See a curated reading list from members of TIME's Asian community that celebrates Asian authors
It might seem trite to say that in times of despair, we can look to the written word for solace. The shootings in Atlanta on March 16, in which a white gunman killed eight people, six of whom were Asian women, has sent waves of grief through the Asian American community and through global East and South East Asian communities. How can the written word even start to convey the pain caused by decades of racism and discrimination, a pain that has felt more acute as attacks targeting Asian people increased over the past year?
The merits, pitfalls and purposes of the “anti-racist reading list”—and whom such lists are written by and for—have been hotly debated. As author Lisa Ko tweeted on March 19, “white supremacy is not going to be dismantled through diverse reading lists.” The last year, particularly following the summer’s widespread Black Lives Matter protests, prompted a rush to compile lists of books written by Black authors and authors of color, intended to service white audiences in the name of antiracism. Such efforts can take away the inherent pleasure of reading and enjoying literature, the author Yaa Gyasi argued in a March 20 piece for The Guardian: “So many of the writers of colour that I know have had white people treat their work as though it were a kind of medicine. Something they have to swallow in order to improve their condition, but they don’t really want it, they don’t really enjoy it, and if they’re being totally honest, they don’t actually even take the medicine half the time. They just buy it and leave it on the shelf. What pleasure, what deepening, could there be in “reading” like that? To enter the world of fiction with such a tainted mission is to doom the novel or short story to fail you on its most essential levels.”
In putting together our own reading list at TIME, we asked ourselves what audience we really wanted to serve—and the answer was clear: each other. In the curation below, Asian staffers in TIME’s newsroom share the books that have brought them hope, comfort and joy. (For readers looking to purchase them, check out audiobook service Libro.fm‘s list of AAPI-owned bookstores.) This list is not intended to educate, but to celebrate. To celebrate the richness, the diversity and the joy of stories by our community, for our community, and curated by our community. The books below resonated with each of us—and we hope they might make you feel, in some way, seen as well.
The Best We Could Do is a true story of a family forced to leave their home to find a new life. In this graphic novel, author Thi Bui tells her personal and familial story set before, during and after the Vietnam war. She illustrates how her family escaped the fall of South Vietnam in the 1970s and the challenges they faced living in America. In sharing the stories of her parents, grandparents and herself, Bui opens up the history of Vietnam. And through illustrations she elegantly portrays the struggles of assimilation and the heartbreak her family endured when they were forced to leave behind everything they knew. The memoir is a detailed family history and an accurate representation of Vietnamese people during the Vietnam war and the realities of finding a better life and a new land. — Karena Phan
Buy Now: The Best We Could Do on Bookshop | Amazon
“It is difficult to parse which parts of me come from my family, from being Chinese, from being Asian American, from being American, from being a woman, from being of a certain generation, and from, simply, being,” thinks the 24-year-old narrator of Days of Distraction. She’s a writer at a prestigious tech magazine in Silicon Valley, who follows her longtime boyfriend, J, to a quiet town in upstate New York. Along the way, she starts to question what it means to be in an interracial relationship, delving into the history of Asian Americans and her own family history. I loved Alexandra Chang’s debut novel, which came out in March 2020. In funny, tender and thought-provoking vignettes and fragments, Chang articulates many aspects of office politics, racism, misogyny, love and identity in an insightful way. As an Asian journalist who has been in many similar environments to ones in the novel, her words deeply resonated with me. — Naina Bajekal
Buy Now: Days of Distraction on Bookshop | Amazon
“It is my conscious decision to write about characters and people whose private personal lives are intimately connected with the politics and history of the country,” historian and writer Jung Chang told TIME in 2019, speaking about her book Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister: Three Women at the Heart of Twentieth-Century China. This approach to the history of China started with Chang’s epic autobiography Wild Swans, published in 1991 to international acclaim. Weaving together family history, including the experiences of her grandmother, her mother and her own story against the backdrop of 20th century China, Chang portrayed the experiences of women’s lives in a nuanced, deeply personal, yet accessible way. “I did not appreciate that information about China was not easily available, or was largely misunderstood, in the West,” writes Chang, reflecting on her time as a young woman in the early 1970s. Reading Wild Swans and Chang’s subsequent work goes a long way toward changing that. — Suyin Haynes
Buy Now: Wild Swans on Bookshop | Amazon
In this powerful collection of essays, Alexander Chee charts many of his formative life experiences, from his father’s death to the 2016 presidential election to his activism during the height of the AIDS epidemic. Through 16 pieces, Chee examines his multiple identities as a Korean American, gay man, lover and writer, posing urgent questions along the way about the space between life and art. In these pieces, he weaves the threads of his personal history and his coming of age as a writer. I remember reading this before taking a creative writing workshop and feeling more energized than ever by reading the advice that Chee recalls a professor giving to him. “Yes, everything’s been written, but also, the thing you want to write, before you wrote it, was impossible to write. Otherwise it would already exist. Your writing makes it possible.” — Naina Bajekal
