Celebrating Asian, Pacific Islander, Desi American Heritage Month

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As a young boy, Bao Phi awoke early, hours before his father's long workday began, to fish on the shores of a small pond in Minneapolis. Unlike many other anglers, Bao and his father fished for food, not recreation. Between hope-filled casts, Bao's father told him about a different pond in their homeland of Vietnam--

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A watermelon growing big and round. A yellow leaf fallen from a tree. A handful of glittering snow. The first worm of spring. As the seasons change, so too does a young girl's world. She moves into a new home with her family and encounters both birth and death. As this curious girl explores life inside her house and beyond, she collects bits of the world. But who are her treasures for? Kao Kalia Yang's picture book debut tells the heartfelt story of a young Hmong girl seeking beauty and connection in a busy world, lushly illustrated by Seo Kim. --

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A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be. In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there's only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates' bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who's lived more than a century. A diary is Nao's only solace--and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine. Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox--possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao's drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future. Full of Ozeki's signature humor and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home--

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This series traces the story of Asian Americans, spanning 150 years of immigration, racial politics, and cultural innovation. It is a timely look at the role that Asian Americans have played in defining who we are as a nation. At the turn of the millennium, Asian Americans have become the fastest growing population in the U.S. It is a time of tremendous change, as the country tackles urgent debates over immigration, race and economic disparity.

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This series traces the story of Asian Americans, spanning 150 years of immigration, racial politics, and cultural innovation. It is a timely look at the role that Asian Americans have played in defining who we are as a nation. During a time of war and social tumult, a young generation fights for equality in the fields, on campuses and in the culture, and claims a new identity: Asian Americans. The aftermath of the Vietnam War brings new immigrants and refugees.

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This series traces the story of Asian Americans, spanning 150 years of immigration, racial politics, and cultural innovation. It is a timely look at the role that Asian Americans have played in defining who we are as a nation. In an era of U.S. expansion, new immigrants arrive from China, India, Japan, the Philippines and beyond. Eventually barred by anti-Asian laws, they become America’s first undocumented immigrants”.

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This series traces the story of Asian Americans, spanning 150 years of immigration, racial politics, and cultural innovation. It is a timely look at the role that Asian Americans have played in defining who we are as a nation. During the Cold War years, Asian Americans are simultaneously heralded as a Model Minority and suspected as the perpetual foreigner. It is also a time of ambition, as Asian Americans aspire for the first time to national political office.

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This series traces the story of Asian Americans, spanning 150 years of immigration, racial politics, and cultural innovation. It is a timely look at the role that Asian Americans have played in defining who we are as a nation. An American-born generation straddles their birth country and their familial homelands in Asia. Family loyalties are tested during WWII, when Japanese Americans are held in detention camps and brothers are on opposite sides of the battle.

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As a key West Coast destination for Japanese immigration to the U.S., Tacoma's vibrant nihonmachi had a significant population of Issei and Nisei by the 1920s and 1930s. Prior to World War II, the Tacoma Japanese Language School served as a community hub for the Japanese American community in the city. Based on interviews with over 40 Nisei former students of the school, Lisa Hoffman and Mary Hanneman develop an interdisciplinary analysis of identity construction and negotiations over belonging by second generation Japanese Americans in pre-World War II urban America. With an approach both transnational in perspective and focused on urban space, the book explores the everyday lives of Japanese American children prior to incarceration, including the impact of their daily study at and participation in community events associated with the school. Drawing from interviews and archival sources, the authors illuminate the rich prewar cultural experiences of Japanese Americans in the city, a distinct social history often eclipsed by a focus on wartime incarceration. Additionally, the book underscores the role of the Japanese government and imperial Japanese educational traditions in shaping Tacoma's JLS, as Japan sought to emerge as an equal member of the international community.--

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The story of a troubled family living in San Francisco's Chinatown.

