Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander History and Culture Books

I feel like it’s important for young readers to see themselves in books, but also to see others in books. You know there’s a lot of talk about books being mirrors and windows and I definitely believe that. Our society is multicultural. There’s so many different backgrounds of every kind, different abilities, different thought processes.

The value in seeing yourself is understanding that there is not necessarily an ideal that you need to look toward, but to know that you’re already ideal as you are. But also whenever you read about people who are outside of your experience the ability to build empathy and understanding of where other people come from and what other people are experiencing, because we all live in these bubbles, right, and it’s important for us to be able to peek inside someone else’s bubble if we can, because that’s how we become a more compassionate society.

And you know there’s a lot of studies that show readers tend to be more empathetic and that books help build empathy. And I mean what’s more important than that.

The first time I recall seeing an Asian character in a book was again Judy Blume. She had a book Just as Long as We’re Together and one of the characters, she wasn’t the main character, but she was one of the three best friends and she was an Asian character.

And I remember being fascinated by that because it wasn’t something that I had come across before. And, you know, another thing I like to tell young people is when I was growing up all the stories that I wrote for myself all had White girl characters and a lot of times they had blonde hair or they certainly weren’t a part of any marginalized community.

And one of the great things about this year’s Newbery honorees is that they’re all people of color. And the great thing is that young people today more and more will be able to see themselves in books and whenever they sit down to write when they’re eight years old like I was they’ll write characters that look like them because they’ll know that their stories are valid.

It never even occurred to me, even into adulthood to have a story with a Filipino character until I wrote Blackbird Fly, which was my first book. And that’s really sad, you know when you think about it. So I’m happy to be writing at a time right now where there’s more and more of those stories available so that people know that their stories are valuable and that they need to be heard.

A lot of my books are inspired by my mother. And she is from the Philippines and she loves to tell stories. She’s a very devout Catholic, so I grew up listening to a lot of stories about saints. And she would share these stories with such passion and an underlying morality of course and life lessons that they had offered and that very much informed specifically Hello Universe a character of Lola, the grandmother, and her use of folktales to impart her wisdom on Virgil.

And in my other books as well it’s very much mirroring my growing up and hearing, you know, I don’t speak Tagalog or any of the dialects, but of course I grew up hearing words peppered here and there. And so that’s incorporated in the books and also things of food, which is integral to any culture, also prevalent in the books. So, you know, it’s very much a reflection of the things I heard, felt, saw growing up.

I actually went to Manila for the readers and writers festival and it was my first trip back to the Philippines since my first book Blackbird Fly was published in 2015 and I was able to visit schools in Manila. And there’s this sense of nervousness at first because I’ve spoken to kids all across America and I’ve heard from Filipino American families, parents, readers, and it’s been really overwhelming. But there’s always that question I wonder how Filipinos will react or embrace books or relate.

And one thing that I’ve absolutely learned as a writer is that when you’re writing about real life, real emotions, feelings of loneliness, not fitting in and otherness, pretty much anyone can relate to, at least you hope they do, and it seems as if they do, because no matter the background we’ve all experienced what that’s like.

So I went to Manila and I spoke to the schools there. Of course everyone was excited and enthusiastic and so appreciative of Filipinos being depicted in literature and celebrating Filipino American culture.

My boys love, love, love the book, and they take a lot of pride in it getting to see a character as a superhero who’s also a Vietnamese, a Vietnamese boy. One of the fun parts about working on the story is when I started doing, writing the Green Lantern story, I wanted to make sure that this character, even though they were new, fit within the Green Lantern universe. So, I emailed my editor, and I was like, could you send me some of the back matter so I can read and research and make sure that what I’m writing is consistent? 

And they sent me boxes of like all the Green Lantern back copies. So, my boys and I just spent like a summer just reading everything. I was like I don’t know how this happened, but I am getting paid to read comics, so I’m just living the dream. So yeah, my boys have gotten a lot out of being in the world of, world of comics for sure.

It’s been a wonderful experience to talk to children and have them talk about how they see themselves reflected in books that I’ve worked on. For me, as an author these books weren’t around when I was a kid. So, I didn’t see myself in a book truly until after I graduated from college. I read Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese and I had this like, everything clicked into place. I was like I didn’t know that this was what I was missing until I read this book, that this was even possible to see yourself in this way on the page. 

So, when I talk to children now and they’re seeing themselves through these books, and I’m so grateful that they don’t have to wait as long as I did. But even just this weekend I was at Comic Con and people would come up and say, they held up Green Lantern: Legacy and they were like, ‘You wrote about my grandmother. You wrote about my family.’ And that means so much. And with Drawn Together I’m always getting messages from families who see their experience reflected on the page in a way that they hadn’t before, and that means the world to me.

