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; two thirds 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, and I have lived or traveled in all four of these homelands and diasporas and many others as well, and have in many cases read these works in their original languages.
My intention as a high school English teacher in creating and offering these reading lists to students, which include lists for over twenty national literatures, was to provide a broad and inclusive curriculum free from politization, censorship, and control by school boards and other authorizing institutions, wherein students may find themselves reflected, explore the legacies of our histories and the consequences of our choices among unknown futures and possibilities, and discover adaptive strategies and maps of becoming human.
One ongoing project which I ran using these lists in high school may be useful for reading or home study groups, partners, and getting to know one’s neighbors; I asked students to choose the list of a group with which they identify and then choose partners from a different group, then as partners select two books, one from each other’s list, to read together and give a presentation about each one to the class.
This project, which I called Becoming Human Through Literature, has three goals; to develop a broad personal culture, to discover maps of how to become human, and to operate transcontextually as a global family member.
As an activity for partners in any stage of a relationship, reading books together and discussing them as you progress makes a wonderful way to explore each others values, goals, and ideas. You may surprise and delight one another; you may also surprise and reimagine yourself.
For all of these lists I began with immortal classics and added whatever I thought merited inclusion on the basis of quality alone; this is how I found myself teaching a broad and inclusive curriculum. Yes, this means I’ve read all of the books listed; and often taught, led discussions, scored critical essays and written about them for many years. It also means that if your favorite book is not on a list, I may simply not have read it yet.
Who am I, an American with no Asian ancestry, to claim any basis for judging works of Asian literature as classics equal to those of Shakespeare or the King James Bible, and creating such lists? This is an excellent question, for reading lists are nothing less than a set of authorized identities.
To this question there are two answers; first, you must read into the literature of a people and discover for yourself what is useful to you in becoming human. We are all unique individuals with our own personal history, and what may help you create yourself today will be different from such works in the past and in the future, because identity is a thing of change.
Second, some works are foundational and universally acclaimed for reasons which are compelling; for example, one cannot be Pakistani without the poetry of Iqbal. And though the study of literature by teenagers for purposes of identity construction is radically different from that of a scholar who seeks entrance into new and utterly alien ways of being human, both are a quest to discover who we ourselves can become, from others who are different as well as those alike.
The question of whose story is this remains primary, which is why I choose voices of members of the culture for study in preference to those of outsiders, with the exception of notable secondary and critical works of scholarship regarding history, biography, and other contexts.
We may not yet be able to change the world, but we can change ourselves. I hope that in so doing we may also one day change how we choose to be human together, as negotiated truths, values, and meaning.
As to my qualifications as a fellow reader of reasonably unbiased and noncoercive intentions, and one aware of the perils of Orientalism, fetishization, assimilation, and other forms of colonialism, let me begin with the primary layer of identity, language.
Languages are a hobby of mine, and I get lost trying to account for all of them, over fifty now throughout my lifetime, but Chinese is my second language, which I studied formally for ten years from the age of nine including traditional inkbrush calligraphy and spoken forms of Standard Hong Kong Cantonese and the Wu dialect of Shanghai. During this period I also studied Zen Buddhism which I claimed as my religion on official documents through much of my twenties, whose sources are both Chinese and Japanese; and I loved the poetry of Basho so much that I was once inspired to walk his hundred mile trail to see where they were written.
In Kashmir my scholarship of Sufi literature as a member of the Naqshbandi order required literacy in Classical Quranic Arabic, Classical Persian, and Ottoman Turkish; the official language Urdu which is Hindi written with a Perso-Arabic script and influenced by Classical Persian, and conversational use of the Kashmiri language Koshur. I already knew Levantine Arabic from Beirut before my senior undergraduate year, and was familiar with Rumi’s poetry, which I carried with me everywhere.
In Nepal I became literate in Classical Tibetan as a monk of the Kagyu Vajrayana order, and conversational Gorkali or Nepalese as it is the official language and spoken by half the population, Newari which is the language of Kathmandu Valley, Gurung which is a tribal language of the Annapurna region and a major language of my key allies the Gurkha military and the horse nomads with whom I operated across the border between Nepal and Kashmir. Hindi was my fifth local language, though of course I already had some familiarity with it, having studied Tantra with a priestess of Kali and on another of my travels been a member of the Aghori brotherhood of warriors during my graduate school years, and during my Freshman year at university read Shankara’s works and those of Ramakrishna through the Vedanta Society.
Beyond my literary studies of the major great civilizations of Asia, I did cross much of it on foot during my Great Trek and have sailed throughout its seas, including on a traditional Phinisi schooner under the Bugis tribal captain Starfollower. I’ve trekked along the Cameron Highlands in Malaysia and later returned to Georgetown on the island of Penang as a home port, lived in the Golden Triangle with the Karen and Shan peoples in Thailand and Burma and fought in their wars of independence, with the Kachin who guided me across the Kumon Range along the route used by Merrill’s Marauders in World War Two, with the Naga of north India, the Iban of Sarawak, and the Mentawai Islanders when I was castaway in a storm off Sumatra, where I built an outrigger canoe and sailed to the main port of Padang, then learned the martial art or Silat of Raja Harimau while living with the Minangkabau. I fought a revolution in Nepal, a war of liberation against India’s imperial conquest in Kashmir, and a piratical campaign to free slaves at sea from the Sultanate of Sulawesi to the Bay of Bengal and the whole of South Asia between.
Everywhere I have traveled, I learned what I could, helped where I could, reimagined and transformed myself as I could. For myself, the purpose of travel is to be broken open to new ways of becoming human. I am become a thing of interfaces between bounded realms of history, culture, and identity, and I now live in the empty spaces beyond our maps of becoming human marked Here Be Dragons, among the unknown and limitless possibilities of human being, meaning, and value.
Who then shall we become? Asks our self of surfaces, images, and masks which each moment negotiates our boundaries with others.
To which our secret self, the self of darkness and of passion, the self that lives beyond the mirror and knows no limits, unbound by time and space and infinite in possibilities, replies; Who do you want to become?
I believe it is also important to recognize that we are all members of such multiplicities; that culture is layered 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.
September 25 2023 My Library of Possible Selves: A History Of My Identities Through My Languages
Broad Diversity of Asian, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander Population/ US Census
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
Vietnamese American Literature
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41880609-on-earth-we-re-briefly-gorgeous
She Weeps Each Time You’re Born, Quan Barry
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22291474-she-weeps-each-time-you-re-born
The Zenith, Dương Thu Hương
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12987271-the-zenith
Novel Without a Name, Dương Thu Hương
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/229001.Novel_Without_a_Name
Paradise of the Blind, Dương Thu Hương
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53629.Paradise_of_the_Blind
Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam, by Andrew X. Pham
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4370.Catfish_and_Mandala
When Heaven and Earth Changed Places: A Vietnamese Woman’s Journey from War to Peace, Le Ly Hayslip, Jay Wurts
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5729.When_Heaven_and_Earth_Changed_Places
Monkey Bridge: A Novel, Lan Cao
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/374928.Monkey_Bridge
The Lotus and the Storm, Lan Cao
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18693709-the-lotus-and-the-storm
Love Like Hate, Linh Dinh
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2145199.Love_Like_Hate
The Reeducation of Cherry Truong, Aimee Phan
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12160925-the-reeducation-of-cherry-truong
Birds of Paradise Lost, Andrew Lam
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15953645-birds-of-paradise-lost
Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey, G.B. Tran
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8501710-vietnamerica
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
Hawai’i: 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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