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Mine Okubo was one of over one hundred thousand people of Japanese descent--nearly two-thirds of whom were American citizens--who were forced into 'protective custody' shortly after Pearl Harbor. Citizen 13660, Okubo's graphic memoir of life in relocation centers in California and Utah, illuminates this experience with poignant illustrations and witty, candid text. Now available with a new introduction by Christine Hong and in a wide-format artist edition, this graphic novel can reach a new generation of readers and scholars. '[Mine Okubo] took her months of life in the concentration camp and made it the material for this amusing, heart-breaking book. The moral is never expressed, but the wry pictures and the scanty words make the reader laugh--and if he is an American too--blush.' 'A remarkably objective and vivid and even humorous account. In dramatic and detailed drawings and brief text, she documents the whole episode. all that she saw, objectively, yet with a warmth of understanding'--New York times book review--

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A boy and his grandfather cross a language and cultural barrier using their shared love of art, storytelling, and fantasy.

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In the summer between middle school and high school, Aiden Navarro is away at camp where he navigates friendships, deals with bullies, and spends time with Elias (a boy he can not stop thinking about), he finds himself on a path of self-discovery and acceptance.

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A groundbreaking portrait of Vincent Chin and the murder case that took America's Asian American community to the streets in protest of injustice. America in 1982. Japanese car companies are on the rise and believed to be putting American autoworkers out of their jobs. Anti-Asian American sentiments simmer, especially in Detroit. A bar fight turns fatal, leaving Vincent Chin--a Chinese American man--beaten to death at the hands of two white men, autoworker Ronald Ebens and his stepson Michael Nitz. From a Whisper to a Rallying Cry is a searing examination of the killing and the trial and verdicts that followed. When Ebens and Nitz pled guilty to manslaughter and received only a $3,000 fine and three years' probation, the lenient sentence sparked outrage in the Asian American community. This outrage galvanized the Asian American movement and paved the way for a new federal civil rights trial of the case. Extensively researched from court transcripts and interviews with key case witnesses--many speaking for the first time--Yoo has crafted a suspenseful, nuanced, and authoritative portrait of a pivotal moment in civil rights history, and a man who became a symbol against hatred and racism--Provided by publisher.

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Asian Americans inhabit a purgatorial status: neither white enough nor black enough, unmentioned in most conversations about racial identity. In the popular imagination, Asian Americans are all high-achieving professionals. But in reality, this is the most economically divided group in the country, a tenuous alliance of people with roots from South Asia to East Asia to the Pacific Islands, from tech millionaires to service industry laborers. How do we speak honestly about the Asian American condition--if such a thing exists? Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively confronts this thorny subject, blending memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose the truth of racialized consciousness in America. Binding these essays together is Hong's theory of minor feelings. As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these minor feelings occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality--when you believe the lies you're told about your own racial identity. With sly humor and a poet's searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and artmaking, and to family and female friendship. A radically honest work of art, Minor Feelings forms a portrait of one Asian American psyche--and of a writer's search to both uncover and speak the truth--

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To my ladies, it's up to you / stay strong through this life like you are bamboo. / His control ain't love, do not misconstrue, / you be Marie Curie / free to disagree and get a degree / not under his lock and key / your true potential set free. / Stand up to the persecution / and make your contribution. / Call my solution a female revolution / retribution in the form of rhyme electrocution. --

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When the Hart-Celler Act passed in 1965, opening up US immigration to non-Europeans, it ushered in a whole new era. But even to the first generation of Asian Americans born in the US after that milestone, it would have been impossible to imagine that sushi and boba would one day be beloved by all, that a Korean boy band named BTS would be the biggest musical act in the world, that one of the most acclaimed and popular movies of 2018 would be Crazy Rich Asians, or that we would have an Asian American Vice President. And that's not even mentioning the creators, performers, entrepreneurs, execs and influencers who've been making all this happen, behind the scenes and on the screen; or the activists and representatives continuing to fight for equity, building coalitions and defiantly holding space for our voices and concerns. And still: Asian America is just getting started. The timing could not be better for this intimate, eye-opening, and frequently hilarious guided tour through the pop-cultural touchstones and sociopolitical shifts of the 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, and beyond. Jeff Yang, Phil Yu, and Philip Wang chronicle how we've arrived at today's unprecedented diversity of Asian American cultural representation through engaging, interactive infographics (including a step-by-step guide to a night out in K-Town, an atlas that unearths historic Asian American landmarks, a handy Appreciation or Appropriation? flowchart, and visual celebrations of both our founding fathers and mothers and the nostalgia-inducing personalities of each decade), plus illustrations and graphic essays from major AAPI artists, exclusive roundtables with Asian American cultural icons, and more, anchored by extended insider narratives of each decade by the three co-authors. Rise is an informative, lively, and inclusive celebration of both shared experiences and singular moments, and all the different ways in which we have chosen to come together.--

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Following the aftermath of the March 2021 mass shootings at three spas in Atlanta, this film chronicles how the Asian American community came together to fight back against hate. Offering a conversation about race, class and gender, the film takes a deep dive into this critical moment of racial reckoning, exploring the struggles, triumphs and achievements of AAPI communities.

