In the month of May we celebrate Asian and Pacific Islander American Heritage Month, a vast subject when considering the source cultures from which such Americans arise; 66% of whom are born elsewhere. If proximity in time and generation to the source culture of one’s family indicates the degree of influence it may have on our personal culture, what we ourselves think and do, its importance in a multicultural nation such as ours cannot be overstated.
Herein I offer my reading list for Modern American Literature under the subheading Asian American Literature; I have posted my World Literature lists for China, Japan, India, and Islamic Peoples on my literary blog separately; it’s a huge and diverse subject.
I believe it is also important to recognize that we are all members of such multiplicities; that culture is layered, sandboxed, and distributed in relational hierarchies of influence, and that we ourselves are the ultimate arbiter of such informing and motivating sources.
We are all pluralities.
And they are all in motion, our identities; processes of change, reimagination, and transformation.
We are speaking here of identity as a function of history and memory, as a prochronism or history expressed in our form of our choices in adaptation like the shell of a fantastic sea creature, but it is in our power to command such resources rather than be mastered by them, and our struggle to free ourselves from the tyranny of other people’s ideas, which confers our liberation and self-ownership as self-created and unique human beings.
Of the past and of traditional culture, let us understand what we must bring a reckoning for and discard in order to create a better humankind, and bring with us into the future only that which serves us in becoming human.
Rejoice and embrace that which we claim and which in return claims us in membership and community, and resist to the death whatever authority claims us without our consent; to this we offer only challenge and defiance.
Asian American History
The Making of Asian America: a history, Erica Lee
Sons of the Yellow Emperor: a history of the Chinese Diaspora, Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas, Lynn Pan
On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family, Lisa See
Asian American Literature
The Joy Luck Club, The Hundred Secret Senses, Amy Tan
The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns, And the Mountains Echoed, Khaled Hosseini
Red Azalea, Becoming Madame Mao, Wild Ginger, Empress Orchid, The Last Empress, Pearl of China, Anchee Min
Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake, The Namesake: A Portrait of the Film Based on the Novel by Jhumpa Lahiri by Mira Nair, Jhumpa Lahiri
Woman Warrior, China Men, Maxine Hong Kingston
Jasmine, The Holder of the Word, The Tree Bride, Desirable Daughters, Miss New India, Bharati Mukherjee
Ten Thousand Waves, Wang Ping
Legacies, The Middle Heart, Bette Bao Lord
I Hotel, Tropic of Orange, Through the Ark of the Rain Forest, Karen Yamashita
Mona in the Promised Land, The Love Wife, Tiger Writing, The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap, Gish Jen
The Crazed, The Boat Rocker, In The Pond, The Writer As Migrant, Between Silences, Hua Jin
Divakaruni: The Mistress of Spices, The Palace of Illusions, Chitra Banerjee
The Ghost Bride, Yangsze Choo
Miracle Fruit, At the Drive In Volcano, Lucky Fish, Oceanic, Aimee Nezhukumatathil
How to Live Safely In A Science-Fictional Universe, Interior Chinatown, Charles Yu
Dance Dance Revolution: Poems, Cathy Park Hong
Cloud of Sparrows, Takashi Matsuoka
Everything I Never Told You, Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng
Native Speaker, The Surrendered, On Such a Full Sea, Chang-rae Lee
The Face: a time code, A Tale For The Time Being, Ruth Ozeki
Golden Gate, Vikram Seth
West of Kabul, East of New York: An Afghan American Story, Road Trips: Becoming an American in the vapor trail of The Sixties, Tamim Ansary
This is Paradise, Kristiana Kahakauwila
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong
How Much of These Hills Is Gold, C Pam Zhang
Inferno, Catherine Cho
A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, Hoa Nguyen
A Passage North, Anuk Arudpragasam
https://aeon.co/essays/the-self-is-not-singular-but-a-fluid-network-of-identities
World Literature: China
World Literature: Japan
World Literature: India
World Literature: Islamic Peoples
Hawaii: a reading list
Hawai’I seizes me with an immediacy and vividness in the context of Asian American literature and history, for it embodies both the terror of our racist and imperial-colonial history and our hopes for a better future as a diverse and inclusive United Humankind in which all human beings are truly equal. Between the systemic evils in which we are complicit and our liberation from unequal power and elite hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness there lies a long path of reckoning and emergence; but first we must find a vision of who we want to become, we humans, and in Hawai’I this too we may discover.
Hawai’I is a Cuba that never found a liberator.
You may notice that herein I do not follow my usual rule of including only works by authors who are members of a historical people and may speak both of and for them, which in this case would limit my selection to books by native indigenous persons of Kānaka Maoli identity.
What is a Hawaiian, or an American? In Hawaii we see an image of our possible future as a united humankind, multiethnic and transhistorical, protean, inclusive, and diverse beyond limit or categorization.
In such a society, to claim membership is to become a member without question or qualification. To write as such a member is to negotiate the legacies of our history, which include epigenetic harms of racism and colonialism, and to reimagine and transform the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Here are works by people born in Hawaii, or written in Hawaii from within its many layered and interdependent communities.
This is also true of its two great ancestor spirits, guardians and guides of the soul, who speak to us through dreams and poetic vision of our futures from a mythic past, Barack Obama and Maxine Hong Kingston. Some scholars argue that they were once living human beings like any other, who became exalted and deified in a remote age not because they were embodiments of Hegelian world-historical forces, but because they changed such forces and processes through poetic vision and a realized action of human values, and the nature and fate of humankind changed with them.
May we all become such fulcrums of change, and help to dream and to realize a free society of equals.
