8 Memoirs for AANHPI Heritage Month

By Reclaim Editors

F

or Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we recommend picking up a book (or two) to help you learn about a perspective that may be unfamiliar to you, or perhaps makes you feel more seen in your own identity and experience.

This list of eight books is in no way complete but rather a starting point for your own exploration. Reclaim and AACC exist to help spread the message that there is no one experience, one way of being as an AANHPI. We each carry our own truth, our own stories, and our own beautiful existence.

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The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father — Kao Kalia Yang
In the Hmong tradition, the song poet recounts the story of his people, their history and tragedies, joys and losses. He keeps the past alive, invokes the spirits and the homeland, and records courtships, births, weddings, and wishes. Kao Kalia Yang now retells the life of her father, Bee Yang, the song poet--a Hmong refugee in Minnesota, driven from the mountains of Laos by America's Secret War.

Beautiful Country: A Memoir of an Undocumented Childhood — Qian Julie Wang
In Chinese, the word for America, Mei Guo, translates directly to "beautiful country." Yet when seven-year-old Qian arrives in New York City in 1994 full of curiosity, she is overwhelmed by crushing fear and scarcity. In China, Qian's parents were professors; in America, her family is "illegal" and it will require all the determination and small joys they can muster to survive.

House of Sticks — Ly Tran
This beautifully written masterclass in memoir recounts a young girl's journey from war-torn Vietnam to Queens, New York, showcasing the tremendous power we have to alter the fates of others, step into their lives and shift the odds in favor of greater opportunity.

Little Manila Is in the Heart — Dawn Bohulano Mabalon
Mabalon draws on oral histories, newspapers, photographs, personal archives, and her own family's history in Stockton. She reveals how Filipina/o immigrants created a community and ethnic culture shaped by their identities as colonial subjects of the United States, their racialization in Stockton as brown people, and their collective experiences in the fields and in the Little Manila neighborhood.

Speak, Okinawa — Elizabeth Miki Brina
A hauntingly beautiful memoir about family and identity and a young woman's journey to understanding her complicated parents--her mother an Okinawan war bride, her father a Vietnam veteran--and her own, fraught cultural heritage.

All You Can Ever Know — Nicole Chung
Nicole Chung was born severely premature, placed for adoption by her Korean parents, and raised by a white family in a sheltered Oregon town. All You Can Ever Know is a profound, moving chronicle of surprising connections and the repercussions of unearthing painful family secrets--vital reading for anyone who has ever struggled to figure out where they belong.

Ma and Me — Putsata Reang
When Putsata Reang was eleven months old, her family fled war-torn Cambodia, spending twenty-three days on an overcrowded navy vessel before finding sanctuary at an American naval base in the Philippines. In her startling memoir, Reang explores the long legacy of inherited trauma and the crushing weight of cultural and filial duty. With rare clarity and lyric wisdom, Ma and Me is a stunning, deeply moving memoir about love, debt, and duty.

Know My Name — Chanel Miller
Miller’s story of trauma and transcendence illuminates a culture biased to protect perpetrators, indicting a criminal justice system designed to fail the most vulnerable, and, ultimately, shining with the courage required to move through suffering and live a full and beautiful life. Know My Name will forever transform the way we think about sexual assault, challenging our beliefs about what is acceptable and speaking truth to the tumultuous reality of healing.

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash