Keep on Reading!: Asian American Authors

From the indie rockstar of Japanese Breakfast fame, a memoir about growing up Korean-American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity. In this story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner tells of growing up the only Asian-American kid at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother's particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence of treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, performing gigs with her fledgling band--and meeting the man who would become her husband--her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother's diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.

"Everyone likes Humaira 'Hani' Khan--she's easy going and one of the most popular girls at school. But when she comes out to her friends as bisexual, they invalidate her identity, saying she can't be bi if she's only dated guys. Panicked, Hani blurts out that she's in a relationship with a girl her friends absolutely hate--Ishita 'Ishu' Dey. Ishu is the complete opposite of Hani. She's an academic overachiever who hopes that becoming head girl will set her on the right track for college. But Ishita agrees to help Hani, if Hani will help her become more popular so that she stands a chance of being elected head girl. Despite their mutually beneficial pact, they start developing real feelings for each other. But relationships are complicated, and some people will do anything to stop two Bengali girls from achieving happily ever after"--Provided by publisher.

"Willis Wu doesn't perceive himself as a protagonist even in his own life: He's merely Generic Asian Man. Sometimes he get to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but he is always relegated to a prop. Yet every day he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters Golden Palace restaurant, where 'Black and White,' a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He's a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy--the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. At least that's what he has been told, time and time again. Except by one person, his mother. Who says to him: Be More"--Provided by publisher.

It's 1890 in Atlanta, and Jo Kuan has a secret: she's the anonymous author of the popular, yet polarizing, new agony aunt column "Dear Miss Sweetie." After spending her life living in a secret basement room (a relic of the Underground Railroad) beneath the press offices of The Focus, a newspaper run by the Bell family, she's picked up a masterful vocabulary to match her sharp wit, and the combination proves intoxicating to Atlanta's young ladies. But if anyone found out that a Chinese American teenager was behind the column, she'd be run out of town or worse. Lee (Outrun the Moon, 2016) has concocted another thrilling historical novel, blending stellar plotting and a dynamic cast of characters with well-researched details and sharp commentary on America's history of racism and prejudice. She pulls no punches when it comes to Jo's experiences of being Chinese in the Reconstruction South: a meeting of Atlanta's suffragettes proves unwelcoming despite their claim to want votes for all women, and though there's stirring romance between Jo and the son of the Bell family, Jo acknowledges the difficulties in that path. But best of all is Jo's first-person narrative, which crackles with as much witty wordplay and keen observations as her column. This spectacular, voice-driven novel raises powerful questions about how we understand the past, as well as the ways our current moment is still shaped by that understanding.--Booklist

When seventeen-year-old Kareena Thakkar finally admits she is a top-level Muay Thai fighter, knowing that might further alienate her from her Indian community, her classmates, especially handsome Amit, enthusiastically support her.

Transitioning from life in Korea to America, a young woman struggles with change and figuring out where she fits. After her mother's decision to marry a man in Alabama, 14-year-old Chuna, who thought she was just going on another mother-daughter trip, grapples with culture shock, bullying, and integrating into a new family. Her mother is still her hero, and she recognizes the sacrifices she has made in order for them to survive. It's rough going though, especially when the rest of the Kims, her new stepfamily, are not very supportive. She can't help but compare Korea to the U.S., the lively streets of Seoul and her many friends to her isolation in 1990s Huntsville. Bullying, though for different reasons-in Korea, for coming from a single-parent home and in Alabama, for being Asian-is always prevalent in her life. (Many of the people she interacts with at school are white.) It isn't until her mother reminds her of her love of comics and drawing that Chuna, now going by Robin, begins to thrive. Employing soft and subdued coloring for the majority of the work, Ha (Cook Korean!, 2016, etc.) uses sepia tones for recollections of her family's history in Korea. This heartfelt memoir from an author who shares her honest, personal experiences excels at showing how Ha navigated Asian American identity and the bonds between mother and daughter. An insightful, moving coming-of-age tale. -Kirkus

Kiku is on vacation in San Francisco when suddenly she finds herself displaced to the 1940s Japanese-American internment camp that her late grandmother, Ernestina, was forcibly relocated to during World War II. These displacements keep occurring until Kiku finds herself stuck back in time. Living alongside her young grandmother and other Japanese-American citizens in internment camps, Kiku gets the education she never received in history class. She witnesses the lives of Japanese-Americans who were denied their civil liberties and suffered greatly, but managed to cultivate community and commit acts of resistance in order to survive.

1954, in San Francisco's Chinatown, when seventeen-year-old Lily Hu realizes she has feelings for a girl in her math class, it threatens Lily's oldest friendships and even her father's citizenship status and eventually, Lily must decide if owning her truth is worth everything she has ever known.

"Real life isn't a fairytale. But Tíên still enjoys reading his favorite stories with his parents from the books he borrows from the local library. It's hard enough trying to communicate with your parents as a kid, but for Tíên, he doesn't even have the right words because his parents are struggling with their English. Is there a Vietnamese word for what he's going through? Is there a way to tell them he's gay?"--Provided by publisher.

What happens when a childhood hobby grows into a lifelong career? The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist, Adrian Tomine's funniest and most revealing foray into autobiography, offers an array of unexpected answers. When a sudden medical incident lands Tomine in the emergency room, he begins to question if it was really all worthwhile"-