New Books In Asian American Studies

In 2022, Michelle Yeoh became the first Asian actress to win the Academy Award for Best Actress. But she wasn’t the first actress of Asian origin to be nominated. In 1935, Merle Oberon was nominated for Best Actress for the role of Kitty Vane in The Dark Angel, only her second film in the U.S. film industry. But no one knew Oberon was Asian. Her public biography said she was born to white parents in Tasmania, eventually moving to India and, from there, to the UK. But Merle Oberon, in truth, was of Anglo-Indian origin, born in Bombay. She’d hidden her heritage to get around U.S. censorship and immigration laws—a secret she took to her grave, even if many in the industry suspected the truth. Mayukh Sen tackles Oberon’s life in Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star (W.W. Norton: 2025). Mayukh Sen is the James Beard Award-winning author of Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America (W.W. Norton: 2021). He is a 2025 Fellow at New America, and has written on f

Join me for a conversation with Dr. Seulghee Lee (Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English, University of South Carolina) about his recently published book, Other Lovings: An AfroAsian American Theory of Life (Ohio State UP, 2025). Some topics of our discussion include Adrian Tomine's graphic novel Shortcomings (2007), Gayl Jones' novella Corregidora (1975), and the cultural phenomenon of "Linsanity" and the lasting impact of NBA player Jeremy Lin's rise to fame. In Other Lovings, Seulghee Lee traces the presence and plenitude of love embedded in Black and Asian American literatures and cultures to reveal their irreducible power to cohere minoritarian social life. Bringing together Black studies, Asian American studies, affect theory, critical theory, and queer of color critique, Lee examines the bonds of love in works by Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde, David Henry Hwang, Gayl Jones, Fred Moten, Adrian Tomine, and Charles Yu. He attends to the ontological force of love in popular culture, inves

Join NBN host Hollay Ghadery for a thought-provoking conversation with Linda Trihn about her memoir, Seeking Spirit: A Vietnamese (Non)Buddhist Memoir (Miroland, 2025). Linda Trinh had everything she thought an immigrant woman should want: motherhood, career, and security. Yet, she felt empty. Growing up in Winnipeg, Linda helped her mom make offerings to their ancestors and cleaned her late dad’s altar. These were her mother’s beliefs, but was Buddhism Linda’s belief? In her late-twenties, Linda sought answers in Egypt and China and prayed during corporate downsizing, seeking meaning in contemporary life. Via a collection of essays, she plays with form and structure to show the interconnection of life events, trauma, and spiritual practice, to move from being a passive believer to an active seeker. About Linda Trinh: Linda Trinh is a Vietnamese Canadian author who writes nonfiction and fiction for adults and children. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in literary magazines such as The Fiddlehead, Room, 

Spies deep behind enemy lines; double agents; a Chinese American James Bond; black propaganda radio broadcasters; guerrilla fighters; pirates; smugglers; prostitutes and dancers as spies; and Asian Americans collaborating with Axis Powers. All these colorful individuals form the story of Asian Americans in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of today's CIA. Brian Masaru Hayashi brings to light for the first time the role played by Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Americans in America's first centralized intelligence agency in its fight against the Imperial Japanese forces in east Asia during World War II. They served deep behind enemy lines gathering intelligence for American and Chinese troops locked in a desperate struggle against Imperial Japanese forces on the Asian continent. Other Asian Americans produced and disseminated statements by bogus peace groups inside the Japanese empire to weaken the fighting resolve of the Japanese. Still others served with guerrilla forces attacking enemy su

Chinatown neighborhoods in the United States are about more than restaurants, shops, and architecture, argues San Jose State urban studies associate professor Laureen Hom in The Power of Chinatown: Searching for Spatial Justice in Los Angeles (California UP, 2024). They're also communities where people live, organize, and argue over politics. Chinatowns are vital political actors, places where culture, history, and community come together to form bulwarks of power as places that have historically had considerable agency in shaping their own destiny. In this close study of Los Angeles' Chinatown neighborhood in the early twenty first century, Hom argues that the neighborhood is a complex places, where urban trends such as gentrification and displacement have been at once both pushed against and, at times, encouraged, both from within and without.  The Power of Chinatown puts people at the center of the story, arguing that for all its tourist appeal, it is those who live in this place who care about it the most

