Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander: What We’re Reading

The Seven Moons of Mali Almeid
Shehan Karunatilaka

Colombo, 1990. Maali Almeida—war photographer, gambler, and closet queen—has woken up dead in what seems like a celestial visa office. His dismembered body is sinking in the serene Beira Lake and he has no idea who killed him. In a country where scores are settled by death squads, suicide bombers, and hired goons, the list of suspects is depressingly long, as the ghouls and ghosts with grudges who cluster round can attest. Learn more.

Build Your House Around My Body
Violet Kupersmith

Build Your House Around My Body takes us from colonial mansions to ramshackle zoos, from sweaty nightclubs to the jostling seats of motorbikes, from ex-pat flats to sizzling back-alley street carts. Spanning more than fifty years of Vietnamese history and barreling toward an unforgettable conclusion, this is a time-traveling, heart-pounding, border-crossing fever dream of a novel that will haunt you long after the last page. Learn more.

Crying in H Mart
Michelle Zauner

Crying In H Mart is a memoir of food and family. The author, Michelle Zauner, is a successful musician who performs as Japanese Breakfast. She grew up with a white, American father and a Korean mother. After her mother died of cancer in 2014, Zauner writes she would stand in the aisles of the Korean grocery store chain H Mart. Learn more.

Dust Child
Que Mai Phan Nguyen

Nguyen Phan Que Mai, an award-winning Vietnamese writer and journalist, has written a novel that tells the stories of people of mixed-race born out of wartime relationships between U.S. servicemen and Vietnamese women who are often left to languish in orphanages, shunned in their communities, left behind and forgotten by their biological fathers. Learn more.

Stay True
Hua Hsu

In Stay True, Hua Hsu, a staff writer for The New Yorker, recounts his relationship with an Asian American college friend, whose search for identity quietly shaped the author’s own. Learn more.

Money Out Loud
All the Financial Stuff No One Taught Us

Berna Anat

In this illustrated, deeply unserious guide to money, Berna Anat—aka the Financial Hype Woman—freaks out her immigrant parents by doing the unthinkable: Talking about money. Loudly. Learn more.

Epitaph for a Peach
David M. Masumoto

A lyrical, sensuous and thoroughly engrossing memoir of one critical year in the life of an organic peach farmer, Epitaph for a Peach is “a delightful narrative . . . with poetic flair and a sense of humor.” Learn more.

Aloha Kitchen
Alana Kysar

In Aloha Kitchen, Alana Kysar takes you into the homes, restaurants, and farms of Hawaiʻi, exploring the cultural and agricultural influences that have made dishes like plate lunch and poke crave-worthy culinary sensations with locals and mainlanders alike. Learn more.

Mooncakes & Milk Bread
Kristina Cho

Mooncakes & Milk Bread is a one-of-a-kind culinary adventure through the world of Chinese bakeries from architect-turned-food-blogger Kristina Cho. Discover all-new recipes, traditional recipes reinterpreted for modern bakers, and an insider’s look at a few legendary Chinese bakeries. Learn more.

Chinatown Pretty
Andria Lo and Valerie Luu

Chinatown Pretty features beautiful portraits and heartwarming stories of trend-setting seniors across six Chinatowns. Andria Lo and Valerie Luu have been interviewing and photographing Chinatown’s most fashionable elders on their blog and Instagram, Chinatown Pretty, since 2014. Learn more.

Cook Real Hawai’i
Sheldon Simeon and Garrett Snyder

The story of Hawaiian cooking, by a two-time Top Chef finalist and Fan Favorite, through 100 recipes that embody the beautiful cross-cultural exchange of the islands. Learn more.

Be Water, My Friend
Shannon Lee

Bruce Lee’s daughter illuminates her father’s most powerful life philosophies—demonstrating how martial arts are a perfect metaphor for personal growth, and how we can practice those teachings every day.

“Empty your mind; be formless, shapeless like water.”  Learn more.

Savor – a Chef’s Hunger for More
Fatima Ali with Tarajia Morrell

A young chef whose dreams were cut short savors every last minute as she explores food and adventure, illness and mortality in Savor, an “inspiring” (The New York Times Book Review) memoir and family story that sweeps from Pakistan to Manhattan and beyond. Learn more.

This Is Paradise
Kristiana Kahakauwila

In a stunning collection that announces the arrival of an incredible talent, Kristiana Kahakauwila travels the islands of Hawai’i, making the fabled place her own. Exploring the deep tensions between local and tourist, tradition and expectation, façade and authentic self, This Is Paradise provides an unforgettable portrait of life as it’s truly being lived on Maui, Oahu, Kaua’i and the Big Island. Learn more.

A Place for Us
Fatima Farheen Mirza

A Place for Us unfolds the lives of an Indian-American Muslim family, gathered together in their Californian hometown to celebrate the eldest daughter, Hadia’s, wedding – a match of love rather than tradition. Learn more.

