A selection of books exploring and celebrating Asian/Pacific American history and culture, with emphasis on books by Asian/Pacific American authors. For more books and resources on Racial Equity and Social Justice, see the resource guide Racial Equity Resources. For more new history books, sent to your inbox, subscribe to the History Insider Newsletter.
Also check out our East Asia in Wisconsin list of cookbooks purchased with a grant from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for East Asian Studies (CEAS) as part of the new East Asia in Wisconsin Library Program. Learn more about this grant!
History
In 1942 more than 109,000 Japanese Americans, including 70,000 U.S. citizens, were picked up and sent to incarceration centers, most for the duration of the war. It was the shame of America-- and it was documented on film. Cahan and Williams provide a visual history which includes interviews with many of the people reflecting on their experiences.
A groundbreaking, breathtaking history of the Chinese workers who built the Transcontinental Railroad, helping to forge modern America only to disappear into the shadows of history until now.
Chang, the daughter of second-wave Chinese immigrants, has written an extraordinary narrative that encompasses the entire history of one of the fastest growing ethnic groups in the United States, an epic story that spans 150 years and continues to the present day. Chang takes a fresh look at what it means to be an American and draws a complex portrait of the many accomplishments of the Chinese in their adopted country, from building the transcontinental railroad to major scientific and technological advances.
Twins Chang and Eng Bunker (1811-1874), conjoined at the sternum by a band of cartilage and a fused liver, were "discovered" in Siam by a British merchant in 1824. Yunte Huang depicts the twins, arriving in Boston in 1829, first as museum exhibits but later as financially savvy showmen.Their rise from freak-show celebrities to rich southern gentry; their marriage to two white sisters, resulting in twenty-one children; and their owning of slaves is here not just another sensational biography but an excavation of America's historical penchant for finding feast in the abnormal, for tyrannizing the "other"--a tradition that, as Huang reveals, becomes inseparable from American history itself.
From the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the Immigration Act of 1924 to Japanese American internment during World War II, the United States has a long history of anti-Asian policies. But Lon Kurashige demonstrates that despite widespread racism, Asian exclusion was not the product of an ongoing national consensus; it was a subject of fierce debate. This book complicates the exclusion story by examining the organized and well-funded opposition to discrimination that involved some of the most powerful public figures in American politics, business, religion, and academia. In recovering this opposition, Kurashige explains the rise and fall of exclusionist policies through an unstable and protracted political rivalry that began in the 1850s with the coming of Asian immigrants, extended to the age of exclusion from the 1880s until the 1960s, and since then has shaped the memory of past discrimination.
In the past fifty years, Asian Americans have helped change the face of America and are now the fastest growing group in the United States. But as award-winning historian Erika Lee reminds us, Asian Americans also have deep roots in the country. The Making of Asian America tells the little-known history of Asian Americans and their role in American life, from the arrival of the first Asians in the Americas to the present-day.
During the first hundred years of Chinese immigration--from 1848 to 1943--San Francisco was home to a shockingly extensive underground slave trade in Asian women, who were exploited as prostitutes and indentured servants. In this gripping, necessary book, bestselling author Julia Flynn Siler shines a light on this little-known chapter in our history--and gives us a vivid portrait of the safe house to which enslaved women escaped.
This groundbreaking book traces the transformation of Asian Americans from a few small, disconnected, and largely invisible ethnic groups into a self-identified racial group that is influencing every aspect of American society. It explores the events that shocked Asian Americans into motion and shaped a new consciousness.
Culture
Despite the fact that two thirds of U.S. Buddhists identify as Asian American, mainstream perceptions about what it means to be Buddhist in America often whitewash and invisibilize the diverse, inclusive, and intersectional communities that lie at the heart of American Buddhism. Be the Refuge is both critique and celebration, calling out the erasure of Asian American Buddhists while uplifting the complexity and nuance of their authentic stories and vital, thriving communities.
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. eBook
Since 9/11, we continue to hear incomplete and sanitized histories ... that all too often neglect the experiences of South Asian, Arab, Muslim, and Sikh immigrant communities in the United States. Activist Deepa Iyer catalogs recent racial flashpoints, from the 2012 massacre at the Sikh gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, to the relentless opposition to the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and to the Park 51 Community Center in Lower Manhattan. Iyer places the hate violence, Islamophobia, and xenophobia in a broader context -- that of an American racial landscape undergoing a rapid and radical demographic transformation. Iyer shows how South Asian, Arab, Muslim, and Sikh immigrant communities engage in ... undocumented youth, Black Lives Matter, and Black-Brown coalitions that can inspire new directions for racial justice in the United States.
How do we love in a time of rage? How do we fix a broken world while not breaking ourselves? Valarie Kaur--renowned Sikh activist, filmmaker, and civil rights lawyer--describes revolutionary love as the call of our time, a radical, joyful practice that extends in three directions: to others, to our opponents, and to ourselves.
