Reading Recommendations : AANHPI Heritage Month
By Gypsy Walukones, Senior Communications Manager
Reading has been a big part of my life – admittedly more sporadically during my adult years – since before I started preschool. When I want to feel like my truest self AND explore the world and experiences of others, I turn to books.
A few weeks ago, I watched the documentary The Librarians, which had recently been featured by Meaningful Movies through our friends at Sustainable Ballard. While the free streaming period is over, it’s still available to stream through PBS Passport by donation to your local PBS station. The documentary focuses on an organized effort to ban books centering BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ characters and storylines from schools in Texas and across the U.S. The film did a great job of balancing tough moments with hope. I took inspiration from the featured school librarians and students speaking up about how vital it is to have their identities and experiences represented.
Our team loves to connect over food and sharing many different cuisines and cultural celebrations from our wider food bank community. We also often share book recommendations!
For Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Heritage Month, I wanted to highlight some books I’ve enjoyed from writers with identities under that umbrella. Shoutout to Seattle Public Library, the Libby app, and our local independent bookstores for making it easy to discover so many different voices!
Gypsy’s recommendations:
The Tenth Muse by Catherine Chung follows a brilliant mathematician as she seeks answers to both an unsolved math problem and questions about her identity and past. I enjoyed the reach across decades and continents, the twists and turns, historical context, and deep character development.
Insurrecto by Gina Apostal can be a challenging read. There are multiple viewpoints, multiple timelines (and dueling movie scripts), and horrifying incidents from 1901 during the Philippine-American War and under the more recent Duterte regime. And yet her writing weaves in a lot of humor as it explores some fascinating women and brilliant insights on how the history of U.S. imperialism impacts life today.
Love and Other Consolation Prizes by Jamie Ford may be lesser known than his Hotel at the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, but I was charmed by the powerful story, its characters and the way it wove together Seattle history from across two World’s Fairs.
I didn’t intentionally start writing this post with a historical fiction theme, but I see one developing here!
Switching gears, I turn to mysteries as my comfort reads and have enjoyed several mystery series by Asian American authors over the past few years. Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto is a delightful romp through San Francisco with lots of found-family vibes as an elderly tea shop owner investigates the murder of a man found dead in her shop, developing motherly feelings for her cast of suspects as she goes. There are some sad themes and moments, but lots of joy and laughter as well. I’m getting ready to enjoy the sequel! (Sutanto’s Four Aunties series is also very fun. Not mysteries but somewhat adjacent, each book is a caper full of misunderstandings, misadventures and nosy, loving family.)
The Verifiers by Jane Pek is the first in a series where protagonist Claudia Lin combines her love of mysteries and riding her bike all over New York City after stumbling into a murder and joining a dating detective service that investigates their clients’ online matches. In contrast to the older, widowed Vera Wong, Claudia is young and queer. Yet there are still some similar threads of immigrant parents and adult children struggling to understand each other. Both The Verifiers and the sequel The Rivals highlight some potentially sinister uses of technology to control human lives while also delving into the connections between the characters.
Arsenic and Adobo by Mia P. Manansala is the first in her Tita Rosie’s Kitchen Mystery Series, all cozy reads with lots of food descriptions (and some recipes), best friends, family, and a wiener dog named Longganisa, like the sausage. I devoured the first five books in the series – sorry/not sorry for the pun – and while some aren’t quite as good as others they’re always an enjoyable escape.
For higher-stakes mysteries and social restrictions, check out The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey. The first book in her Perveen Mistry series follows Perveen as she joins her father’s law firm in 1921 Bombay. Again, I enjoyed the historical context and insights into the burgeoning independence movement and weakening British empire. Less of a light read than the other mystery series’ I’ve mentioned, there are a lot of scenes of gender-based violence.
If you’re into nonfiction, I also strongly recommend these memoirs and essay collections:
Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir by Tessa Hulls
Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong
Of Color: Essays by Jaswinder Bolina
All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung
Recommendations from our team:
Ciara’s recommendation: Daughter of the Moon Goddess by Sue Lynn Tan
“Action packed with a strong and resilient main character who trains and becomes the best to rescue her mom. A nice read when you want to be distracted from the world. I loved the descriptions of the clothing, the beautiful surroundings, and the warrior training the main character goes through.”
Jade’s recommendation: Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
“A sweeping epic that follows Sunja and four generations of her family across nearly eight decades and three countries. Sunja, a woman from a small fishing village in Korea, must make a life for her family in wartime Japan. She does everything in her power to maintain agency and dignity for herself and those she loves while facing the barriers of her time and place (war, gender discrimination, colonization, xenophobia, and classism.) I learned so much about Japanese and Korean history through this unforgettable story of familial love, choice, and devotion. A powerful meditation on the relationship between the personal and the political with vast emotional depth and beautiful prose.”
Susan’s recommendation: “I loved On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (general fiction, but VERY poetic)”
I realized when I was looking over my list that while the authors encompassed various South Asian, Southeast Asian, and East Asian identities, my reading lacked voices from Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander writers. My colleague Ciara shared this blog post from Fakequity with some specific recommendations, so I’m excited to dig into some of those next!
What books by AANHPI authors would you recommend? I’d love to hear from you via email at gypsyw@ballardfoodbank.org!