A collection of thirty heartfelt, witty, and hopeful thought pieces “that highlights the humanity and multitudes of being Asian American” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review), for fans of Minor Feelings. There are 23 million people, representing more than twenty countries, each with unique languages, histories, and cultures, clumped under one banner: Asian American. Though their experiences are individual, certain commonalities appear. -The pressure to perform and the weight of the model minority myth. -The proximity to whiteness (for many) and the resulting privileges. -The desexualizing, exoticizing, and fetishizing of their bodies. -The microaggressions. -The erasure and overt racism. Through a series of essays, poems, and comics, thirty creators give voice to moments that defined them and shed light on the immense diversity and complexity of the Asian American identity. Edited by CAPE and with an introduction by renowned journalist SuChin Pak, My Life: Growing Up Asian in America is a celebration of community, a call to action, and “a vital record of the Asian American experience” (Publishers Weekly). It’s the perfect gift for any occasion. Featuring contributions from bestselling authors Melissa de la Cruz, Marie Lu, and Tanaïs; journalists Amna Nawaz, Edmund Lee, and Aisha Sultan; TV and film writers Teresa Hsiao, Heather Jeng Bladt, and Nathan Ramos-Park; and industry leaders Ellen K. Pao and Aneesh Raman, among many more.

Any serious consideration of Asian American life forces us to reframe the way we talk about racism and antiracism. The current emphasis on racial identity obscures the political economic basis that makes racialized life in America legible. This is especially true when it comes to Asian Americans. This book reframes the conversation in terms of what has been called ""racial capitalism"" and utilizes two extended case studies to show how Asian Americans perpetuate and resist its political economy.

---Michael O. Emerson, Rice University --

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • ONE OF TIME’S 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE • A ruthlessly honest, emotionally charged, and utterly original exploration of Asian American consciousness “Brilliant . . . To read this book is to become more human.”—Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen In development as a television series starring and adapted by Greta Lee • One of Time’s 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the Year • Named One of the Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, New Statesman, BuzzFeed, Esquire, The New York Public Library, and Book Riot 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. She would later understand that these “minor feelings” occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality—when you believe the lies you’re told about your own racial identity. Minor feelings are not small, they’re dissonant—and in their tension Hong finds the key to the questions that haunt her. With sly humor and a poet’s searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and female friendship. A radically honest work of art, Minor Feelings forms a portrait of one Asian American psyche—and of a writer’s search to both uncover and speak the truth. Praise for Minor Feelings “Hong begins her new book of essays with a bang. . . .The essays wander a variegated terrain of memoir, criticism and polemic, oscillating between smooth proclamations of certainty and twitches of self-doubt. . . . Minor Feelings is studded with moments [of] candor and dark humor shot through with glittering self-awareness.”—The New York Times “Hong uses her own experiences as a jumping off point to examine race and emotion in the United States.”—Newsweek “Powerful . . . [Hong] brings together memoiristic personal essay and reflection, historical accounts and modern reporting, and other works of art and writing, in order to amplify a multitude of voices and capture Asian America as a collection of contradictions. She does so with sharp wit and radical transparency.”—Salon

" ... about the transformation of Asian Americans ... into a self-identified racial group that is influencing every aspect of American society."--Jacket.

Contributions by Hena Ahmad, Linda Pierce Allen, Mary J. Henderson Couzelis, Sarah Park Dahlen, Lan Dong, Tomo Hattori, Jennifer Ho, Ymitri Mathison, Leah Milne, Joy Takako Taylor, and Traise Yamamoto Often referred to as the model minority, Asian American children and adolescents feel pressured to perform academically and be disinterested in sports, with the exception of martial arts. Boys are often stereotyped as physically unattractive nerds and girls as petite and beautiful. Many Americans remain unaware of the diversity of ethnicities and races the term Asian American comprises, with Asian American adolescents proving to be more invisible than adults. As a result, Asian American adolescents are continually searching for their identity and own place in American society. For these kids, being or considered to be American becomes a challenge in itself as they assert their Asian and American identities; claim their own ethnic identity, be they immigrant or American-born; and negotiate their ethnic communities. The contributors to Growing Up Asian American in Young Adult Fiction focus on moving beyond stereotypes to examine how Asian American children and adolescents define their unique identities. Chapters focus on primary texts from many ethnicities, such as Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Japanese, Vietnamese, South Asian, and Hawaiian. Individual chapters, crossing cultural, linguistic, and racial boundaries, negotiate the complex terrain of Asian American children's and teenagers" identities. Chapters cover such topics as internalized racism and self-loathing; hyper-sexualization of Asian American females in graphic novels; interracial friendships; transnational adoptions and birth searches; food as a means of assimilation and resistance; commodity racism and the tourist gaze; the hostile and alienating environment generated by the War on Terror; and many other topics.

"In the past fifty years, Asian Americans have helped change the face of America and are now the fastest growing group in the United States. But as ... historian Erika Lee reminds us, Asian Americans also have deep roots in the country. The Making of Asian America tells the little-known history of Asian Americans and their role in American life, from the arrival of the first Asians in the Americas to the present-day. An epic history of global journeys and new beginnings, this book shows how generations of Asian immigrants and their American-born descendants have made and remade Asian American life in the United States: sailors who came on the first trans-Pacific ships in the 1500s to the Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II. Over the past fifty years, a new Asian America has emerged out of community activism and the arrival of new immigrants and refugees. No longer a "despised minority," Asian Americans are now held up as America's "model minorities" in ways that reveal the complicated role that race still plays in the United States. Published to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the United States' Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that has remade our "nation of immigrants," this is a new and definitive history of Asian Americans. But more than that, it is a new way of understanding America itself, its complicated histories of race and immigration, and its place in the world today"--Jacket.