nandini Islam (2015)
A queer coming-of-age novel about Ella, a young girl who is orphaned and sent to Brooklyn by way of Bangladesh to live with the Saleems, her aunt, uncle, and cousin. She negotiates her Muslim identity and sexual identity in post-9/11 NYC and Bangladesh. - A Burning by Megha Majumndar (Fiction, 2020)
A Burning is part thriller, part social commentary that follows three main characters during the aftermath of a terrorist attack in a Kolkata slum; it engages themes of social class, religion, and gender in modern-day India. Majumndar exposes the dark reality behind a rapidly changing India, whose middle class is growing but leaving many behind the economic divide. - Chemistry by Weike Wang (Fiction, 2017)
A second-generation young Chinese woman struggling to finish her PhD begins to question everything as her life veers off of the course she was expected to walk. - A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo (Fiction, 2007)
A young woman who has newly arrived in London, England from China begins composing a Chinese-English dictionary to help her make sense of her new life in English and her relationship with her English boyfriend. - Curb by Divya Victor (2021)
Divya Victor documents how immigrants and Americans navigate the liminal sites of everyday living: lawns, curbs, and sidewalks undergirded by violence but also constantly repaved with new possibilities of belonging. CURB witnesses immigrant survival, familial bonds, and interracial parenting in the context of nationalist and white-supremacist violence against South Asians. - Disgraced by Ayed Aktar (2012)
Disgraced is a Pulitzer Prize winning play that addresses forms of Islamophobia within progressive circles and charts some of the struggles that upwardly-mobile Muslims face in a post-9/11 America (and NYC in particular). The play unfolds over the course of a dinner party on the Upper East Side of Manhattan between friends of various ethnic backgrounds, as the cracks between cultural worldviews gradually open onto a life-altering a fight. - The Face: Strangers on a Pier by Tash Aw (Nonfiction, 2016)
A kaleidoscopic meditation from Malaysian author Tash Aw on migration and heritage in contemporary Asia. - Forgotten Country by Catherine Chung (Fiction, 2003).
Against the backdrop of the historical division of Korea, this novel traces the story of two sisters: Jee-hyun is tasked with finding her wayward sister Haejin, symbolizing a common trope in Korean families- dutiful daughter versus lost daughter. - Joan is Okay by Weike Wang (Fiction, 2022)
The novel follows an ICU doctor in NYC living a solitary life in the aftermath of her father’s death as Covid-19 breaks out. - Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (Fiction, 1999)
This collection of nine short stories explore the lives of an array of Indian and Indian-American characters, illuminating the tenuousness of human connection across continents, language, and generations. - Intimacies by Katie Kitamura (Fiction, 2021)
A woman moves to The Hague to work as an interpreter for the International Criminal Court. As she is pulled deeper into her work translating for a war criminal, and closer to a new lover than she expected, Kitamura dissects a world ruled by capricious power dynamics and fallible language. - So Many Olympic Exertions by Anelise Chen (Fiction, 2017)
In this experimental novel, a young Taiwanese woman is struggling to finish her PhD about competitive athletics when she discovers that an old friend has committed suicide. Subtle and fragmented yet deeply probing, this text—blending the narrator’s own life with her research—explores the paradigms of ambition, pain, and our notions of success. - Socialist Realism by Trisha Low (2019)
When Trisha Low moves West, her journey is motivated by the need to arrive “somewhere better”—someplace utopian, like revolution; or safe, like home; or even clarifying, like identity. Instead, she faces the end of her relationships, a family whose values she has difficulty sharing, and America’s casual racism, sexism, and homophobia. - Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang (Fiction, 2017)
A collection of short stories exploring the sweet and sourness of adolescence through the lens of Chinese and Chinese-American girls living in NYC in present-day and Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution. - A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki (Fiction, 2013)
This metafictional novel follows a teenage Japanese-American girl living in Tokyo and a Japanese-American writer living in Canada until their lives converge after the 2011 tsunami. - The Tenth Muse by Catherine Chung (Fiction, 2019).
A young female mathematician living in America tackles a famously unsolved mathematical problem and in the process, discovers secrets from WWII which reveal her own family’s fraught history. - Translrelating House One by Poupeh Missaghi(2020)
Missaghi published Transrelating House One while working at Baruch’s own Writing Center. The book explores “the aftermath of Iran’s 2009 election,” wherein, “a woman undertakes a search for the statues disappearing from Tehran’s public spaces.” The book navigates the difficulties of speaking truth to the power of her former homeland, the Iranian state, while also asking how “we translate loss into language.” - This Is Paradise by Kristiana Kahakauwila (2013)
In This Is Paradise, Kristiana Kahakauwila — a hapa haole (mixed Hawai’ian and white) writer from California and Maui — navigates the daily struggle of a world caught between Indigenous Hawai’ians, and lampoons myths of Polynesian “paradise” throughout. Through six related short stories, the book explores the underbelly of island life and “the guilt associated with leaving for the mainland.” - Time is a Mother by Ocean Vuong (2022)
In his second poetry collection, Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of personal and social loss, embodying the paradox of sitting in grief while being determined to survive beyond it. Shifting through memory, Vuong contends with the meaning of family and the cost of being the product of an American war in America. - Triplines by Leonard Chang (Autobiographical fiction, 2014).
A coming of age story told by young Korean American Lenny, who is transplanted from NYC to the suburbs in Long Island with his parents. Conflict with his alcoholic Navy veteran father. Masculinity and growing up. Grows marijuana, skips school, rebellion. - The Unpassing by Chia-Chia Lin (Fiction, 2019)
A Taiwanese family living in Alaska and struggling to make ends meet grapples with the sudden death of their youngest daughter. Set against the harsh yet beautiful landscape of the Alaskan wilderness, the novel explores what it means to grieve in a place that doesn’t feel like home.
Published May 31, 2023