Hawaii speaks here with many voices, all of which belong.
History and Culture
Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai’I, by Hokulani K. Aikau (Editor)
Pacific Worlds, by Matt K. Matsuda
Paradise of the Pacific: Approaching Hawaii, by Susanna Moore
Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands, Honolulu: The First Century, by Gavan Daws
Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings and America’s First Imperial Adventure, by Julia Flynn Siler
Unfamiliar Fishes, by Sarah Vowell
Captive Paradise: The Story of the United States and Hawaii, by James L. Haley
From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai’I, by Haunani-Kay Trask
Waikiki: A History of Forgetting & Remembering, by Andrea Feeser
Volcanoes, Palm Trees, and Privilege: Essays on Hawai’I, by Liz Prato
Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before, by Tony Horwitz
A Shark Going Inland Is My Chief: The Island Civilization of Ancient Hawai’I, On the Road of the Winds: An Archaeological History of the Pacific Islands before European Contact, Unearthing the Polynesian Past. Explorations and Adventures of an Island Archaeologist, by Patrick Vinton Kirch
No Footprints in the Sand: A Memoir of Kalaupapa, by Henry Nalaielua, Sally-Jo Keala-O-Anuenue Bowman
Big Happiness: The Life and Death of a Modern Hawaiian Warrior, by Mark Panek
Waking Up in Eden: In Pursuit of an Impassioned Life on an Imperiled Island,
by Lucinda Fleeson
My Time in Hawaii: A Polynesian Memoir by Victoria Nelson
Hawaiian Mythology, by Martha Warren Beckwith
Ancient Hawai’I, by Herb Kawainui Kane
The Kumulipo: A Hawaiian Creation Chant, by Keaulumoku
The Burning Island: Myth and History of the Hawaiian Volcano Country, by Pamela Frierson
Kika Kila: How the Hawaiian Steel Guitar Changed the Sound of Modern Music, by John W. Troutman
The Haumana Hula Handbook: A Manual for the Student of Hawaiian Dance,
by Mahealani Uchiyama
Hawaiian Surfing: Traditions from the Past, by John R.K. Clark
Waves of Resistance: Surfing and History in Twentieth-Century Hawai’I,
by Isaiah Helekunihi Walker
Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, by William Finnegan
Archipelago: Portraits of Life in the World’s Most Remote Island Sanctuary,
by David Liittschwager, Susan Middleton
Sam Choy’s Island Flavors, Sam Choy Woks the Wok : Stir Fry Cooking at Its Island Best, The Choy of Seafood: Sam Choy’s Pacific Harvest, Sam Choy’s Polynesian Kitchen: More Than 150 Authentic Dishes from One of the World’s Most Delicious and Overlooked Cuisines, by Sam Choy
Written By Outsiders Looking In, as was said of Timothy Leary by The Moody Blues
Hotel Honolulu, by Paul Theroux
The Curse of Lono, by Hunter S. Thompson, Steve Crist (Editor), Ralph Steadman (Illustrator)
Travelers’ Tales Hawai‘I, By Rick & Marcie Carroll
Six Months in the Sandwich Islands: Among Hawaii’s Palm Groves, Coral Reefs and Volcanoes, by Isabella Lucy Bird
Literature
Shark Dialogues, House of Many Gods, Kiana Davenport
Night Is a Sharkskin Drum, by Haunani-Kay Trask
This is Paradise: stories, Kristiana Kahakauwila
The Heart of Being Hawaiian, by Sally-Jo Keala-O-Anuenue Bowman
Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre, by Lois-Ann Yamanaka
Shadow Child, by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto
The Tattoo, by Chris McKinney
School for Hawaiian Girls, by Georgia Ka’Apuni McMillen
The Descendants, by Kaui Hart Hemmings
Sharks in the Time of Saviors, by Kawai Strong Washburn
Diamond Head, by Cecily Wong
Language of the Geckos and Other Stories, A Ricepaper Airplane, by Gary Pak
Hawaii Nei: Island Plays, by Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl
Molokai, Kaaawa: A Novel about Hawaii in the 1850s, by O.A. Bushnell
A Little Too Much Is Enough, Makai, by Kathleen Tyau
Jan Ken Po, by Dennis M. Ogawa
The Folding Cliffs: A Narrative, by W.S. Merwin
Moloka’I, Daughter of Moloka’I, Honolulu, by Alan Brennert
Aloha Las Vegas: And Other Plays, by Edward Sakamoto
Picture Bride, The Land Of Bliss, Cloud Moving Hands, by Cathy Song
On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems, All-Night Lingo Tango, Babel, Holoholo: Poems, Delirium: Poems, The Alphabet of Desire, Lester Higata’s 20th Century, by Barbara Hamby
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, We Can Be Better: The Influential Speeches of Barack Obama, The Promiser: Barack Obama’s Fireside Chats, A Promised Land, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, by Barack Obama
The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, by David Remnick
Woman Warrior, China Men, Maxine Hong Kingston
Maxine Hong Kingston’s Broken Book of Life: An Intertextual Study of the Woman Warrior and China Men, by Maureen Sabine
The Art of Parody: Maxine Hong Kingston’s Use of Chinese Sources,
by Yan Gao
Writing Tricksters: Mythic Gambols in American Ethnic Fiction,
by Jeanne Rosier Smith
Finding Meaning: Kaona and Contemporary Hawaiian Literature, by Brandy Nālani McDougall
The Power of the Steel-tipped Pen: Reconstructing Native Hawaiian Intellectual History, by Noenoe K. Silva
Torch of Liberty 
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