Happy Asian American Pacific Islander month! Celebrate this month by reading from some of the most remarkable Asian authors today. For fans of thrillers, take a look at Hunted as two desperate parents race against the clock to find their children and save the world from disaster. In Slow Noodles, you can read about the aftermaths of the Pol Pot genocide through a Cambodian refugee who finds healing through food. You’ll be able to bring some of the book to friends through the recipes included. This is by no means an extensive list and is just a great way to jumpstart conversations in your book club and community to read works by other AAPI authors.
Our May 2024 Open Book Author Spotlight!
A father is brought in for questioning about his missing daughter. A mother starts seeing a connection between her son and the bomber. An unknown conspiracy starts unfolding in Oregon. In this action-packed thriller, two parents are on the run from the authorities and must find their kids before a bigger catastrophe erupts.
Annabelle unexpectedly takes a collect call from Lee County Jail. She isn’t prepared to hear her mother’s voice, saying she had shot someone who messed with her mangos. This begins a complicated, poignant memoir of growing up as a mixed-race Filipina in suburban Florida while reckoning with tangled branches of Annabelle’s life. While trying to trace her own journey of belonging, she must reckon with her erratic father’s untimely death and her fiery mother’s yearning for the country she left behind.
In this hauntingly beautiful memoir, a Cambodian refugee recounts losing her country and family during Pol Pot’s genocide in the 1970s and reclaiming family recipes from her mother’s kitchen. As an immigrant in Saigon, Nguon loses her mother, brothers, and sister and eventually flees to a refugee camp in Thailand. She survives by cooking in a brothel, serving drinks in a nightclub, and making and selling street food. This lyrical memoir includes more than twenty family recipes, such as green papaya pickles, pâté de foie, Khmer curries, and more to show how recreating her childhood dishes can become an act of resistance and act of honoring the memory of her mother.
Trang and Quỳnh leave their rural village to work at a bar in Sài Gòn to help their parents pay off debts. The sisters learn to speak English, dress seductively, and how to drink and flirt with American GIs in return for money. War moves closer to the city and Trang gets swept up in a romance with a handsome and kind American helicopter pilot. Decades later, Dan, an American veteran, returns to Việt Nam with his wife, Linda. In their journey, secrets surface that threaten his marriage. Phong, son of a Black American soldier and a Vietnamese woman, goes on a mission to find both his parents. These characters from past and present confront decisions made during a time of war.
Asian Americans are experiencing a reckoning regarding their identity and race, inspiring them to reconsider the cultural frameworks that enabled their assimilation into American culture. Asian Americans are the least likely racial group to seek out mental health services. Permission to Come Home takes Asian Americans on an empowering journey toward reclaiming their health. With insights and evidence-based tools, Dr. Jenny T. Wang offers readers permission to feel, take up space, and return to a place of acceptance and belonging.
Our October 2023 Open Book Author Spotlight!
Filmmaker and activist Curtis Chin brings us into his world in this part memoir, part invitation: how Chung’s Cantonese cuisine plays a huge role in his life, where he learned to embrace his identity as a gay ABC, and where he realized just how much he had to offer the world, his family, and himself. Readers will feel like they’ve got a glimpse of what it’d be like to grow up with him and maybe even share something off the secret menu.
Emily Hoang is a writer and editor, who is obsessed with haunted houses, ghosts, and dreams. More info can be found on her website.