Asian American representation in literature has been growing over the years. While different kinds of novels, both of these novels are thought-provoking and speak to the experience of Asian Americans.
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The Family Recipe by Carolyn Huynh
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| April 2025; Atria Books; 978-1668033043 audio, ebook, print (320 pages); Asian American lit |
Duc Tran, founder of the Vietnamese sandwich chain Duc’s Sandwiches, will retire and wants to leave the business to someone. His wife Evelyn left years ago, and he's estranged from his five children. To earn their inheritance, his four daughters must revitalize run-down shops in old-school Little Saigon locations within a year, but if his son Jude gets married first, he will get it all. Each daughter is trying to figure out messy lives and gentrification, and Jude tries to decide if he wants to marry at all. Duc has a reason behind the inheritance scheme, and his children soon discover it as well as the secret their mother kept hidden.
Duc was a refugee from Vietnam after the war, and tensions were high in the postwar period. Even years later, people in the southern United States hated him for being Vietnamese. Despite that, he was able to create a fortune and successful banh mí sandwich shops. Unfortunately, his family life suffered. His son Jude felt weighed down by the insistence that he had a bright future, and his daughters all fled as soon as they were able to leave. His second wife was certainly there for material comfort
We see the four daughters as they struggle to learn how to run a store and build a life in each of the four cities they are sent to. Jude tries to work with the first woman he meets through a matchmaker but doesn't feel like it is real. We also get flashes to the past, with Duc and Huey meeting soon after their emigration to America, bonding when traumatized. The scenes of being scorned, threatened, and downright chased out with a shotgun pale in comparison to the ones with the KKK terrorizing the burgeoning Vietnamese community growing in the South. The five children all deal with different issues, the lost children with different levels of trauma from being abandoned by their mother and left with two men who couldn't handle the needs of young children. As the youngest, Georgia felt like she missed the most; she can't speak Vietnamese, has few memories of her mother, and feels like she doesn't belong anywhere.
This is the tragedy of any child born from a diaspora. They don't feel like they belong in the country they were born in but also don't belong in their ethnic country of origin. There are traumas the older generation unwittingly visit upon the younger, even while doing their best. This novel deals with the fallout of this, with the secrets that everyone knows other than the ones it directly affects, and the search for belonging. I felt just as invested as the Tran children in seeing if they would make it, if they could build lives and forge a path forward as a family again. Identity and family are intertwined here, and it felt so familiar while reading the book that I felt like part of their community as well.
Buy The Family Recipe at Amazon
Mỹ Documents by Kevin Nguyen
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| April 2025; One World; 978-0593731680 audio, ebook, print (352 pages); Asian American lit |
Ursula, Alvin, Jen, and Duncan are cousins with bright futures. Ursula is a budding journalist, Alvin is an engineering intern for Google, Jen is a NYU freshman, and Duncan is on his high school football team. A series of violent attacks across America create a national panic, prompting a government policy that pushes Vietnamese Americans into internment camps. Jen and Duncan are sent with their mother to Camp Tacoma while Ursula and Alvin receive exemptions. Those in the camp are isolated from the world outside of it, and are forced to work jobs they hate. When Jen discovers a way to get messages to the outside, she contacts Ursula. This is her opportunity to tell the world about the camp, as well as bolster her own career.
Based on the Japanese American internment during World War II, this book still deals with modern-day racism and immigration policy in America. It's easy to think what happened in the 40s doesn't affect today, but people are only too willing to ignore the atrocities done in that time period and recreate the circumstances that led to it happening in the first place. Mỹ is the Vietnamese word for American, but when it's not capitalized also means beautiful. Context is key in a monosyllabic and tonal language like Vietnamese.
In this story, the "cousins" are half-siblings scattered around the country by a Vietnamese father who essentially abandoned them all. We are introduced slowly to the four main characters, seeing the ties between them and family members, and seeing the family lore in the form of their paternal grandmother's stories. As half Vietnamese, Ursula is white passing and uses her mother's maiden name. Her brother Alvin isn't quite as white passing, but strings were pulled at Google so he avoided detention. Jen and Duncan weren't as lucky, with a Vietnamese American mother and no one bending rules for them. This tension and quiet horror of the situation is brought home by getting to know these four people directly affected. Interspersed are dry and impersonal sections, outlining the internment order, the capitalist drive to take advantage of the situation, and politicians downplaying the severity to control the narrative.
Throughout the internment, we see those who collaborate, those who fight in obvious ways, those who fight back in subtle ways. Some accepted the reality of the internment, merely surviving, and others eked out joy where they could. Yet others did suicide by cop. We're told that Camp Tacoma is the fancier and nicest of the camps, yet this still happens. It's a chilling look at the circumstances inside the camp, and the mental gymnastics of the everyday people who justify it. There's no right way to deal with trauma and how to deal with a situation like this. I hope that this book inspires conversations about people of different cultures, ethics, and how best to cross the divides between us.
Buy Mỹ Documents at Amazon
Born and raised in New York City, M.K. French started writing stories when very young, dreaming of different worlds and places to visit. She always had an interest in folklore, fairy tales, and the macabre, which has definitely influenced her work. She currently lives in the Midwest with her husband, three young children, and a golden retriever.
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