Nearly fifty years after the end of the war in Vietnam, American children of Vietnamese refugees continue to process the meanings of the war and its consequences through creative work. Displacing Kinship: The Intimacies of Intergenerational Trauma in Vietnamese American Cultural Production (Temple UP, 2024) examines how Vietnamese American cultural productions register lived experiences of racism in their depictions of family life and marginalization. Second-generation texts illustrate how the children of refugees from Vietnam are haunted by trauma and a violent, ever-present, but mostly unarticulated past. Linh Thủy Nguyễn’s analysis reveals that present experiences of economic insecurity and racism also shape these narratives of familial loss. Developing a theory of intergenerational trauma, Nguyễn rethinks how U.S. imperialism, the discourse of communism, and assimilation impacted families across generations. Through ethnic studies and feminist and queer-of-color critique, Displacing Kinship offers a criti

In 1931, Hazel Ying Lee, a nineteen-year-old American daughter of Chinese immigrants, sat in on a friend’s flight lesson. It changed her life. In less than a year, a girl with a wicked sense of humor, a newfound love of flying, and a tough can-do attitude earned her pilot’s license and headed for China to help against invading Japanese forces. In time, Hazel would become the first Asian American to fly with the Women Airforce Service Pilots. As thrilling as it may have been, it wasn’t easy. In America, Hazel felt the oppression and discrimination of the Chinese Exclusion Act. In China’s field of male-dominated aviation she was dismissed for being a woman, and for being an American. But in service to her country, Hazel refused to be limited by gender, race, and impossible dreams. Frustrated but undeterred she forged ahead, married Clifford Louie, a devoted and unconventional husband who cheered his wife on, and gave her all for the cause achieving more in her short remarkable life than even she imagined possib

In 1492, Christopher Columbus arrived on the Caribbean Island of Guanahaní to find an Edenic scene that was soon mythologized. But behind the myth of paradise, the Caribbean and its people would come to pay the price of relentless Western exploitation and abuse. In Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis (Doubleday Books, 2025), Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe embarks on a historical journey to chart the forces that have shaped these islands: the legacy of slavery, indentured labor, and the forced toil of Chinese and enslaved Black people who mined the islands’ bounty—including guano, which, at the time, was more valuable than gold—for the benefit of European powers and at the expense of the islands’ sacred ecologies. Braiding together family history, cultural reportage, and social studies, Goffe radically transforms how we conceive of Blackness, the natural world, colonialism, and the climate crisis; and, in doing so, she deftly dismantles the many layers of entrenched imperial

In this episode, I talked to Corinne Sugino, whose book Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans (Rutgers UP, 2024) examines how mainstream stories about Asian American success have come to serve harmful ideas about progress. At the turn of the century, Asian Americans have come to embody meritocracy and heteronormative family values, and more recently, some Asian Americans have become the face of law and order. These ideas become solidified in a variety of narratives, from blockbuster movies such as Crazy Rich Asians, to (supposedly) myth-busting documentaries such as Seeking Asian Female, to legal arguments against Affirmative Action. But these stories—usually stories about American citizens of East Asian descent—erase the diverse lived experience of Asian America. In this conversation, Corine Sugino also explains how we can draw on Black Studies, including scholarship by Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, to develop a more capacious understanding of “the human” and antiracism. This provid

Jami Nakamura Lin spent much of her life feeling monstrous for reasons outside of her control. As a young woman with undiagnosed bipolar disorder, much of her adolescence was marked by periods of extreme rage and an array of psychiatric treatments, and her relationships suffered as a result, especially as her father's cancer grasped hold of their family. As she grew older and learned to better manage her episodes, Lin grew frustrated with the familiar pattern she found in mental illness and grief narratives, and their focus on recovery. She sought comfort in the stories she'd loved as a child -- tales of ghostly creatures known to terrify in the night. Through the lens of the yokai and other figures from Japanese, Taiwanese, and Okinawan legend, she set out to interrogate the very notion of recovery and the myriad ways fear of difference shapes who we are as a people.  Featuring stunning illustrations by her sister, Cori Nakamura Lin, and divided into the four acts of a traditional Japanese narrative structur