Drawn Together is a very special book for, for me. And it came based on my experience with my own family. My family is originally from Vietnam, but I was born in the U.S. And growing up, my grandparents spoke mostly Vietnamese and I spoke mostly English, so I spent a lot of time at their house, in their home, and we loved each other so much, and yet we didn’t know how to talk to each other about that. 

So I grew up with this dissonance of both feeling very close to my grandparents, but also feeling very distant at the same time because we didn’t know how to communicate on a very basic level. I wanted to write a book that both captured that depth of love and connection while also recognizing some of the challenges that could come with it. 

What I didn’t know at the time is that Dan had the same experience with his grandmother because she lived in Thailand and spoke mostly Thai, or maybe exclusively Thai, and so he had that same language barrier, and had to find ways to try and connect with her over time. 

So that story is very personal to me. And it’s been wonderful to share with people because, as a writer, and all till – until this book came out pretty much, that inability to communicate felt like this personal failure and burden that I was carrying, but having the book out in the world has given me the opportunity to connect with other people who have had similar experiences because I’ll go to a reading and then inevitably afterwards someone will come up and say, ‘Oh you know, this reminds me so much of my childhood.’ Or, ‘I speak English with my grandparents, but we’re not able to connect just because we can’t find that common ground until we were able to find a mutual love of cooking or music or art.’ 

And so having a book out in the world like that has made me feel less alone. And what’s even more gratifying for me is this is a book about the inability to connect with someone in your life and then seeing classrooms and families use the book as a way of connecting with the people in their lives. 

I’ve had so many people reach out and say, you know, ‘We read this book and we immediately called our grandparents.’ Or ‘We immediately decided we needed to get together with our grandmother who we haven’t talked to in a long time.’ And I’ll get pictures of kids and their grandparents drawing together or painting together. And the fact that this book, which was born out of that distance, is being used to close that gap for other families means the world to me. And I can’t think of a better tribute to my grandparents than, than that.

So my name is Christina Soontornvat. The Tryout, the beginning of it, you know, you see the first day of school for seventh grade. And so you see Christina going through all of these different classes and the teachers in every class are mispronouncing her or my name are making a little joke about it or saying, I’m not even going to try to pronounce that one. And what I wanted to do with that is show readers right away. First of all, give them a sense of the time period. I think this would be hopefully less acceptable now to treat students like this. Though I know it happens all the time. And also just showing that I was different. I had always had a name that stood out and that people made comments about, but also that for each of those teachers, they thought they were making a funny joke.

And that was the only time that happened to them that day. But I had seven classes that day and it happened every single class. So I think you’d kind of get to see that, okay, these little microaggressions, which is what sometimes they get called, they add up and they accumulate. So it was a good way in the graphic novel to show that. And then you see a flashback where my third grade teacher approaches it very differently. I’m going to try to say your name and I’m sorry if I don’t get it right, but I really want to try. And that was also a way to show that there were people in this small town who were just so inclusive, so kind, so open. And she, I’m going to guarantee I’m the first Thai person she ever met, and that was the first Thai name she ever tried to pronounce. But just how much you can impact someone and make a difference in their life by being kind to them. And that also happened all the time too. So really the book as there was a lot that was challenging. There was a lot of racism, prejudice in the school. But I also really wanted to show how much kindness there was because there’s that too. And that’s the totality of the story, is that all of that existed together.

For more author interviews, please visit ReadingRockets.org.

Being honest and kind of raw about racism and prejudice in our country is really the, it’s like the only way to approach it from all sides, every angle. And I think the important thing for people to know is that kids, young kids in schools today, no matter who they are or where they are very aware. They know about racism, they see it. They … it’s happened to them or to people that they know. They want to talk about it. They are not afraid to talk about it. I think it’s us grownups that get afraid to talk about it, like uncomfortable. We’ve been taught that it’s uncomfortable to talk about, but we’re not going to make any change or any progress if we don’t talk about it. And I think kids are, they are so much more sophisticated, mature, capable of grappling with nuance, nuance of feeling, with empathy than we give them credit for. I just think we do them so much disservice to try to pare things down or cut things out, or hide things from them. You really can’t hide things from them. I mean, think about yourself in middle school and high school. You knew what was up even if nobody was telling you, you knew what was going on.

For more author interviews, please visit ReadingRockets.org.