Buy Now: How to Write an Autobiographical Novel on Bookshop | Amazon
We Are Not Free follows a group of 14 second-generation Japanese American teens in 1942, whose lives are upended after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. Forced to leave their homes in San Francisco and live in incarceration camps, each teen experiences a range of challenges, from dislocation to discrimination. Author Traci Chee gives each character a distinct voice and uses different formats to share their stories and perspectives, including verse, letters and first-person narratives. Chee crafts a transformative story about teens facing incredible adversity during a tragic point in American history. —Karena Phan
Buy Now: We Are Not Free on Bookshop | Amazon
Arguably the first Chinese American novel to receive widespread publication, Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea takes an unflinching dive into Manhattan’s Chinatown in the 1940s, where the rigid societal structures of the old world clashed with 20th century dreams and desires. Chu has no qualms in grappling with the community’s misogyny, violence and shame, while painting vivid scenes of communal joy and support. The book’s honesty and brutality made it shocking to many readers when it was published in 1961; it is now central to Asian American history and studies. — Andrew R. Chow
Buy Now: Eat a Bowl of Tea on Bookshop | Amazon
As she prepares to become a mother herself, author Nicole Chung searches for answers about her biological parents in her debut memoir. Growing up in Oregon, Chung’s mother, who was white, always told her a comforting tale about her adoption: “Your birth parents had just moved here from Korea. They thought they wouldn’t be able to give you the life you deserved.”
I was deeply moved by Chung’s stories of growing up in a mostly white, “colorblind” society. “To be a hero, I thought, you had to be beautiful and adored. To be beautiful and adored, you had to be white,” she writes. While I’m not an adoptee and will never know the experience of not being seen fully by your own family, this memoir is such an urgent meditation on race, motherhood and the search for identity that I have gone back to it countless times for comfort. — Naina Bajekal
Buy Now: All You Can Ever Know on Bookshop | Amazon
When I was 13 years old, I read Kiran Desai’s extraordinary novel, The Inheritance of Loss. Every time I’ve read it since, I find more to love in the prose, which is gorgeous from the very first sentence: “The colors had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains.” The novel follows Sai, an orphaned teenager living with her Anglophile grandfather in a crumbling house on the Indian side of the Himalayas; in a parallel narrative, we see Biju, the son of Sai’s grandfather’s cook, who drifts from one New York restaurant to another, trying to make a life for himself but ground down by the reality of being an “illegal” immigrant, “a dirty little rodent secret” that only other Indians living abroad could understand.
“Certain moves made long ago had produced all of them,” Desai writes, deftly weaving together India’s colonial history with the 21st-century issues of globalization, terrorism and inequality. As the daughter of Indian immigrants who moved to Britain full of optimism, as the granddaughter and great-granddaughter of men and women who marched for India’s independence and went to prison for the cause, I have always found this extraordinary novel to be one of the best at capturing the ways in which modern multiculturalism has fallen short of its promises. — Naina Bajekal
Buy Now: The Inheritance of Loss on Bookshop | Amazon
Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings is the most honest and apt exploration of Asian American identity I’ve ever read. This prescient collection of essays, published in early 2020 just before a year of unprecedented anti-Asian violence due to the pandemic, finds its immeasurable strength in the subtleties, struggles and occasional triumphs of a community living at the margins of a society, largely unacknowledged and left out of a national dialogue about race. Running the gamut from unpacking the shame she felt growing up as the daughter of Korean immigrants to deconstructing her identification with the uncomfortable, caustic comedy of Richard Pryor, Hong’s essays are at once candid, complex and gutting. They demand to be seen in the full range of her humanity as an Asian American woman and writer. — Cady Lang
Buy Now: Minor Feelings on Bookshop | Amazon
In Mira Jacob’s graphic memoir Good Talk, tough questions are the catalysts for necessary discussions. Framed through the innocent yet poignant queries of her 6-year-old half-Jewish, half-Indian son ahead of the 2016 presidential election, Jacob seeks to find thoughtful but truthful answers to questions like, “Are white people afraid of brown people?” by revisiting her lived experiences. Using both humor and grace, Jacob considers the dialogues in her life that have shaped how she views the world—and the America we live in— from coming of age as one of the few students of color and one of the only South Asian students in her New Mexico high school to reckoning with her white in-laws’ support of Donald Trump. The conversations aren’t always easy, but Jacob approaches each with nuance and fierce compassion—making the case that good talk is an essential part of not only learning, but healing. — Cady Lang
Buy Now: Good Talk on Bookshop |