In a book that pulls together both sides of the Pacific, Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America (UNC Press, 2023) asks the question: what if we look at Filipino history not from the cities or the imperial metropoles, but from the mountains and the countryside? Or put another way, from the "bundok," the Tagalog word for "mountain" which American soliders in the late 19th century would come to use as a catachall for the places they found themselves fighting imperial wars. In Bundok, NYU history and FIlipino Studies professor Adrian De Leon tracks both the movement of European and American colonizers into the archipeligo, as well as how people and images moved beyond the islands and into the wider Pacific world, and how these pictures and these emigres shaped ideas about civilization, savagery, and the nature of Filipine identity itself. In a book that traces pathways from the mountains of Luzon to the mountains of South Dakota, De Leon demonstrates how the American West has always been a transnational

This empowering book blends history, storytelling, and culturally grounded techniques to equip readers with the tools needed to promote self-reflection, personal growth, and diasporic healing. Asian Americans represent the fastest growing ethnic group in the United States, yet few books capture how historical events, immigration experiences, cultural values, and unhelpful generational patterns contribute to this group's thoughts, attitudes, and actions in ways that impact relationships, well-being, and psychological health. In Patterns That Remain: A Guide to Healing for Asian Children of Immigrants (Oxford University Press, 2025), Dr. Stacey Diane Arañez Litam empowers readers to heal from diasporic wounds and become people, partners, and parents who embody abundance mentalities grounded in joy, balance, and gratitude. This unique book combines complex and nuanced facets of Asian American history, research, and therapeutic modalities in ways that validate Asian American worldviews and promote a deep sense of

In Unsustainable Empire: Alternative Histories of Hawai‘i Statehood (Duke University Press, 2018), Dean Itsuji Saranillio offers a bold challenge to conventional understandings of Hawai‘i’s admission as a U.S. state. Hawai‘i statehood is popularly remembered as a civil rights victory against racist claims that Hawai‘i was undeserving of statehood because it was a largely non-white territory. Yet Native Hawaiian opposition to statehood has been all but forgotten. Saranillio tracks these disparate stories by marshaling a variety of unexpected genres and archives: exhibits at world's fairs, political cartoons, propaganda films, a multimillion-dollar hoax on Hawai‘i’s tourism industry, water struggles, and stories of hauntings, among others. Saranillio shows that statehood was neither the expansion of U.S. democracy nor a strong nation swallowing a weak and feeble island nation, but the result of a U.S. nation whose economy was unsustainable without enacting a more aggressive policy of imperialism. With clarity a

In 1986 the Compact of Free Association marked the formal end of U.S. colonialism in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, while simultaneously re-entrenching imperial power dynamics between the two countries. The U.S.-RMI Compact at once enshrined exclusive U.S. military access to the islands and established the right of “visa-free” migration to the United States for Marshallese citizens, leading to a Marshallese diaspora whose largest population resettled in the seemingly unlikely destination of Springdale, Arkansas. An “all-white town” by design for much of the twentieth century, Springdale, having nearly quadrupled in population since 1980, has been remade by Marshallese as well as Latinx immigration. Through ethnographic, policy-based, and archival research in Guåhan, Saipan, Hawai’i, Arkansas, and Washington, D.C., New Destinations of Empire: Mobilities, Racial Geographies, and Citizenship in the Transpacific United States (University of Georgia Press, 2024) by Dr. Emily Mitchell-Eaton tells the story o

Justin K.H. Tse captures the voices of Cantonese Protestant Christians from the San Francisco, Vancouver, and Hong Kong metropolitan areas as they reflect on their efforts to adapt to secular communities while retaining their identity and beliefs. In the context of the transpacific region between Asia and the Americas, the “Pacific Rim” refers to a window of time in which predominant narratives emphasized skilled migration and the rise of multicultural societies—the era before the rise of Chinese nationalism in 2012 and the Hong Kong protests. Diasporic Cantonese Protestant Christians of this time were frequently portrayed as a homogenous people bringing their Chinese culture and Christian communities from Hong Kong to cities such as Vancouver and San Francisco—sometimes contesting liberal developments like same-sex marriage but also offering new democratic awareness. Sheets of Scattered Sand: Cantonese Protestants and the Secular Dream of the Pacific Rim (U Notre Dame Press, 2024) challenges that depiction o