The Bad Muslim Discount
Syed M. Masood

Following two families from Pakistan and Iraq in the 1990s to San Francisco in 2016, The Bad Muslim Discount is an inclusive, comic novel about Muslim immigrants finding their way in modern America. Learn more.

The Making of Asian America: A History
Erika Lee

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. Learn more.

Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister
Jung Chang

Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister is a gripping story of love, war, intrigue, bravery, glamour and betrayal, which takes us on a sweeping journey from Canton to Hawaii to New York …

They Called Us Enemy: Expanded Edition
By George Takei, Justin Eisinger, Steve Scott and Harmony Becker (Illustrator)

Now with sixteen pages of bonus content from George Takei and his co-creators: a new afterword plus a behind-the-scenes tour of the process of researching, writing, drawing, and promoting They Called Us Enemy, featuring historical documents, scripts, sketches, photos, and more!

How Much of These Hills Is Gold
By C Pam Zhang

Born in Beijing, C Pam Zhang is mostly an artifact of the United States. She is the author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold, winner of the Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award and the Asian/Pacific Award for Literature.

Honor Before Glory: The Epic World War II Story of the Japanese American GIs Who Rescued the Lost Battalion
By Scott McGaugh

On October 24, 1944, more than two hundred American soldiers realized they were surrounded by German infantry deep in the mountain forest of eastern France. As their dwindling food, ammunition, and medical supplies ran out, the American commanding officer turned to the 442nd Regimental Combat Team to achieve what other units had failed to do.

Eat a Peach: A Memoir
David Chang

From the chef behind Momofuku and star of Netflix’s Ugly Delicious—an intimate account of the making of a chef, the story of the modern restaurant world that he helped shape, and how he discovered that success can be much harder to understand than failure.

The Sympathizer
Viet Thanh

A profound, startling, and beautifully crafted debut novel, The Sympathizer is the story of a man of two minds, someone whose political beliefs clash with his individual loyalties.

He Mele A Hilo: A Hilo Song
Ryka Aoki

Ryka Aoki is a writer, performer, and educator who has been honored by the California State Senate for her “extraordinary commitment to free speech and artistic expression, as well as the visibility and well-being of transgender people.”

The Accidental Asian
Eric Liu

In The Accidental Asian, Liu writes with a heavy dose of humor and irony as he explores themes of race and identity. 

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
Cathy Park Hong

Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America.

Strangers from a Different Shore
Ronald Takaki

Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans is a work of nonfiction by Ronald Toshiyuki Takaki. First published in 1989 by Back Bay Books, the work discusses 150 years of Asian American history through recollections, interviews, and historical facts.

America is Not the Heart
Elaine Castillo

There is much more than the average “Asian expatriate in the US” story to be found in the debut novel by Elaine Castillo. America Is Not the Heart offers some genuine insights into love, life and what constitutes a home as well as an absorbing family saga set between the Philippines and the Bay area of San Francisco.

My Year of Meats
Ruth Ozeki

A cross-cultural tale of two women brought together by the intersections of television and industrial agriculture, fertility and motherhood, life and love — the breakout hit by the celebrated author of A Tale for the Time Being.

The Stationery Shop
Marjan Kamali

A poignant, heartfelt new novel by the award-nominated author of Together Tea—extolled by the Wall Street Journal as a “moving tale of lost love” and by Shelf Awareness as “a powerful, heartbreaking story”—explores loss, reconciliation, and the quirks of fate.

Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama
Diane C. Fujino

On February 12, 1965, in the Audubon Ballroom, Yuri Kochiyama cradled Malcolm X in her arms as he died, but her role as a public servant and activist began much earlier than this pivotal public moment. Heartbeat of Struggle is the first biography of this courageous woman, the most prominent Asian American activist to emerge during the 1960s.

Pachinko
Lee Min-jin

In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant — and that her lover is married — she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan.

Afterparties
Anthony Veasna So

Seamlessly transitioning between the absurd and the tenderhearted, balancing acerbic humor with sharp emotional depth, Afterparties offers an expansive portrait of the lives of Cambodian-Americans. As the children of refugees carve out radical new paths for themselves in California, they shoulder the inherited weight of the Khmer Rouge genocide and grapple with the complexities of race, sexuality, friendship, and family.

Dear America
Notes of an Undocumented Citizen
By Jose Antonio Vargas

Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, called “the most famous undocumented immigrant in America,” tackles one of the defining issues of our time in this explosive and deeply personal call to arms.

Dear Girls: Intimate Tales, Untold Secrets, & Advice for Living Your Best Life
Ali Wong

Ali Wong’s heartfelt and hilarious letters to her daughters (the two she put to work while they were still in utero), covering 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.