This #AAPI Heritage Month, we challenge you to only read books written by AAPI authors. Check out these books that recount lived experiences and highlight stories of what it's like to grow up in America. Support your local AAPI-owned book stores by purchasing your books here.
With All Our Strength by Anne Brodsky
"With All Our Strength is the inside story of this women-led underground organization and their fight for the rights of Afghan women. Anne Brodsky, the first writer given in-depth access to visit and interview their members and operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, shines light on the gruesome, often tragic, lives of Afghan women under some of the most brutal sexist oppression in the world." Source
Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by 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. 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." Source
The Making of Asian America by Erika Lee
"The Making of Asian America shows how generations of Asian immigrants and their American-born descendants have made and remade Asian American life, from sailors who came on the first trans-Pacific ships in the 1500 to the Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II. Over the past fifty years, a new Asian America has emerged out of community activism and the arrival of new immigrants and refugees. But as Lee shows, Asian Americans have continued to struggle as both “despised minorities” and “model minorities,” revealing all the ways that racism has persisted in their lives and in the life of the country." Source
America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States by Erika Lee
"The United States is known as a nation of immigrants. But it is also a nation of xenophobia. In America for Americans, Erika Lee shows that an irrational fear, hatred, and hostility toward immigrants has been a defining feature of our nation from the colonial era to the Trump era. Benjamin Franklin ridiculed Germans for their “strange and foreign ways.” Americans’ anxiety over Irish Catholics turned xenophobia into a national political movement. Chinese immigrants were excluded, Japanese incarcerated, and Mexicans deported. Today, Americans fear Muslims, Latinos, and the so-called browning of America." Source
To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before by Jenny Han
"Instead of confessing her love for boys, Lara Jean decides to seal her feelings within letters. She leaves the box under her bed, but later finds they have been mysteriously mailed out. Interesting consequences ensue." Source
The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives by Viet Thanh Nguyen
"Viet Nguyen, called “one of our great chroniclers of displacement” (Joyce Carol Oates, The New Yorker), brings together writers originally from Mexico, Bosnia, Iran, Afghanistan, Soviet Ukraine, Hungary, Chile, Ethiopia, and others to make their stories heard. They are formidable in their own right—MacArthur Genius grant recipients, National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award finalists, filmmakers, speakers, lawyers, professors, and New Yorker contributors—and they are all refugees, many as children arriving in London and Toronto, Oklahoma and Minnesota, South Africa and Germany. Their 17 contributions are as diverse as their own lives have been, and yet hold just as many themes in common." Source
Seasonal Velocities by Ryka Aoki
"This puzzle of Ryka Aoki’s work seamlessly fits together to display a full picture of growing up trans as a Japanese American, paving the way for many LGBTQIA+ and female authors." Source
Go Home! by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
"Asian diasporic writers imagine “home” in the twenty-first century through an array of fiction, memoir, and poetry. Both urgent and meditative, this anthology moves beyond the model-minority myth and showcases the singular intimacies of individuals figuring out what it means to belong." Source
Myth of the Model Minority: Asian Americans Facing Racism by Rosalind Chou
"The second edition of this popular book adds important new research on how racial stereotyping is gendered and sexualized. New interviews show that Asian American men feel emasculated in America’s male hierarchy. Women recount their experiences of being exoticized, subtly and otherwise, as sexual objects. The new data reveal how race, gender, and sexuality intersect in the lives of Asian Americans. The text retains all the features of the renowned first edition, which offered the first in-depth exploration of how Asian Americans experience and cope with everyday racism. The book depicts the “double consciousness” of many Asian Americans―experiencing racism but feeling the pressures to conform to popular images of their group as America’s highly achieving 'model minority.'" Source
Celebrate AAPI history, contributions, and challenges that AAPI women have faced in the United States by registering for our free event here.
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