Set in 1977, Johnny Delivers (Guernica Editions, 2024) tells the absorbing story of 18-year-old Johnny Wong—the son of Chinese immigrants to Canada—who calls on the spirit of Bruce Lee to help him navigate the still relevant challenges of racism and how it permeates our interiority, our institutions, our relationships, and our livelihood. Toxic masculinity, homophobia, and the struggle for belonging. With the 100th Anniversary of the Enactment of the Chinese Exclusion Act in Canada barely behind us, the themes explored in this book are particularly salient. An exciting and heart-wrenching story combined with the distinctly Canadian setting and universal themes make this book a wonderful book to read. Wayne Ng was born in downtown Toronto to Chinese immigrants who fed him a steady diet of bitter melon and kung fu movies. Ng is a social worker who lives to write, travel, eat, and play, preferably all at the same time. He is an award-winning author and traveler who continues to push his boundaries from the Arcti

For anyone who has ever felt like they don't belong, Sigh, Gone: A Misfit's Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and the Fight to Fit In (Flatiron Books, 2020) shares an irreverent, funny, and moving tale of displacement and assimilation woven together with poignant themes from beloved works of classic literature. In 1975, during the fall of Saigon, Phuc Tran immigrates to America along with his family. By sheer chance they land in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a small town where the Trans struggle to assimilate into their new life. In this coming-of-age memoir told through the themes of great books such as The Metamorphosis, The Scarlet Letter, The Iliad, and more, Tran navigates the push and pull of finding and accepting himself despite the challenges of immigration, feelings of isolation, and teenage rebellion, all while attempting to meet the rigid expectations set by his immigrant parents. Appealing to fans of coming-of-age memoirs such as Fresh Off the Boat, Running with Scissors, or tales of assimilation like V

Jackie Wang is a poet, scholar, multimedia artist, and Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She is the author of the poetry collection The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void (2021), which was a finalist for the National Book Award; the critical essay collection Carceral Capitalism (Semiotext(e), 2018); and the chapbooks The Twitter Hive Mind Is Dreaming (2018) and Tiny Spelunker of the Oneiro-Womb (2016). Her research is on racial capitalism, surveillance technology, and the political economy of prisons and police. Alien Daughters Walk into the Sun: An Almanac of Extreme Girlhood (Semiotext(e), 2023) features the early writings of Jackie Wang, drawn from her early zines, indie-lit crit, and prolific early 2000s blog. Compiled as a field guide, travelogue, essay collection, and weather report, Alien Daughters Walk into the Sun traces Jackie Wang’s trajectory from hard femme to Harvard, from dumpster dives and highway bike rides to dropping

Today, U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) detains an average of 37,000 migrants each night. To do so, they rely on, and pay for, the use of hundreds of local jails. But this is nothing new: the federal government has been detaining migrants in city and county jails for more than 100 years.  In The Migrant's Jail: An American History of Mass Incarceration (Princeton UP, 2024), Brianna Nofil examines how a century of political, ideological, and economic exchange between the U.S. immigration bureaucracy and the criminal justice system gave rise to the world's largest system of migrant incarceration. Migrant detention is not simply an outgrowth of mass incarceration; rather, it has propelled carceral state-building and fostered intergovernmental policing efforts since the turn of the twentieth century. From the incarceration of Chinese migrants in New York in the 1900s and 1910s to the jailing of Caribbean refugees in Gulf South lockups of the 1980s and 1990s, federal immigration authorities provided co

Today’s book is: Immigration Realities: Challenging Common Misperceptions (Columbia UP, 2024), by Ernesto Castaneda and Carina Cione, which is a practical, evidence-based primer on immigrants and immigration. Each chapter debunks a frequently encountered claim and answers common questions. Presenting the latest findings and decades of interdisciplinary research in an accessible way, Dr. Castañeda and Carina Cione emphasize the expert consensus that immigration is vital to the United States and many other countries around the world. Featuring original insights from research conducted in El Paso, Texas, Immigration Realities considers a wide range of places, ethnic groups, and historical eras. It provides the key data and context to understand how immigration affects economies, crime rates, and social welfare systems, and it sheds light on contentious issues such as the safety of the U.S.-Mexico border and the consequences of Brexit. This book is an indispensable guide for all readers who want to counter false