Aloha! It’s time for Monday books and today is a special one. It’s 1/18, the day that we honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and remember his legacy. Like all people in the US, my life has been shaped by Dr. MLK. My father came to the US in 1959. He was 24 years old and a medical doctor. Dad chose UC Berkeley and obtained his PhD in biophysics. He quoted Dr. King’s I Have

Aloha! Welcome to Monday Books in 2021. I’ll be recommending Greatest Hits and more recent titles by Asian/Asian American women writers TWICE a month. To kick off 2021, I want to recommend Pachinko by Min Jin Lee. Despite its length and its weighty subject matter, this is a book for everyone. It’s a book for someone who favors plot twist; it’s a book that gives a broad stroke overview of Koreans in Japan; it’s a

Aloha! It’s time for Monday Books and today it’s a collection of poetry–Pei Pei the Monkey King by Wawa. Wawa writes in both English and Chinese and also publishes under Lo Mei Wa. This book references the 2014 Umbrella Revolution and features poems in both English and Chinese, along with an introduction by translator/poet Henry W. Leung and an interview with Wawa. These poems are playful, exuberant, and distinctly Hong Kong in their references to

Aloha! I want to recommend The Prince of Mournful Thoughts and Other Stories by Caroline Kim. This is literary fiction, and in its craft and worldmaking is literary realism at its best. The stories cover a range of times, places, and characters—but the book’s central characters are unapologetically Korean or Korean American. This is the book’s strength. I believe due to the proximity of whiteness, Asian American literature frequently navigates out of the space of

Aloha! Time for Monday books! Frameless Windows, Squares of Light by Cathy Song is rooted in the lyric. This work sings. Song is from Hawai’i and is of Chinese and Korean descent – one of the first to bring the words, stories, and feeling of Asian Americans to mainstream literary poetry audiences. She writes with a profound understanding of the significance of story. She has written many poetry books, beginning with Picture Bride, a Yale

Aloha, it’s Monday books! I want to recommend Enter the Navel: for the love of creative nonfiction by Anjoli Roy. This is a slender volume downloadable for free by Creative Commons and also available in paperback. I assigned it as a class read. This is a lively, funny, and playful fast read, elicits great discussion, and the range of material about the belly button (personal anecdotes, myth, scientific analysis) was like going down the rabbit

Aloha, time for Monday books! There are certain books that speak of place and time, and yet, can resonate well beyond the initial publication date. I would place Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s excellent book of poetry Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre (1993) in this category. Yamanaka says this book was “uncensored women’s voices” and this is the book’s power. Yamanaka’s writing is brutal, funny, raw, and filled with pathos, and her work never fails to engage

Aloha! It’s time for Monday books and I highly recommend MINOR FEELINGS by Cathy Park Hong. I have posted about this book prior, but having now witnessed the transformational discussions it inspires in my own class, I believe this book to be one of, if not the most significant piece of writing TO DATE about race and identity, and the lives of Asian American women.  Essays are straightforward and the prose is intelligent, angry, vulnerable,

Aloha, time for Tuesday books! Totem: America by Debra Kang Dean, author of five collections of poetry, reminds us how poetry opens us to feelings that are often too complicated to express and gives us the words we need to heal and live. Born in Hawai’i and of Korean and Okinawan ancestry, Dean is a serious practitioner of taiji, a master of lyricism, and writes of grief, connection, color and story. She guides the reader

Aloha, time for Tuesday books! The Birth of Korean Cool (How One Nation is Conquering the World Through Pop Culture) by EunyHong is a funny exuberant read and will inform people about the basic hows and whys of Korean culture and the machinations of global K-pop culture. I believe that this book is highly relevantgiven the anti-Asian sentiment due to COVID, the Black/Asian dynamic in the US, and the truth of polyculturalism. K-pop embodies an

Aloha! Time for Tuesday books! E.J. Koh’s The Magical Language of Others! Koh’s memoir will resonate for those caught between time and place, who seek an understanding between generations, and who look to words for answers. This book exposes the realities of economic global work, Confucian expectations translated into modern lives, and the brutality of people living out their ambitions. It paints a poignant and raw picture of how we try to manifest a certain

It’s Tuesday! Time for a book recommendation. I deem I-Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita as the one novel to read if you want to understand the foundation of Asian America—its culture and art, its politics and aspirations. This book pushes aesthetic boundaries as seen in form, and it innovates in its delivery on every level. I would make this required reading for Asian American Studies and stick this on a university level American Literature syllabus.

In the Company of Strangers is a fine collection of short fiction. I’m highlighting it because I believe it to be strangely overlooked — and it shouldn’t be. Writing from the Overseas Filipino diaspora is complex and diverse. It speaks to the wildly disparate realities of a people who continue to carve out a place in the global consciousness and imagination. Skinner tells stories about a range of characters and time periods, and she does

Tammy Ho Lai-Ming’s Hula Hooping was 15 years from inception to publication. The writing has a liveliness and precision that is exuberant and without pretense. Word-play is that—play and fun! She invites the reader in with lyricism and wit. This is the kind of poetry I like to read because if I can’t move into the poem fairly quickly, I won’t hang out til the end. I want to hang out and read this book

This book A Cab Called Reliable by Patti Kim is an Asian American/Korean American literary classic and should be on every reading list for Asian American literature. This book was written decades before its time and Kim writes with authority, lyricism and fluidity. There is a complicated protagonist and the book reveals the raw truths of childhood and immigration. This story is about the dark side of Confucianism, how we are imprisoned by family and

This is a great book. I bought it several months ago and started reading it. The author reveals to us the relevance of Karen Carpenter to American pop,  but also references her own life. This is an academic memoir free of jargon, written in fluid prose. Too often researchers are captive to the often unbearable unreadable lexicon of theory. Academics must use this and deftly to legitimize ideas that are new—and fields that are stigmatized