“Los Angeles” is the first short story in Ling Ma’s new collection, Bliss Montage, and a city that I moved away from six weeks ago. When I left, I said goodbye to friends, family and familiarity for a new life in Montana. Under these circumstances, reading Bliss Montage became a source of comfort. Ma weaves the surreal with the fabric of everyday life until they are nearly indistinguishable, with such seamlessness that there is great pleasure in visiting the world through her eyes.  In “Los Angeles,” a woman lives in a sprawling complex with her wealthy husband, children and 100 ex ..read more

It’s been more than a decade since I lived in Cerritos, California, the Los Angeles suburb where I grew up alongside countless other children of diaspora. As we near the holiday season, my mind naturally gravitates toward “home” and missing the particular closeness — and claustrophobia — that I associate with that place and stage of life. I recently returned to Anthony Veasna So’s short story collection, Afterparties, seeking some form of solace and familiarity. What does it mean to be American? What does it mean to be Cambodian? The idea of trying to pin identity to any singular trait ..read more

On a balmy afternoon in San Francisco, I Zoomed with author and professor May-Lee Chai, whose short story collection, Tomorrow in Shanghai and Other Stories, was just published in August. Chai’s collection takes readers to a new Shanghai outside Earth; contemplates the modern complications of two women who fall in love in China despite the odds; and bears witness to a Chinese immigrant boy’s first moments in America.   Chai’s characters find and lose their dreams, which are often vulnerable, diaphanous and fragile, pitted against a hard reality. In the second story, a you ..read more

It was an idyllic spring afternoon when my mom beat the shit out of me, the zeppelin inside my heart bursting into flames. Before I stepped inside the house, the treetops were drenched in untranslatable komorebi amid the rolling green hills of yesterday. Dandelion clocks disintegrated in a puff. Posters of paint-smudged fishing towns hung from living room walls of houses I passed on my bike. The fuzzy navel sunset spilled onto the parchment horizon. When my mom wailed on my body like a disobedient dog in the kitchen, I lost faith in the entire world. My adolescence became scented in its own ..read more

Maria Zhang, an award-winning Polish-Chinese actress and artist, is a talent defined by her multitudes. The accomplished actress, who just wrapped filming the guest lead role of Suki on Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender, has been on a roll recently, captivating audiences with her lead role in All I Ever Wanted, a 2021 Film Independent Project Involve short film that broadens what an Asian and Asian American experience looks like by showcasing a joyful queer love story between two teenagers. The short was the official selection at Outfest Fusion 2022, at Los Angele ..read more

As the double entendre of the title suggests, Joseph Han’s ambitious debut, Nuclear Family, playfully fuses and refuses tropes of the Asian American novel. The titular family, the Chos, are an intimate yet expansive unit, the novel’s nexus as well as its slipknot. The Korean American household of four are settled in Hawai’i and run a Korean restaurant-cafeteria called Cho’s Delicatessen whose charm invites comparisons to Kim’s Convenience. The store, and at some levels the novel, neatly collapses the zones of family, domesticity, community, ethnic enclave, capitalism, colonialism&n ..read more

With Graci Kim’s new book having just come out, if you haven’t heard of The Gifted Clans Trilogy, you need to get The Last Fallen Star and prepare for The Last Fallen Moon (available as of June 14). I read the first book in one night. Two weeks ago, Graci debuted her TikTok account and posted a video of her 2-year-old daughter reacting to seeing The Last Fallen Star for the first time in a bookstore. In an earlier video, she posted, “No one wants to read about Korean witches, they said. You’ll never get published, they said. Just give up, they said.” Her book is now a New York Times bestsell ..read more

One windy morning in the vintage Cole Valley neighborhood of San Francisco, I pulled my car into a spot on 17th and Stanyan to call Sharmila Sen, author of Not Quite Not White (Penguin, 2019). Her insightful and at times arrestingly funny memoir relates her discovery of race in America. Discovering racial politics in America after experiencing the caste system of India, Sen exchanged one system of discrimination for another when she was 12 years old. She laid out the book’s theoretical premise early on: how a history of racism has impacted not only the legal but psychological livelihoods of ..read more

Where or how did your most recent book begin?   Counterfeit began as a joke. A couple of years ago, I was working on my last novel, a weighty historical drama set in 1950s southern China. After a particularly grueling day of research, I turned to my partner and said, "The next book I write is going to require zero research and is going to have to be about something I already know a ton about — designer handbags." Not long after, I came across an article in The Washington Post about a real-life con artist who had created a seemingly foolproof counterfeit handbag scheme, a scheme ..read more

In 2015, my undergraduate institution was embroiled in a heated campus debate over free speech that played out across a handful of controversies. Student activists pushed to rename what was then called the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, denounced a Mexican-themed party and lambasted a student group called “Urban Congo” composed mostly of white men who danced around in loincloths. Parallel incidents erupted across other college campuses. For the better part of a year, they were all we talked about over meals, in seminars and at parties. Have you seen the ..read more