Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month, like all heritage months, offers an opportunity to celebrate our identities and expand our understanding of cultures that differ from ours. In this spirit of continuous learning and exploring, the staff at Justice in Aging compiled a list of books, podcasts, and films that have been significant to their understanding of AAPI cultures, histories, or their own AAPI heritage. Many of the recommendations below weave in themes that touch on our work here at Justice in Aging including older adults and intergenerational families, caregiving, belonging, immigration, disability, and more. We hope you find something new to read or watch that you’ll remember for years to come.
Books
by Alice Wong
One in five people in the United States lives with a disability. Some disabilities are visible, others less apparent–but all are underrepresented in media and popular culture. Activist Alice Wong brings together this urgent, galvanizing collection of contemporary essays by disabled people, just in time for the thirtieth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act,
From Harriet McBryde Johnson’s account of her debate with Peter Singer over her own personhood to original pieces by authors like Keah Brown and Haben Girma; from blog posts, manifestos, and eulogies to Congressional testimonies, and beyond: this anthology gives a glimpse into the rich complexity of the disabled experience, highlighting the passions, talents, and everyday lives of this community. It invites readers to question their own understandings. It celebrates and documents disability culture in the now. It looks to the future and the past with hope and love.
by C. Pam Zhang
Both epic and intimate, blending Chinese symbolism and reimagined history with fiercely original language and storytelling, How Much of These Hills Is Gold is a haunting adventure story, an unforgettable sibling story, and the announcement of a stunning new voice in literature. On a broad level, it explores race in an expanding country and the question of where immigrants are allowed to belong. But page by page, it’s about the memories that bind and divide families, and the yearning for home.
by Cathy Park Hong
Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative–and its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world.
Binding these essays together is Hong’s theory of “minor feelings.” As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy.
by Michelle Zauner
In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food.
by Helen Zia
This groundbreaking book is about the transformation of Asian Americans from a few small, disconnected, and largely invisible ethnic groups into a self-identified racial group that is influencing every aspect of American society. It explores the junctures that shocked Asian Americans into motion and shaped a new consciousness, including the murder of Vincent Chin, a Chinese American, by two white autoworkers who believed he was Japanese; the apartheid-like working conditions of Filipinos in the Alaska canneries; the boycott of Korean American greengrocers in Brooklyn; the Los Angeles riots; and the casting of non-Asians in the Broadway musical Miss Saigon. The book also examines the rampant stereotypes of Asian Americans.
by Jason Deparle
When Jason DeParle moved into the Manila slums with Tita Comodas and her family three decades ago, he never imagined his reporting on them would span three generations and turn into the defining chronicle of a new age–the age of global migration. In a monumental book that gives new meaning to immersion journalism, DeParle paints an intimate portrait of an unforgettable family as they endure years of sacrifice and separation, willing themselves out of shantytown poverty into a new global middle class. At the heart of the story is Tita’s daughter, Rosalie. Beating the odds, she struggles through nursing school and works her way across the Middle East until a Texas hospital fulfills her dreams with a job offer in the States.
Film & Television
Directed by Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert
The fate of the world depends on Evelyn Quan Wang, a Chinese immigrant running a laundromat with her husband, Waymond. As her mind-bending story unfolds, Evelyn explores the many different courses her life has taken across the multiverse. This also gives her the emotions, memories and skills acquired in her many alternate lives – which she must use to fight against a mysterious threat known as Jobu Tupaki.
Directed by Marissa Aroy
The story of farm labor organizer Larry Itliong and a group of Filipino farm workers who instigated one of the American farm labor movement’s finest hours – The Delano Grape Strike of 1965 that brought about the creation of the United Farm Workers Union (UFW).
HBO
In Take Out, award-winning journalist Lisa Ling—whose own family story began in a Chinese restaurant—travels from the bayous of Louisiana to Orange County’s Little Saigon, exploring the foods we love while shining a long overdue spotlight on the contributions Asian Americans have been making to the United States since before the United States was even the United States.
Directed by Jon M. Chu
An American-born Chinese economics professor accompanies her boyfriend to Singapore for his best friend’s wedding, only to get thrust into the lives of Asia’s rich and famous.
PBS
Asian Americans is a five-hour film series that delivers a bold, fresh perspective on a history that matters today, more than ever. As America becomes more diverse, and more divided while facing unimaginable challenges, how do we move forward together? Told through intimate personal stories, the series will cast a new lens on U.S. history and the ongoing role that Asian Americans have played.
Directed by Christine Choy & Renee Tajima-Peña
On a hot summer night in Detroit in 1982, Ronald Ebens, an autoworker, killed Vincent Chin, a young Chinese American draftsman with a baseball bat. Although he confessed, he never spent a day in jail. This gripping Academy Award-nominated film relentlessly probes the implications of the murder, for the families of those involved, and for the American justice system.
HBO
In pursuit of the American dream, a Korean-American family moves to a farm in Arkansas. With plenty of highs and lows along the way, Minari follows the family’s journey to learn what it means to make a new home. Yuh-Jung Youn won an Oscar for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role. In addition to her win, the film was nominated for five more Academy Awards.
Podcasts
Scene on Radio
The story of Bhagat Singh Thind, and also of Takao Ozawa – Asian immigrants who, in the 1920s, sought to convince the U.S. Supreme Court that they were white in order to gain American citizenship. Thind’s “bargain with white supremacy,” and the deeply revealing result.
CapRadio
Mid Pacific explores what it means to be Asian American and the feeling of being caught between two worlds. Host Sarah Mizes-Tan brings you stories of food, politics, family and more and shows how those experiences influence our ideas of identity.
APM Reports
President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 just months after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Some 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were forced from their homes on the West Coast and sent to one of ten “relocation” camps, where they were imprisoned behind barbed wire for the length of the war. Two-thirds of them were American citizens. Order 9066 chronicles the history of this incarceration through vivid, first-person accounts of those who lived through it.
Listen Now →
Throughline, NPR
In August of 1895, a ship called the SS Coptic approached the coast of Northern California. On that boat was a passenger from San Francisco, a young man named Wong Kim Ark who was returning home after visiting his wife and child in China. He’d taken trips like this before, and expected to come back to the city he was born in, to his life and friends. But when the ship docked, officials told him he couldn’t get off. The customs agent barred him according to the Chinese Exclusion Act, which denied citizenship to Chinese immigrants. Though Wong Kim Ark had been born in the U.S. and lived his whole life there, the agent said he was not a citizen.
Dive into Pacific Island issues alongside a Pacific Islander millennial woman of science. This podcast is done in service to our under-represented voices to shed light upon long-standing social, economic, scientific, political, educational, and cultural circumstances which we grew up with and which connect us.