When I was watching the mainstream media cover the story, there were just so many times where I noticed the American media kind of misrepresenting something or not getting it. Just so many examples, not understanding the religion, making fun, a little bit of the way that families would leave offerings and pray to this princess, this goddess of the cave. Guess goddess is not the right word, but her spirit, and just not being as respectful as they could. But also other things like the way that the boys responded when the rescue divers came in to help them, and how the boys were very calm and not seeming to get upset. And so the American media kind of acted like, oh, these funny boys, they weren’t even upset about anything because they were smiling. And I just, that was a misunderstanding of Thai culture, which is that you, they’re trying to be respectful by not showing they’re upset, and of course they’re upset, and of course they’re so terrified and overwhelmed and emotional, but they’re not going to show that to British diver because it’s not appropriate, and that would reflect badly on them, so it’s on them and their family.

So it was things like that that I felt like, okay, oh, when I write this, I have so much to say that’s going to help you understand it. If you don’t know what Thai culture is like that I felt just had to go in there. That’s part of understanding the story just as much as knowing the facts, the facts about the rescue.

For more author interviews, please visit ReadingRockets.org.

Dallas is such a diverse city. And of course there were lots of Thai people that we hung out with. My dad had a lot of Thai friends who lived there. And then so moving to a smaller town where it wasn’t as diverse. And I think my school, I went back and looked and I think it was like 87% white demographic. And so feeling instantly unique, very different. Teased sometimes, but just less being ostracized, but more just constantly being aware that I was different and feeling like I didn’t exactly have things in common with my classmates. I think that made me, I think that’s one of the reasons I was such a big reader. I mean, for one thing, I was always at the restaurant. I was always hanging out with my parents there. I had to go there after school. I had to hang out there on the weekends.

I’m an only child, and so that I couldn’t be left home alone. I had to go with them. And this is before iPads, before internet. So if I wasn’t drawing, I was reading or I would be asked to help out. So if I didn’t want to be put to work, I would have to just sit in the corner with a book. But I also think that there was a little bit of escapism where I was trying to imagine myself as the hero, imagine myself in these fantasy worlds. I read a lot of fantasy as a kid, a lot of magical stories. And I think it was because I felt so different in the real world. I was looking for a place for myself, and I found that in books.

For more author interviews, please visit ReadingRockets.org.

I’m Korean American. I was born in America, and I actually did live in Korea for a few years. I was born in Virginia, and I grew up mostly in Connecticut on the East Coast. And I lived in Korea from 1977 to ’82, and I went to Seoul Foreign School, which was a school for American kids. And it was really interesting because growing up as a Korean American in a mostly white suburban town in Connecticut, I got, unfortunately, I got, you know, the slanted eye thing, kids calling me terrible racist slurs, and I used to get a lot of “Can you see when you’re smiling?” kind of questions, which made me very self-conscious about my eyes.

And it was interesting because when we moved to Seoul, Korea, suddenly I was surrounded by everyone who looked like me, but because I talked the way I talk and I don’t speak Korean – I was raised to speak English and I’m very American, the way I behaved and my body language, the way I talked, and I spoke very little Korean – I was trying to learn it as a kid – the Korean kids who looked just like me, they made fun of me too, and they didn’t consider me Korean.

And I would find out later there’s a Korean term called “gyopo” which means Koreans who are not born in Korea, and it can sometimes be a little bit of a problematic term because you’re not really considered really Korean. So, I kind of grew up not fitting into either world. I didn’t fit in in my country of heritage, and I didn’t fit in in my other country of heritage. [laughs]

When I wrote my three children’s book picture book biographies, Sixteen Years in Sixteen Seconds, the Sammy Lee Story; Shining Star, the Anna May Wong Story; and Twenty-two Cents, Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank, I chose those three people because of their resilience.

Sammy Lee faced great racism. He was not allowed to swim in the town public swimming pool because he wasn’t white, you know, and this is in Pasadena. Do you know how hot Pasadena gets in the summer? It’s three digits. It’s like a hundred degrees out there. This child needs relief from the hot heatwaves, the sun, and he has to be behind a fence. He can’t use the pool ’cause he’s not white. That’s unforgivable. That’s disgusting. It’s hateful. It’s wrong.

What did he do? Ended up becoming a doctor, ended up winning two, not just one, two gold medals for America at the Olympics in diving. You know, that’s resilience. That’s saying I see the best in my country, and I’m going to go towards that, you know, I’m not going to let the hate defeat my dreams. With Anna May Wong, same thing, faced great racism as an actress, you know, did not get a lot of roles because she was not white, you know, had to do stereotype roles like “Mongol slave number four.”

She was hashtag representation matters decades before Twitter and social media even came about.

