20 Essential Books About the Asian American Experience

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April showers bring May flowers, and lucky for us, they also bring AAPI Heritage Month. In June 1977, Representative Frank Horton of New York and Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawai'i proposed to the U.S. Congress that the first ten days of May would commemorate Asian American communities’ contributions in American history. In 1992, the week was developed into a month. In the 31 years since, the AAPI community has continued to tell their own stories, producing some of the most culturally significant works of art in recent history. From Academy Award winning films to viral sensation TV shows to earworm pop songs, the AAPI artists have been busy.

For anyone who likes to learn or get their entertainment the old-fashioned way—for example, by cracking open a book—we’ve pulled together a list of twenty books that illuminate different facets of the Asian American experience. There’s juicy yet heartwrenching fiction that dissects generational trauma, first love, and issues of identity. And don’t miss out on the nonfiction classics that broach topics like immigration, war, and activism, as well as poetry about the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality. Once your reading is underway, you may also want to check out the film and TV adaptations of these vivid stories. We’ve got you covered.

Beautiful Country, by Qian Julie Wang

A memoir published in 2021, Beautiful Country details the experiences of author Qian Julie Wang when she and her family first arrived in the United States as undocumented immigrants. The title is based on the direct English translation of the Chinese word for America. Wang describes the hardship and poverty she endured, giving important context to the struggles that immigrants are willing to overcome just to make a life in the United States. See America through her incisive yet discerning gaze. Get the book.

The Rape of Nanking, by Iris Chang

The best-selling nonfiction book by American journalist Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking, is a painstakingly researched deep dive into the massacre that occurred in Nanjing, China during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The conflicts during the Japanese occupation of World War II are not often discussed in American history classes, but in this book, Chang provides detailed accounts of the events leading up to the massacre, as well as the war crimes and atrocities that ensued. The Rape of Nanking is one of the first works that brought awareness of the massacre to English-speaking readers. A work of historical importance, it has been lauded for raising awareness about the incident, as well as for sparking public interest into the actions of Japanese occupation in other countries, such as Korea, the Philippines, and other areas of Southeast Asia. Get the book.

Love in a Fallen City, by Eileen Chang

A Chinese-born American writer, Eileen Chang was well known for her talent for penning passionate feminist stories about love and the experiences of Chinese civilians during times of socio-political upheaval. Chang lived through the Japanese occupation of China, getting her education and writing several of her renowned works during that time. One of those works was Love in a Fallen City, which follows the life of Bai Liusu, a divorced young woman in Shanghai who falls in love with a bachelor sent to court her younger sister. Their love endures the hardships of a country riven by war and under siege. Through many trials, they discover their devotion to each other. Get the book.

Taipei, by Tao Lin

Tao Lin’s third novel is also his most widely acclaimed. Born to Taiwanese parents in Alexandria, Virginia, Lin’s writing has been lauded as spearheading the new literary tradition of “autofiction” and the genre of alt-lit, which developed mostly over the internet and broaches topics of urban alienation, modern loneliness, and existential anxiety. Taipei captures a specific moment in our contemporary society, following a young man as he wanders through a listless existence in the American art scene and his attempts to make meaningful connections with the people around him. Get the book.

Interior Chinatown, by Charles Yu

A high-concept second novel by Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown won the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. It was also greenlit for a TV adaptation set to premiere on Hulu, starring Jimmy O. Yang. But don’t wait for the show to get familiar with the story. The novel follows protagonist Willis Wu, who portrays stereotypical background roles on a police procedural. Yu uses the framework of the novel to explore ideas of assimilation, immigrant experiences, and the limits of representation for AAPI-identifying people. It pushes boundaries of what a novel should look like, as well as the boundaries that the AAPI community face while trying to live nuanced, multi-faceted lives. Get the book.

Thank You, Mr. Nixon, by Gish Jen

One of our finest practitioners of the short story form returns with Thank You, Mr. Nixon, a spiky collection distilling five decades of Chinese-American life into eleven remarkable short stories. In the title story, a Chinese girl in heaven pens a cheerful thank you note to “poor Mr. Nixon,” postmarked to his address in the ninth circle of hell. In another standout, Hong Kong parents go to desperate lengths to make contact with their “number-one daughter,” now in self-imposed exile across the globe. In another story; a glamorous young woman’s romance with an older Chinese-American man is squashed by his watchful mother, to hilarious effect. Wry and wise, these big-hearted stories of immigration, identity, and exile linger. Get the book.

Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee

If you fell in love with Apple TV+’s sensational adaptation of Pachinko, but haven’t read the award-winning source material yet, it’s time to get caught up. With the epic sweep of Zola or Dickens, Lee chronicles four storied generations of a Korean immigrant family, beginning with a pregnant young woman’s decision to enter a marriage of convenience that ferries her to a new beginning in Japan. Her decision to leave home echoes across generations, all of it playing out against the rich tapestry of an ever-changing 20th-century Japan, where the Zainichi (Korean immigrants and their descendents) encounter brutal racism and class discrimination. The transparent bigness of this novel is majestic, as are its themes of joy, sacrifice, and heartbreak. Get the book.

The Body Papers, by Grace Talusan

This intimate debut memoir by an electric Filipino-American writer, awarded the Restless New Books Prize for Immigrant Writing, takes its title from the myriad ways that paper documents, like citizenship papers and medical records, have shaped the author’s life. Talusan grew up in suburban New England during the 1970s, where she grappled with secrets like her family’s undocumented status and her molestation at the hands of her grandfather. The Body Papers traces her journey through a litany of unbearable traumas, and her emergence as a survivor of racism, cancer, immigration, and so much more. It’s a raw, fierce, and moving experience—one you won’t soon forget. Get the book.

Crying in H Mart, by Michelle Zauner

In this bittersweet memoir, the multi-hyphenate talent behind pop group Japanese Breakfast delivers a poignant story of grief and identity. Raised in the largely white town of Eugene, Oregon, then ascendant in an industry far from home, Zauner often felt distanced from her Korean heritage. After her mother’s death following a long battle with cancer, she cooked her way through grief, returning to her roots by way of ancestral dishes like jjigae and tteokbokki. In Crying in H Mart, she recounts her heartbreak and healing, celebrating her mother’s life while reclaiming her gifts of food, language, and cultural identity. Get the book.

Time is a Mother, by Ocean Vuong

Vuong’s second collection of poetry is a bruising journey through the devastating aftershocks of his mother’s death. Like Orpheus descending into the underworld, Vuong takes us to the white-hot limits of his grief, writing with visionary fervor about love, agony, and time. Without his mother, Vuong must remake his understanding of the world: what is identity when its source is gone? What is language without the cultural memory of our elders? Aesthetically ambitious and ferociously original, Time Is A Mother interrogates these impossibilities. “Nobody’s free without breaking open,” Vuong writes in one searing poem. Here, he breaks open and rebuilds. Get the book.

Minor Feelings, by Cathy Park Hong

In this radical exploration of the Asian American psyche, Hong writes masterfully about her experience of “minor feelings”: the painful cognitive dissonance you feel when the cultural messaging you receive contradicts the lived experience of your identity. Through cultural criticism, memoir, and historical investigation, Hong names and illuminates issues of race and gender that long went unnamed, creating a blistering new handbook to the state of race in America. With 70 percent of 2020’s 3,800 acts of anti-Asian violence committed against Asian women, Hong’s dissection of racism’s intersection with gender has renewed relevance. Get the Book

The Making of Asian America, by Erika Lee

From an award-winning historian comes a sweeping history of Asian Americans and their pivotal role in American life, beginning with the Asian sailors who arrived in the Americas through the first trans-Pacific voyages during the 1500s, and tracing through the ensuing centuries all the way to our contemporary moment. Lee delineates the unique histories of Asian Americans descended from Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Hmong, and other ancestral groups, while illuminating the myriad forms of discrimination they’ve faced in the United States. So too does Lee interrogate the corrosive stereotype of the “model minority.” The scope of this comprehensive history is downright epic, correcting centuries of national mythology and immigration narratives that long failed to highlight the vital role Asian Americans have played in shaping American life. Get the Book

Yellow Peril!, edited by John Kuo Wei Tchen and Dylan Yeats

This far-ranging visual compendium from two academic experts surveys the all-too vast body of anti-Asian images and writing that pervade Western history, from paintings and photographs to propaganda and pop culture ephemera. Beginning with European colonialism and the Enlightenment, Yellow Peril interrogates the xenophobia and racism that Asians have suffered in Eurocentric countries, considering how malevolent media gave rise to prejudice and abuse. For readers interested in the role media and cultural messaging play in promoting racism, Yellow Peril is an urgent and incisive primer on the subject. Get the Book

The Myth of the Model Minority, by Rosalind S. Chou and Joe R. Feagin

In the expanded second edition of this timely text, two distinguished professors of sociology explore what they call the “double consciousness” of many Asian Americans, who experience pervasive daily racism coupled with pressure to conform to the harmful, monolithic stereotype of “the model minority.” Through hundreds of interviews, Chou and Feagin illuminate the harassment and oppression Asian Americans endure on a daily basis. So too do they investigate the intersections of racism, gender, and sexuality, conducting interviews with Asian men who feel emasculated and Asian women who feel eroticized. In these carefully documented pages, a diverse symphony of voices rings out, lending visibility and dimension to what’s too often left unspoken. Get the Book

