my first asian american book

[pylduck.livejournal.com]

Hi y'all! I thought I'd try to get a meme going here 'cuz I'm curious about this question.... What were the first books of Asian American literature that you read? Feel free to note what context you read them in, too, or how you found the book.

My first book was probably Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's Farewell to Manzanar. I must've read it in middle school or something, but I don't remember for sure.

After that one, I do definitely remember reading Amy Tan's second novel, The Kitchen God's Wife, the summer before my senior year of high school for my English class. I don't remember the novel much, but I remember showing it to my mom, and she was intrigued that we were reading a story about Chinese people in my predominantly-white, suburban Californian high school.

If we count texts by non-Asian Americans, I think I read Pearl Buck's The Good Earth as a kid because it was in my parents' house. I'm curious how my parents chose books to buy. We had a couple of bookcases of books in the house, with some "classics" as well as fantasy books and other assorted stories.

In college, I read some non-fiction books in Asian American studies like Yen Le Espiritu's Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities, Angelo Ancheta's, Race, Rights, and the Asian American Experience, and Leslie Hatamiya's Righting a Wrong: Japanese Americans and the Passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 for a special topics course on Asian Americans and Politics taught by the Dean of Asian American Students and a law student. At some point, I picked up Lisa Lowe's Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics from the book store by campus, and that book was instrumental in convincing me to become a professor so that I could study and write on stuff like she did!

But it really wasn't until I got to grad school that I started reading Asian American literature more broadly. I mostly did this on my own, though, because the program I went to didn't have any Asian American literature courses. :P

Comments

[jailbaitjello.livejournal.com]

First introduction was probably Amy Tan, though I can't remember which book. It wasn't Joy Luck Club, because I read that after I read a lot of her others. Anyway, I think it's kind of a moot point because after reading my first Amy Tan book, I went and voraciously devoured all her others. "Stereotypical" as her mother-daughter books were, I really related to them when I first came upon them. They were probably pivotal in my development as a teenage girl growing up with my immigrant single mother. I've never been able to really understand why Amy Tan gets so much flack from the Asian American literary community. Like, mention Amy Tan and usually you'll get an eye roll, but for what it's worth, Amy Tan usually is the gateway for a lot of people into Asian American lit...

Anyway, of the Amy Tan books that I've read, A Hundred Secret Senses is probably my favorite.

In college, I was able to read more Asian American novels, and the only one that I read that I really enjoyed was the Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri. I also found Pearl Buck's Good Earth to read on my own and really enjoyed that.

I still need to read Kingston's the Woman Warrior. I've read China Men for class, and Phoebe Eng's Warrior Lessons, which draws heavily from Woman Warrior, but I haven't read that oh so landmark book. How strange is that? Haha.

[ceciliaj.livejournal.com]

I think my first was also The Joy Luck Club! And I loved it, actually, even though it also rapidly proved my introduction Asian American Lit Criticism (emphasis on the critical): a male classmate (one of two Asian American students in the class) brought in Why the Joy Luck Club Sucks (http://www.eskimo.com/~webguy/writings/joysucks.html).

I didn't read a lot more till grad school -- my college had no coursework in Asian American lit, though I did get the chance to take a postcolonial course when I was in Germany. In grad school, fortunately, I got to take two Asian American lit courses -- one in Filipino American lit and US imperialism, the other on queer diaspora type stuff. So many awesome books!

[sa-am.livejournal.com]

i think the first asian american lit book i actually read wasn't until GRADUATE SCHOOL and that was younghill kang's east goes west!

[sa-am.livejournal.com]

i'm speaking cover to cover too, because i think i had read excerpts previously like someone teaching "no name woman" from the woman warrior