It’s amazing how she overcame the racism in Hollywood to fight for more dignified roles in Hollywood. And it’s because of Anna May Wong that we have things like the blockbuster megahit Shang-Chi from Marvel, you know, why we have Crazy Rich Asians, why we have Parasite and Minari, two Korean and Korean-American movies back to back at the Oscars.

You know, we owe a lot of that fight in Hollywood because she fought for the importance of positive imagery on the screen. That’s resilience. She didn’t give up. She kept going to those auditions even though she knew she probably would not get the role. Muhammad Yunus grew up, he came from a well-off family, but they were surrounded by poverty, and he watched his mother, they were making a favorite family snack, she would give them instead to the kids. He would say all the kids would tell the mom go for it, give it to the poor people outside, the homeless.

And he was so inspired by his mother’s compassion for the homeless and the poverty stricken in Bangladesh, that would lead to him studying economics and coming up with the brilliant idea of using micro banking where you give very small loans to poverty stricken people so they can actually be enabled and empowered to rise above .

You can’t break the cycle of poverty if you’re not given the same level playing field of getting a fair loan to start your business so you can become economically independent. So, he was resilient. He was a Boy Scout. The Boy Scouts taught him about compassion and giving back to the world. So, that is how and why I choose the subjects for my young adult and children’s book biographies.

I always look for people that are resilient and fight back and enact positive change because that, I think, reading about that inspires and empowers young kids to know that you can do something, you know, you can protest, you can talk to your principal about something that is bothering you at your school. You can speak up and protect your friends against bullying, you know, and so forth. So, to me, that’s why I write the biographies that I do, especially for children’s books. I look for kids that are just strong and resilient and fight back.

As Korean-American, as an Asian-American, I do want to address how librarians and educators and teachers can choose strong book examples about Asian American, Pacific Islander history, literature, fiction, characters, and voices in a way that is equitable and also authentic. I think the only answer I can think of is do the homework and be accountable.

When I say be accountable and do the homework in terms of trying to find the most authentic and proper books to teach that feature Asian American, Pacific Islander characters, themes, and historical events, it’s not just about going to the award list. Oh, what made all the state lists, what made all the awards lists, you know, let me just do that because I was that kind of reader.

Every time the National Book Awards came out or the Pulitzers, I’m like I would just go and get all the books and read them. But that’s not enough. You need to dig beneath that because there are a lot of books that go missing that should have been on those award lists but didn’t have the distribution, you know. Because a lot of these books are being published by more smaller, independent bookstores, they don’t have the access or the money to get them on all the bookshelves at the major bookstores. So that’s one thing.

I also think there are a bunch of websites now that are devoted to helping teachers and librarians know how to just get through this mass of this forest of books, like how do you focus in. There’s We Need Diverse Books.

Linda Sue Park, award-winning Korean American author, she just started a specific resource for Korean and Korean-American and Koreans in the diaspora list of books with interviews and vetting of “here are some really authentic books you should be reading.”

My very first book, The Ugly Vegetables, is a story about a girl and her mother. Her mother grows Chinese vegetables in her garden while everybody else in the neighborhood grows flowers. And the little girl is very embarrassed because they’re obviously Chinese-American or Asian-American in the story. This is very much based on my childhood. I think one of the things when I wrote my first story was to write what you know. Following those old mantras, write what you know.

After I wrote this book, it was actually a relative success. I was really, really proud of it. But what happened was I started getting letters, or parents who say “Oh I’ve been looking so hard for a book just like this. An Asian-American character where there is somebody who looks just like my daughter. Or just like my son.” Then I started thinking about myself, and I started thinking about how I grew up. I remembered how I used to feel very much alone because I grew up in upstate New York where there was not a lot of Asians, the fact we were the only Asian family in our neighborhood, I was definitely the only Asian girl in my classroom. Most of the time I just forgot about it, most of the time I just pretended I wasn’t Asian. In fact I remember walking past a window and I would see my reflection in the window and I would go “Oh, there’s a Chinese girl.” I’d be like “Oh wait, that’s me.”

Because most of the time I would just forget that I was Asian. So, I think one of the reasons I did that was because I loved books when I was younger. And all the books that I read never had anybody that looked like me in them. And I realized that if that had been maybe I wouldn’t have felt so alone. I wouldn’t have wanted to forget I was Asian so much. And so that’s something that is a mirror, these books are very much a mirror of my life when I was younger.

