In James, Marilyn finds what she thinks is a kindred spirit and an outsider like herself. James, a first generation Chinese-American, has spent his whole life just wanting to fully assimilate into the only country he’s ever known. She scorns her mother’s homemaker wishes as she pursues becoming a doctor at Harvard in the 1950s. Marilyn wears her feelings of being an outsider as a badge of pride. Why Read: Highlights the challenges of a mixed-race family in 1980s Ohio If you have an e-reader (I have a Kindle), then most libraries team up with the Libby app which lets you borrow e-books easily! And if you live in NYC, Yu & Me Books is the first female Asian-American owned bookstore and just a fun spot in general! 14 Must Read Asian-American Books

Reading Tips: As always, I highly recommend utilizing your local library and/or bookstores before resorting to Amazon. I guess it feels like I’m finding kindred spirits while also discovering new definitions of “Asian-American Pacific Islander.”Īnyway, this one is for my fellow AAPIs as well as anyone curious about our experiences! There’s something familiar in all these stories even if they’re all also so very, very different from each other and even from my own story. I’ve read a lot of Asian-American books.Ĭonsidering I am Asian-American, specifically adopted Chinese-American, I guess I just gravitate towards these novels without realizing it.

Kwan is not a terrible writer, if entertainment is all you hope to get out of your reading material he does have a flair for a witty turn of phrase, on occasion, and the paper-thin shallow characters are so forgettable you could gladly put it down and put the book out of your mind in an instant if you needed to focus your attention on something else, like real life.So a little while ago I began organizing all the books I’ve read into where they take place, and I noticed a small trend. If you really want mindless reading, you can’t go wrong with Crazy Rich Asians. At its heart, Crazy Rich Asians is a sentimental novel, and it holds the elites up as an example. What the novel lacks, however, is any sort of interiority or contradiction, or any attempt to wrestle with the implications of class society and the tensions between the rich and, well, the rest. The blurbs set the framework for how this book should be read: It’s both fun and excessive.but it’s also meant to be a commentary on this society, apparently, judging by the comparisons to Wharton, or Waugh, or Austen. Kwan, obviously having too good a time writing the book, went on for over 500 pages and one had to trudge wearily along.

Books like crazy rich asians