For Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month

Over the past seven-plus years on this blog, I’ve posted about many novels by Asian American writers. Here are brief summaries of some of those books, with links to my full reviews.

The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane      Lisa See     (2017)  A moving tale of the collision of a traditional Chinese culture with the modern world. Click here for my full review.

The Tenth Muse     Catherine Chung     (2019)  The story of a female mathematician of extraordinary abilities in mid-20th-century Michigan. Click here for my full review.

Searching for Sylvie Lee     Jean Kwok     (2019)  A mystery that also follows an immigrant family in today’s highly mobile global economy. Click here for my full review.

Pachinko     Min Jin Lee     (2017)  A saga about four generations of a Korean family living in Japan in the twentieth century. Click here for my full review.

Chemistry     Weike Wang     (2017) A novel about the difficulties that women (of any race) face in choosing careers in the sciences, and about the tensions between the personal and the professional in the lives of talented people. Click here for my full review.

The Fortunes     Peter Ho Davies     (2016)  A heartbreaking metafictional novel, in four interlocking sections, about the experience of being Chinese American over the past 150 years.  Click here for my full review.

Little Fires Everywhere     Celeste Ng     (2017)  Teens in late-1990s Shaker Heights, Ohio, confront incendiary issues of the upper-middle-class: bigotry, greed, and a disdain for those who diverge from the norms set by their communities. Click here for my full review.

Finally, here’s my review of a very recent novel:

Lady Tan’s Circle of Women     Lisa See     (2023)  This fictional recreation of the life of Tan Yunxian, a woman born into an elite family of Chinese scholars and judges, is set in late-fifteenth-century China. A murder mystery is buried in the pages and unravels toward the end, but the primary focus is on Lady Tan’s development as a physician and on how she came to write a definitive medical treatise that has survived to this day. Given Lady Tan’s vocation—which was extremely rare for a female in this period—be prepared for descriptions of the medical conditions that she treats, especially related to pregnancy and childbirth. The patriarchal structures of medieval Chinese society (footbinding, concubines) are also prominent. Reading sometimes like nonfiction, Lady Tan’s Circle of Women immerses the reader in medieval China.

Two Historicals, Two Contemporaries

So that I don’t get too mired in the past with my reading material, I like to alternate historical and contemporary novels. First, reviews of two historicals:

The Giver of Stars     Jojo Moyes     (2019)  I’m late to the parade of Jojo Moyes’s bestselling popular novels, but I blazed through this one. The fast-moving plot is drawn from the actual existence of a cadre of women in Depression-era Appalachia who rode on horseback to deliver library books to people living in isolated cabins, a project of the federally-funded WPA. In her fictional take, Moyes deposits an outsider into rural Kentucky—the English bride of a mine owner’s son—and tells the story mainly through this woman’s eyes. There’s small-town gossip, domestic violence, religious fervor, racial animosity, moonshinin’, patriarchy, friendship, union bustin’, political corruption, and some true love.

The Cloister     James Carroll     (2017)  In NYC, the Metropolitan Museum’s medieval art department is housed in The Cloisters, which resembles a medieval monastery. On a rainy day in 1950, a Catholic priest ducks into The Cloisters and meets a docent who is a Holocaust survivor from Paris. Before WWII, she worked at the Sorbonne with her father, researching the 12th-century philosopher-monk Peter Abelard’s opposition to the Catholic church’s anti-Semitism. Carroll’s novel pivots back and forth between the 12th century and 1950. You’ll settle in more easily if you know a little Latin and if you know about Abelard’s love affair with the philosopher-abbess Héloïse d’Argenteuil. Even without that knowledge, you’ll find both stories powerful.

Next, two contemporaries:

Groundskeeping     Lee Cole     (2022)  Owen and Alma are both aspiring writers in their late twenties who meet at a small college in Kentucky. He’s a groundskeeper, and she’s on a one-year writing fellowship. They fall into a fraught relationship that is made more difficult by issues of social class and privilege. I didn’t recognize most of the music that they listen to, but the writing here is very fine—complex plotting, deft character delineations, rich setting descriptions.

Joan is Okay     Weike Wang     (2022)  All of us know what’s going to happen in the intensive care units of hospitals in New York City in the spring of 2020. We know that ICU physicians like Joan are going to be in the thick of the COVID pandemic. But in 2019, Joan can’t predict this. She’s dealing instead with the expectations of her boss (who rewards her workaholism) as well as the expectations of her Chinese American family (who want her to get married and have kids). She also has a strangely intrusive neighbor and an oddball work colleague. Still, Joan is okay, even when COVID hits. This short novel packs a punch. And don’t miss my review of Wang’s previous novel, Chemistry.