An award-winning historian reframes our continuing debate over immigration with a compelling history of xenophobia in the United States and its devastating impact.
Portraits and stories of fashionable seniors across Chinatowns in San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, and Vancouver, in a celebration of aging gracefully and Asian-American culture.
All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory. Exploring how this troubled memory works in Vietnam, the United States, Laos, Cambodia, and South Korea, the book deals specifically with the Vietnam War and also war in general. Nguyen reveals how war is a part of our identity, as individuals and as citizens of nations armed to the teeth. Venturing through literature, film, monuments, memorials, museums, and landscapes of the Vietnam War, he argues that an alternative to nationalism and war exists in art, created by artists who adhere to no nation but the imagination.
Based on her popular Instagram @Hatecopy and her experience in a South Asian immigrant family, artist Maria Qamar has created a humorous, illustrated "survival guide" to deal with overbearing "Aunties," whether they're family members, annoying neighbors, or just some random ladies throwing black magic your way.
A first-generation immigrant's exploration of race and assimilation in the United States, an American's journey into the heart of not-whiteness. Part memoir, part manifesto, Not Quite Not White is a searing appraisal of race and a path forward for the next not quite not white generation - a witty and sharply honest story of discovering that not-whiteness can be the very thing that makes people Americans.
Memoirs & Essays
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.
This beautifully illustrated and emotional story is an evocative memoir about the search for a better future and a longing for the past. Exploring the anguish of immigration and the lasting effects that displacement has on a child and her family, Bui documents the story of her family's daring escape after the fall of South Vietnam in the 1970s, and the difficulties they faced building new lives for themselves. (Graphic novel) eBook
A dual first-person memoir by the acclaimed Vietnamese-American novelist and her thoroughly American teenage daughter-exploring their complicated relationship and touching on war and past tragedy, culture clash and bullying, and growing up both as individuals and as a family.
Chung investigates the mysteries and complexities of her transracial adoption in this chronicle of unexpected family for anyone who has struggled to figure out where they belong. eBook
In 1972, when she was seven, Firoozeh Dumas and her family moved from Iran to Southern California, arriving with no firsthand knowledge of this country beyond her father’s glowing memories of his graduate school years here. More family soon followed, and the clan has been here ever since. Funny in Farsi chronicles the American journey of Dumas’s wonderfully engaging family in an unforgettable story of identity, discovery, and the power of family love. eBook
The author is the thirty-year-old proprietor of Baohaus, the hot East Village hangout where foodies, stoners, and students come to stuff their faces with delicious Taiwanese street food late into the night, and one of the food world's brightest and most controversial young stars. But before he created the perfect home for himself in a small patch of downtown New York, he wandered the American wilderness looking for a place to call his own. This book is the immigrant's story for the twenty-first century; a story of food, family, and the forging of a new notion of what it means to be an American. eBook, eAudio
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. eAudio
Hollywood starlet Mindy Kaling shares her ongoing, laugh-out-loud journey to find contentment and excitement in her adult life.
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. eBook
A powerful and aching love story in letters, from mother to daughter. After living in America for over a decade, Eun Ji Koh's parents return to South Korea for work, leaving fifteen-year-old Eun Ji and her brother behind in California. Overnight, Eun Ji finds herself abandoned and adrift in a world made strange by her mother's absence. Her mother writes letters in Korean over the years seeking forgiveness and love--letters Eun Ji cannot fully understand until she finds them years later hidden in a box.
A debut collection of fierce, funny essays about growing up the daughter of Indian immigrants in Western culture, addressing sexism, stereotypes, and the universal miseries of life. eAudio
Acclaimed literary essayist T Kira Madden's raw and redemptive debut memoir is about coming of age and reckoning with desire as a queer, biracial teenager amidst the fierce contradictions of Boca Raton, Florida, a place where she found cult-like privilege, shocking racial disparities, rampant white-collar crime, and powerfully destructive standards of beauty hiding in plain sight. eBook
Marie Mutsuki Mockett's family owns a Buddhist temple but after the Fukushima disaster, radiation levels prohibited the burial of her Japanese grandfather's bones. As Japan mourned, Mockett also grieved for her American father who had died unexpectedly. Seeking consolation, Mockett is guided by a colourful cast of Zen priests and ordinary Japanese who perform rituals that disturb, haunt and finally uplift her.
A coming-of-age memoir by a Vietnamese American recounts her struggles for an American identity in the pre-politically correct climate of the Midwest and her passion for American food in the face of her family's Buddhist lifestyle.
A richly textured reflection on what it is to be a Muslim in America today, and the luminous story of many journeys: from Pakistan to the United States in an arranged marriage that becomes a love match lasting forty years; from secular Muslim in an Islamic society to devout Muslim in a society ignorant of Islam, and from liberal to conservative to American Muslim; from student to bride and mother; and from an immigrant intending to stay two years to an American citizen, business executive, grandmother, and tireless advocate for interfaith understanding.
A heart-wrenching memoir about an immigrant family's American Dream, the justice system that took it away, and the daughter who fought to get it back, from NPR correspondent Aarti Namdev Shahani.
A stunning graphic memoir recounting actor/author/activist George Takei's childhood imprisoned within American concentration camps during World War II. (Graphic novel) eBook
A memoir in graphic novel format about the author's experiences as the son of Vietnamese immigrants who fled to America during the fall of Saigon describes how he learned his tragic ancestral history and the impact of the Vietnam War on his family while visiting their homeland years later. (Graphic novel)
For anyone who has ever felt like they don't belong, Sigh, Gone shares an irreverent, funny, and moving tale of displacement and assimilation woven together with poignant themes from beloved works of classic literature. eBook
Ali Wong's heartfelt and hilarious letters to her daughters (the two she put to work while they were still in utero) cover everything they need to know in life, like the unpleasant details of dating, how to be a working mom in a male-dominated profession, and how she trapped their dad. eBook, eAudio
In the Hmong tradition, the song poet recounts the story of his people, their history and tragedies, joys and losses. He keeps the past alive, invokes the spirits and the homeland, and records courtships, births, weddings, and wishes. Following her award-winning memoir The Latehomecomer, Kao Kalia Yang now retells the life of her father, Bee Yang, the song poet--a Hmong refugee in Minnesota, driven from the mountains of Laos by America's Secret War. eBook, eAudio
One of the most acclaimed essayists of his generation, Wesley Yang writes about race and sex without the jargon, formulas, and polite lies that bore us all. His powerful debut collection does more than collect a decade's worth of cult-reputation essays--it corrals new American herds of pickup artists, school shooters, mandarin zombies, and immigrant strivers, and exposes them to scrutiny, empathy, and polemical force.
Poetry
Orphaned as a child, Fatimah Asghar grapples with coming of age and navigating questions of sexuality and race without the guidance of a mother or father. These poems at once bear anguish, joy, vulnerability, and compassion, while also exploring the many facets of violence: how it persists within us, how it is inherited across generations, and how it manifests itself in our relationships. In experimental forms and language both lyrical and raw, Asghar seamlessly braids together marginalized peoples histories with her own understanding of identity, place, and belonging.
After her mother died, poet Victoria Chang refused to write elegies. Rather, she distilled her grief during a feverish two weeks by writing scores of poetic obituaries for all she lost in the world. In Obit, Chang writes of "the way memory gets up after someone has died and starts walking." These poems reinvent the form of newspaper obituary to both name what has died ("civility," "language," "the future," "Mother's blue dress") and the cultural impact of death on the living. Whereas elegy attempts to immortalize the dead, an obituary expresses loss, and the love for the dead becomes a conduit for self-expression. In this unflinching and lyrical book, Chang meets her grief and creates a powerful testament for the living.
Soft Science explores queer, Asian American femininity. A series of Turing Test-inspired poems grounds its exploration of questions not just of identity, but of consciousness--how to be tender and feeling and still survive a violent world filled with artificial intelligence and automation. We are dropped straight into the tangled intersections of technology, violence, erasure, agency, gender, and loneliness.
Lucky Fish travels along a lush current—a confluence of leaping vocabulary and startling formal variety, with upwelling gratitude at its source: for love, motherhood, "new hope," and the fluid and rich possibilities of words themselves. With an exuberant appetite for "my morning song, my scurry-step, my dew," anchored in complicated human situations, this astounding young poet's third collection of poems is her strongest yet.
In this collection of poetry, Seshadri takes on the planar paradoxes of time and space, destabilizing highly tuned lyrics and elegies with dizzying turns in poems of unrequitable longing, of longing for longing, of longing to be found, of profound grief.
This debut collection reshapes a Cambodian family's memory about the Khmer Rouge regime--memory both real and imagined.
From the current phenomenon of drawing calligraphy with water in public parks in China to Thomas Jefferson laying out dinosaur bones on the White House floor, from the last sighting of the axolotl to a man who stops building plutonium triggers, Sight Lines moves through space and time and brings the disparate and divergent into stunning and meaningful focus. In this new work, Arthur Sze employs a wide range of voices--from lichen on a ceiling to a man behind on his rent--and his mythic imagination continually evokes how humans are endangering the planet; yet, balancing rigor with passion, he seizes the significant and luminous and transforms these moments into riveting and enduring poetry.
A powerful, essential collection of poetry that recounts with devastating detail the Hmong exodus from Laos and the fate of thousands of refugees seeking asylum.
A haunting debut that is simultaneously dreamlike and visceral, vulnerable and redemptive, and risks the painful rewards of emotional honesty.