Happy AA & NH/PI Month! From the sailors who arrived in America on the first trans-Pacific ships in the 1500s to the activists organizing against Asian hate today, Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders have a rich, varied, sometimes painful, and always complex history in the United States. However, that history is often neglected or reduced to a singular, overly simplistic experience. We at Private Prep believe that it’s important to recognize that the AA & NH/PI experience is not a monolith, and we also believe that reading can be a powerful tool in cultivating empathy and awareness.
To celebrate AA & NH/PI Month, we’ve collected seven of our favorite books by seven Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander authors.
Ling Ma, Severance
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ling Ma is a Chinese American novelist and assistant professor at the University of Chicago. Often describing herself as “from Fujian, Utah, and Kansas”, Ma draws inspiration for her novels from a variety of sources: the work of Kafka, the 90s/00s blogosphere, contemporary art, and reality TV, to name a few. Ma wrote her first novel when she was laid off from her job as a fact-checker for Playboy; she calls the unemployment checks she received in the following months her “arts fellowship”, as that period of unemployment allowed her to dive headfirst into writing. She then pursued her MFA in Creative Writing at Cornell and is now the recipient of dozens of highly coveted literary awards.
ABOUT THE BOOK: Severance is a dystopian novel that frankly defies description. Part zombie plague novel, part biting indictment of late-stage capitalism, part first-generation immigration story, part coming of age novel, and part corporate satire, Severance follows Candace Chen, an unfulfilled Bible product coordinator, before and after an incurable infection slowly obliterates global civilization.
Celestine Hitiura Vaite, Frangipani
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Célestine Hitiura Vaite was born in Tahiti as the daughter of a Tahitian mother and a French father who went back to his country after military service. She grew up with her large extended family in Faa’a-Tahiti, where traditional storytelling was part of everyday life and women overcame obstacles with gusto and humor. While she was pregnant with her third child in Australia, Vaite began to write for the first time out of homesickness. She has now written three critically acclaimed novels.
ABOUT THE BOOK: In this whimsical novel, Vaite introduces readers to proud “professional cleaner” Materena Mahi, one of the spunkiest women on the island of Tahiti. Frangipani follows Mahi, who is abandoned by her husband after a domestic squabble, as she raises her free-spirited and headstrong daughter. This story of love, motherhood, gossip, and growing up after 40 has charmed readers across the globe.
Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ocean Vuong is a Vietnamese American poet, essayist, novelist, and professor at UMass Amherst. Born in Saigon, Vietnam and raised in Connecticut in a working class family of nail salon and factory laborers, Vuong dropped out of Business school to pursue a degree in American Literature. He subsequently received his MFA in Poetry from NYU. A recipient of a 2019 MacArthur “Genius” Grant, Vuong and his writing have been featured in The Atlantic, Harpers, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, and The Village Voice.
ABOUT THE BOOK: Thanks to Vuong’s background in poetry, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a novel packed with poetic images and ideas. The narrator is a young man in his late twenties, nicknamed Little Dog, who is composing a long letter to his Vietnamese mother. His mother still carries the burden of the Vietnam war, as does his grandmother, and Little Dog’s struggles reach not only back to the traumas of Vietnam but forward in his efforts to fit into a world that sees him as other.
T Kira Mahealani Madden, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: T Kira Mahealani Madden is a Kānaka Maoli-Chinese writer, photographer, and amateur magician living in Charleston, SC. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and an BA in design and literature from The New School. She is also the founding Editor-in-chief of No Tokens, a magazine of literature and art. The niece of famed shoe designer Steve Madden and the daughter of parents who struggled with addiction, T Kira Madden often draws inspiration from her own experiences growing up as a queer biracial teen in Boca Roton, Florida.
ABOUT THE BOOK: T Kira Madden’s debut memoir is about coming of age and reckoning with queer desire. As a child, Madden lived a life of extravagance, from her exclusive private school to her equestrian trophies. But as the only child of parents continually battling drug and alcohol addictions, and facing a culture of assault and objectification, Madden she found lifelines in the desperately loving friendships of fatherless girls. Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls is equal parts eulogy and love letter, about families of blood and families found.
Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Ban Mê Thuột, Viet Nam. He came to the United States as a refugee in 1975 with his family and was initially settled in a camp for Vietnamese refugees. Seeking better economic opportunities, his parents moved to San Jose, California, and opened one of the first Vietnamese grocery stores in the city. Now a literary star and an advocate for displaced peoples all over the world, Nguyen is a professor at USC, an acclaimed novelist, a recipient of Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships, and an activist in the Vietnamese diaspora community.
ABOUT THE BOOK: A gripping spy novel, an exploration of extreme politics, and a moving love story, The Sympathizer is set during and just after the war in Vietnam and is told in the form of a forced confession written by a spy for the North Vietnamese who worked undercover as an aid to a South Vietnamese general. It appears that part of his crime is sympathizing with the suffering on both sides. Published 40 years to the month after the fall of Saigon, The Sympathizer received the Pulitzer Prize in 2016.
Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Nilanjana Sudeshna “Jhumpa” Lahiri was born in London to Bengali parents and then raised in the United States. She is the author of four books in both English and Italian, a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, and a professor at Princeton University. Lahiri is known for depicting the everyday lives of (often middle-class) Asian-American immigrants with compassionate scrutiny and moral complexity.
ABOUT THE BOOK: The Namesake narrates three decades of the lives of Ashoke and Ashima Ganguly as they leave India and settle down in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the 1960’s. This poignant treatment of the immigrant experience is also an elegantly told family saga with universal themes of love, of the profound relationship between a father and a son, of teenage angst, of feeling pulled by different worlds yet not completely belonging to either, and of the unpredictability of life.
Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Hanya Yanagihara grew up in Honolulu, the daughter of a doctor who did research on mouse immunology and a mother who practiced needlework, quilting, and other crafts. Her father, a third-generation Hawaiian resident, was of Japanese descent; her mother is Korean American. In addition to writing a series of wildly popular novels, Yanagihara is the editor-in-chief of T, the style supplement to the New York Times, which publishes articles and photo-essays about fashion, travel, art, and design.
ABOUT THE BOOK: Written over the course of a mere 18 months, Yanagihara’s 800-page epic A Little Life depicts the everyday experience of living with trauma, chronic pain, and disability. Set in the present, A Little Life is about four young men – friends from the same college – who move to New York to chase big careers. Over the course of the novel, it comes to focus on one of these men, Jude, who has a mysterious traumatic history. A Little Life is the perfect chronicle of our age of anxiety, providing all its attendant dramas as well as its solaces: friendship, drugs, travel, love affairs and interior design.
Reading can’t solve all of the prejudice in the world (we wish it could!), but it can be a direct way to support AA & NH/PI authors and learn more about their experiences and histories through storytelling. If you’re interested in any of these books for AA & NH/PI Month (or just for fun!), consider purchasing them from an AA & NH/PI owned bookstore. If you’re interested in more book recommendations, check out this list of our staff’s favorite books.
