Continuing our celebration of AAPI creatives across disciplines whose work has had a profound impact on their respective fields for AAPI Heritage Month, let's celebrate and recognize the contributions and achievements of some of our favorite Asian-American writers.
Jhumpa Lahiri
Born in London to Bengali parents and raised in the U.S., acclaimed writer Jhumpa Lahiri explores the experiences of characters who are often immigrants or children of immigrants straddling multiple cultural identities and worlds.
Her debut collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000. Lahiri’s novel The Namesake was adapted into a successful film by director Mira Nair.
Lahiri highlights the varied ways that both individuals and families interface with displacement and assimilation, maintain their cultural heritage, and create or redefine their sense of belonging and home.
Chen Chen
Chen Chen is a Chinese-American poet and essayist. He is well known for his humor, sharp wit, as he montages pop culture references with playful, cutting observations of his personal experiences of queerness, family, and migration.
In his collection When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, he explores the complexities of reconciling the expectations of his culture and family with his own desires.
In Chen Chen’s essay “Against Universality, In Praise of Anger”, he provides a series of statements and questions that provoke thought about the subtle biases towards Western creative traditions that are at play across disciplines, citing interpersonal experiences and references to pop culture and other artists along the way as he reclaims space for readers and writers like him:
These days I embrace writing to an Asian American reader, or more specifically, a queer Asian American reader, a queer Chinese American reader. It’s taken me a long time to get to this place and some days I forget how much I can embrace it.
Ocean Vuong
Ocean Vuong is a Vietnamese-American poet, essayist, and novelist known for his lyrical, innovative use of language and ability to capture human emotions with vulnerability and perceptive intricacy. Vuong's writing explores themes of identity, memory, trauma, and the immigrant experience. His debut poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds won the T.S. Eliot Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Vuong frequently writes about queer desire, and the journey of finding acceptance and understanding amidst LGBTQ+ marginalization and stigma. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous explores queer man's coming-of-age and his experiences with not only romantic & familial love and heartbreak, but also generational trauma and memories of displacement.
He illuminates the subtleties of navigating how cultural and racial identity intersects with sexuality and gender, challenging fixed notions of masculinity. Vuong also candidly explores how these dynamics can play out in interracial relationships, and offers a powerfully nuanced portrayal of queer life that is both delicate and raw. His writing is widely cherished for the way its formal beauty and skill is wrought with genuine compassion.
Jenny Han
Jenny Han is a Korean-American author whose popular young adult novels often focus on characters who must confront their identities and cultures in order to find their place in the world - such as the lovable Lara Jean Covey in Han's well-known trilogy To All The Boys I've Loved Before, which was adapted into a Netflix film series.
Her writing style in both this trilogy and other works such as The Summer I Turned Pretty and Shug is celebrated for its warmth, charm, and ability to explore complex emotions around family, friendship, self-discovery, first love, and cultural heritage with relatability, honesty, and depth.
Sources:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/29/ocean-vuongs-life-sentences
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/30/on-earth-were-briefly-gorgeous-by-ocean-vuong-review
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/ocean-vuong-on-the-traumatic-and-transcendent
https://www.npr.org/2019/06/04/729351902/ocean-vuong-on-earth-were-briefly-gorgeous
https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/7561/ocean-vuong-the-art-of-poetry-no-119-ocean-vuong
https://www.pw.org/content/an_interview_with_ocean_vuong
https://www.oceanvuong.com/
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/08/29/chen-chen-on-the-radical-power-of-joyful-vulnerability/
https://chenchenwrites.com/
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/chen-chen
https://www.npr.org/2017/04/25/524876321/when-i-grow-up-i-want-to-be-a-list-of-further-possibilities-explores-identity-a
https://www.pw.org/content/craft_capsule_against_universality_in_praise_of_anger
https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/jhumpa-lahiri
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/jhumpa-lahiris-unintended-self-portrait
https://dearjennyhan.com/about/
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/books/review/to-all-the-boys-ive-loved-before-by-jenny-han.html
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