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Exploring the anguish of immigration and the lasting effects that displacement has on a child and her family, Bui documents the story of her family's daring escape after the fall of South Vietnam in the 1970s, and the difficulties they faced building new lives for themselves--Publisher description.

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In 1949, four Chinese women--drawn together by the shadow of their past--begin meeting in San Francisco to play mah jong, invest in stocks and say stories. They call their gathering the Joy Luck Club--and forge a relationship that binds them for more than three decades.

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Real life isn't a fairytale. But Tié̂n still enjoys reading his favorite stories with his parents from the books he borrows from the local library. It's hard enough trying to communicate with your parents as a kid, but for Tié̂n, he doesn't even have the right words because his parents are struggling with their English. Is there a Vietnamese word for what he's going through? Is there a way to tell them he's gay?--

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The definitive history of Asian Americans by one of the nation's preeminent scholars on the subject. In the past fifty years, Asian Americans have helped change the face of America and are now the fastest growing group in the United States. But as award-winning historian Erika Lee reminds us, Asian Americans also have deep roots in the country. The Making of Asian America tells the little-known history of Asian Americans and their role in American life, from the arrival of the first Asians in the Americas to the present-day. An epic history of global journeys and new beginnings, this book shows how generations of Asian immigrants and their American-born descendants have made and remade Asian American life in the United States: sailors who came on the first trans-Pacific ships in the 1500s; indentured 'coolies' who worked alongside African slaves in the Caribbean; and Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, and South Asian immigrants who were recruited to work in the United States only to face massive racial discrimination, Asian exclusion laws, and for Japanese Americans, incarceration during World War II. Over the past fifty years, a new Asian America has emerged out of community activism and the arrival of new immigrants and refugees. No longer a 'despised minority, ' Asian Americans are now held up as America's 'model minorities' in ways that reveal the complicated role that race still plays in the United States. Published to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the United States' Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that has remade our 'nation of immigrants, ' this is a new and definitive history of Asian Americans. But more than that, it is a new way of understanding America itself, its complicated histories of race and immigration, and its place in the world today--

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In this ferocious and tender debut, Chen Chen investigates inherited forms of love and family -- the strained relationship between a mother and son, the cost of necessary goodbyes -- all from Asian American, immigrant, and queer perspectives. Holding all accountable, this collection fully embraces the loss, grief, and abundant joy that come with charting one's own path in identity, life, and love. When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities. To be a season of laughter when my father says his coworker is like that, he can tell because the guy wears pink socks, see, you don't, so you can't, you can't be one of them. To be the one my parents raised me to be. A season from the stormiest planet. A very good feeling with a man. Every feeling, in pink shoes. Every step, hot pink.--

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Has Naila's destiny really been written in the stars? Naila's conservative immigrant parents have always said the same thing: She may choose what to study, how to wear her hair, and what to be when she grows up--but they will choose her husband. Following their cultural tradition, they will plan an arranged marriage for her. And until then, dating--or even friendship with a boy--is forbidden. When Naila breaks their rule by falling in love with Saif, her parents are livid. Convinced she has forgotten who she truly is, they travel to Pakistan to visit relatives and explore their roots. But Naila's vacation turns into a nightmare, when she learns that plans have changed--her parents have found her a husband and they want her to marry him, now! Despite her greatest efforts, she is aghast to suddenly find herself cut off from everything and everyone she once knew. Her only hope of escape is Saif...if he can find her before it's too late. Debut author Aisha Saeed takes readers on an unforgettable journey that brings to life the harrowing reality of what happens when everything you thought you knew changes in an instant. Naila's struggle to find a compromise between her parents' wishes and her own dreams for her future makes for a truly compelling read. --