My favorite books in celebration of APIDA Heritage Month (May 2021)

Hi all, for those that know me IRL, you probably know that I am a pretty big book nerd. In celebration of Asian Pacific Islander Desi American (APIDA) Heritage Month this May, I am including some of my favorite books by APIDA authors I read in the past year.

• We don’t hear much about experiences of navigating life, identities, and trauma from the perspective of trans-racial adoptees. In a mesmerizing, poignant, and brave memoir Older Sister, Not Necessarily Related, Jenny Heijun Wills details her experience as a Korean-born adoptee into a white family in small-town Canada, and her reconnection with her biological family and her own identity in her late 20s. [review: CBC]
• In Beyond the Gender Binary, Alok Vaid-Menon challenges the world to see gender not in black and white, but in full color. Taking from their own experiences as a gender-nonconforming artist, they show us that gender is a malleable and creative form of expression. [purchase from Alok on Shopify; Alok Vaid-Menon]
• Vietnamese-American writer and poet Ocean Vuong shares his experiences of love, family, trauma, and identity in a novel-length letter to his illiterate mother in On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous. [reviews: NPR, New Yorker, New York Times]
• I finished reading Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning in one weekend. In this ruthlessly honest and emotionally charged collection of essays, Cathy dissects her own experiences and sheds light on the conditional existence of Asian Americans in the US. [Review: New Yorker (Jia Tolentino); Interview with the author: Yale Review]
• Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror is an enlightening, unforgettable trip through the river of self-delusion that surges just beneath the surface of our lives. This is a book about the incentives that shape us, and about how hard it is to see ourselves clearly in a culture that revolves around the self. [review: New York Times]
• Pachinko by Min Jin Lee is an epic historical novel about a Korean family navigating racism, classism, and patriarchy against the backdrop of Japan’s occupation of Korea beginning in 1910 to the end of WWII. [reviews: NPR; The Guardian]
• In somber narrative, Chanel Miller details her transformation from an anonymous victim to a fierce advocate for survivors of sexual assault within the judicial system following publication of her powerful victim impact statement. Despite the palpable pain, Chanel manages to cultivate hope through her incredible strength through Know My Name. [reviews: NPR; NY Times]
• In the 2014 debut novel by Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told you, she details experiences of a Chinese American family that attempts to cope with grief/loss, systemic oppression, and internalized racism/expectations surrounding the drowning death of middle daughter Lydia. [review: NY Times]
• In Fairest, Meredith Talusan explores how her academic scholarship to Harvard provided access to elite circles of privilege and transformed her life across boundaries of race, class, sexuality, and gender as once a poor boy with albinism growing up in the Philippines. [Reviews: NPR]
• In Yiyun Li’s bitter-sweet semi-autobiographical novel Where Reasons End, a grieving mother converses with her teenage son following his death by suicide. Unlike other writing about suicide, Li’s poignant prose aims to capture her son’s impact on her life, instead of dwelling on why. [review: The Atlantic]
• Convenience Store Woman by Japanese writer Sayaka Murata details the heartwarming story of an unconventional 36-year-old Tokyo resident Keiko navigating rigid gender norms and unspoken social expectations as a neurodivergent person. Keiko beautifully captures her experience by stating, “..the normal world has no room for exceptions, and always quietly eliminates foreign objects. Anyone who’s lacking is disposed of.” [review: New York Times]
• In the Pulitzer winning collection of short stories Interpreter of Maladies (1999), Jhumpa Lahiri beautifully conveys the lives of Indians and Indian Americans as they navigate issues related to culture and identity. [review: New York Times]

Special recommendation:

• As a therapist, I also highly recommend Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation, what I consider to be the definitive book on critical race theory and Asian American mental health (with case examples and formulations), written by David Eng (Professor of English at University of Pennsylvania) and Sinhee Han (Psychotherapist at The New School and private practice in New York City). [review: The New Yorker]