And as a window, I hope as a window, when I was younger, I tell this story quite often. As I said, I always tried to pretend that I wasn’t Asian, I’d always try to forget that I was Asian. Most of the time that worked. Most of the time, I just forget that I was. I thought I was just like everybody in my classroom. And then my fifth grade class decided to put on the play “The Wizard of Oz”. And everybody, all the girls in my class wanted to be Dorothy. And I really wanted to be Dorothy too. So, every day, out on the school-yard, we’d all sing “Somewhere over the Rainbow” over and over and over practicing for the audition.

Finally on the day of the audition. We are standing in that circle, one last time, practicing. And I turned to the girl next to me and I said “Hey today’s the audition, do you think they might choose me to be Dorothy” And she looked at me and she said “But you can’t be Dorothy. Dorothy’s not Chinese.” And I remembered I felt so stupid. And I remember feeling like oh my gosh she’s right, I’m Asian, I’m Chinese. There’s no way I could ever be Dorothy. And when it was time for the audition and they called me name, I didn’t even try out. I just shook my head and said “No, no, no. Forget it. It would be so stupid for Dorothy to be Chinese.”

So my hope for my books is not only is it a mirror of my childhood so that kids who were like me could see themselves and not feel so alone. I also hope that it’s a window for those who are not Asian who are not of a minority race. And they can see other, other races and realize oh they are just like, just like, even though they might look different. So that’s kind of how I feel my books are both windows and mirrors.

So Tracy Woo in Blubber was the first character that I really saw myself in when I was growing up because finally instead of Mr. Sulu or, you know, Bruce Lee, I actually saw a character who was my generation and who had very similar experiences to mine, and I think it filled a need I didn’t even know I had to see myself there.

So I had had my third child. I’d been a stay-at-home mom, and, like, I had gotten an invitation to a high school reunion, and, you know, you get those things and it kinda makes you stop and think, and for that one, I thought, “You know, what have I not done that I always wanted to do?” And I realized I always wanted to write — try to write a children’s book, and so I called up a friend of mine who had an MFA, and I said, “Well, you know, what should I do?” And she said, “Go to the Writers Center in Maryland. They have, you know, great programs,” and so I took my first class with Mary Quattlebaum, who’s a really awesome teacher, and it just kinda took off from there.

I think, you know, the hard part about being a mom when you’re a writer is you kind of sometimes have this instinct to protect your characters, and that’s really the last thing you wanna do. You really kind of wanna make their lives as difficult as you reasonably can for the sake of the story. I think having kids has been helpful in that you kind of have a sense of, you know, what a kid’s life is like now, which is different from, you know, what my life was when I was growing up.

But at the same time, I try to respect their space. Like, I don’t want them to feel like, “Oh, this happened, and it’s gonna end up in Mom’s book.” So there’s always kinda that line, or at least, you know, you have to ask permission. Like, is it okay if I put this, you know, fill in embarrassing incident in this book?

It wasn’t until I was grown and had children of my own that I realized, “Oh, there’s probably just a treasure trove of stories in my own family that I’ve never looked into.”

Some young people may come to that much sooner than I did, and they may well be interested in, “Grandma,” or, “Grandpa, tell me about when you were young.” “How was it different in whatever country you lived in?” And if that’s the case, wonderful. Write them down. Oftentimes, it’s grandma and grandpa, or even your parents who can’t write in English, or can’t speak in English, and can’t share those stories in the way that you can. You can help, even if it’s only writing down a story or two of your grandparents that you then just show to the rest of your family.

All of my favorite books were, for me, exotic stories. I would include in that something like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I was a Midwestern, suburban girl. I lived in a small town near cornfields, and Brooklyn was exotic to me. It was this big city, which I had never lived in, and Francie Nolan lived in this tenement, which was a very different setting for me. And, yet, she loved the library, and she loved to read. So, finding something in common with people who lived in very different circumstances was by far the most rewarding thing for me.

And I think that’s what books can do for young people. They’re a bridge. They’re a way to get to know people who are very different and to say, “But wait. In a lot of ways, they are like me.”

Well, you know, I grew up as an outsider, because I grew up in an Afro-American neighborhood, and I went to school in Chinatown. And so even though I had friends in both areas, I was always something of an outsider. In my own neighborhood, if we were playing war games – and, again, this will date me – I would serve as the all-purpose Oriental. I’d either be the Japanese that was getting killed, if we’re fighting World War II, or I’d be the Korean getting killed if we were fighting the Korean War.

Or, when I would go into Chinatown – well, I went to a Catholic school. And so if my friends wanted to tell jokes that the nuns wouldn’t understand, my friends would tell the jokes in Chinese. But my parents didn’t speak Chinese at home, so I didn’t have enough Chinese to understand the jokes.