Asian American Memoir

Celebrate AAPI heritage and learn about the Asian American experience through first-person memoir, narratives, and personal histories, selected by RCL editors. Resources for College Libraries (RCL) features core titles for academic libraries, curated by Choice/ACRL subject specialists. In Syndetics Unbound, RCL Librarians recommend a selection of the 90,000+ titles available at rclweb.net.

Updated April 1, 2025
RCL Librarians
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America is in the heart : a personal history
Bulosan, Carlos
Paper Book
First published in 1943, this classic memoir by well-known Filipino poet Carlos Bulosan describes his boyhood in the Philippines, his voyage to America, and his years of hardship and despair as an itinerant laborer following the harvest trail in the rural West.
Minor feelings : an Asian American reckoning
Hong, Cathy Park
Paper Book
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...
Beautiful country : a memoir of an undocumented childhood
Wang, Qian Julie
Paper Book
A NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER * The moving story of an undocumented child living in poverty in the richest country in the world--an incandescent debut from an astonishing new talent * A TODAY SHOW #READWITHJENNA PICK In Chinese, the word for America, Mei Guo, translates...
Citizen 13660
Okubo, Miné
Paper Book
Mine Okubo was one of over one hundred thousand people of Japanese descent - nearly two-thirds of whom were American citizens - who were forced into ?protective custody? shortly after Pearl Harbor. Citizen 13660, Okubo's graphic memoir of life in relocation centers in California and Utah,...
Catfish and mandala : a two-wheeled voyage through the landscape and memory of Vietnam
Pham, Andrew X.
Paper Book
Winner of the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize A New York Times Notable Book of the Year Winner of the Whiting Writers' Award A Seattle Post-Intelligencer Best Book of the Year Catfish and Mandala is the story of an...
Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy
Sukrungruang, Ira
Paper Book
On one side of the door, the rich smell of sweet, spicy food and the calm of Buddhist devotion; on the other, the strangeness of a new land. When Ira Sukrungruang was born to Thai parents newly arrived in the U.S., they picked his Jewish moniker out of a book of "American"...
Fault lines : a memoir
Alexander, Meena
Paper Book
Passionate, fierce, and lyrical, Meena Alexander's memoir traces her evolution as a postcolonial writer from a privileged childhood in India to a turbulent adolescence in the Sudan and then to England and New York City. In this tenth-anniversary edition of Fault Lines, this Alexander...
Crying in H Mart : a memoir
Zauner, Michelle
Paper Book
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * From the indie rock sensation known as Japanese Breakfast, an unforgettable memoir about family, food, grief, love, and growing up Korean American--"in losing her mother and cooking to bring her back to life, Zauner became herself" (NPR). * CELEBRATING...
Freedom without justice : the prison memoirs of Chol Soo Lee
Lee, Chol Soo
Paper Book
Freedom without Justice is the compelling story of Chol Soo Lee's wrongful imprisonment and his years of survival in prison, while political activists fought to win his freedom. His saga took place against a backdrop of great historical change in Asian American communities following the passage...
Farewell to Manzanar : a true story of Japanese American experience during and after the World War II internment
Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki.
Paper Book
The powerful true story of life in a Japanese American internment camp. During World War II the community called Manzanar was hastily created in the high mountain desert country of California, east of the Sierras. Its purpose was to house thousands of Japanese American internees. ...
The woman warrior ; China men
Kingston, Maxine Hong.
Paper Book
Here--for the first time in one volume--are two classic, brilliantly original works on the experience of Chinese immigrants in America. In both books the acclaimed author mines her family's past and her culture's stories, weaving myth and memory to fashion works of enormous revelatory power.<...

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