All You Can Ever Know, by Nicole Chung

In this stirring memoir, Chung recounts her upbringing in Oregon, where she was raised by white parents after her Korean biological parents placed her for adoption. In her predominantly white town, Chung rarely encountered other Asian Americans, but hid the extent of the prejudice she faced from her parents. It wasn’t until she stood at the precipice of becoming a mother herself that Chung decided to track down her birth family, whose complicated and difficult history yielded challenging but illuminating insights. Chung ruminates movingly on the nuances of transracial adoption, deconstructing the saccharine “happy ending” narratives that adoptees are often fed. In these mellifluous pages, she reflects beautifully on the complications of identity and belonging, making for a powerful story in which many transracial adoptees can see their struggles recognized. Get the Book

I Hotel, by Karen Tei Yamashita

In her magnum opus, Yamashita (the author of May 2020’s Esquire Book Club Pick, Sansei and Sensibility) sets the scene in San Francisco circa the '60s and '70s, when the Yellow Power movement rose to prominence in the American West. In ten linked novellas, all set at the I Hotel (a real landmark beloved by San Francisco’s AAPI community), an expansive cast of characters intersect at the hotel, which becomes a hotbed of pan-Asian culture and political activism. Kaleidoscopic, polyphonic, and dazzlingly ambitious, this sprawling novel operates not unlike an oral history, vividly capturing a people, a place, and a political movement. Get the Book

Native Speaker, by Chang-Rae Lee

Published in 1995, Lee’s searing debut novel about an Asian American man walking a tightrope between two cultures remains as relevant as ever. Described by his estranged wife as a "surreptitious, B+ student of life, illegal alien, emotional alien, Yellow peril: neo-American, stranger, follower, traitor, spy,” Henry Park is an American born to Korean immigrants, who works as a spy assigned to monitor an ascendent Korean-American politician. Henry longs to be what he considers a true American (a “native speaker”), but he remains an eternal outsider, neither American enough nor Korean enough to fully inhabit either identity. In this incisive story of alienation and assimilation, Lee crafts a blistering, deeply felt portrait of the second-generation immigrant experience. Get the Book

It Began With a Page, by Kyo Maclear and Julie Morstad

Struggling to talk with the children in your life about how racism targets Asian American communities? In this beautifully illustrated biography, Maclear and artist Julie Morstad educate young readers about the life of Gyo Fujikawa, the groundbreaking author and illustrator of children’s literature who advocated tirelessly for racial diversity in picture books. Raised in a strong and loving California household, Fujikawa avoided imprisonment in a Japanese internment camp while living in New York City, but her California-based family was not so fortunate. As her heart broke for her family, Fujikawa strove to represent children from all backgrounds in her books. Though her reluctant publisher initially passed on Babies, her book about a diverse group of multicultural children, Fujikawa pushed back, and Babies went on to sell over two million copies. Through this sensitive tribute to one woman’s fight for inclusivity, children can develop a richer understanding of just how recently segregation shaped American life, and how the fight for representation continues to matter deeply. Get the Book

This Time Will Be Different, by Misa Sugiura

Teens and tweens will fall hard for this soaring coming-of-age novel about CJ Katsuyama, a spirited seventeen-year-old teenager in Northern California who works alongside her aunt in her family’s flower shop. CJ’s complicated relationship with her achievement-minded mother comes to a boiling point when her mother plans to sell the shop to the local family who profited from the horrific internment of thousands of Japanese Americans, including her grandparents. In her single-minded quest to save the family business, CJ jeopardizes her friendships and romantic relationships, leading to powerful lessons about activism and allyship, as well as the long life of racism and implicit bias in the United States. In this sensitive and mature story of family, power, and love in all its forms, CJ embraces her history and finds her voice. Get the Book

China Men, by Maxine Hong Kingston

In her National Book Award-winning fusion of memory, mythology, and history, Kingston traces three generations of her male Chinese ancestors living in North America. These men include her great-grandfather, brought from China to Hawaii for indentured servitude in the fields; her grandfather, who built the transcontinental railroads alongside thousands of other Chinese laborers; her father, whose journey from China was questionably legal; and her brother, who served in Vietnam. Kingston questions what emigration does to cultural identity and masculinity, exploring how children of immigrants live in a limbo between old world expectations and new ways that jeopardize their cultural inheritance. Rich with deft storytelling about the cruelty and exclusion of the American Dream, China Men paints an arresting portrait of men between worlds. Get the Book

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