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May is Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month, which celebrates the lives and contributions of inspiring Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders through various forms of media. In honor of the holiday, here are 25 books from Asian American and Pacific Islander authors that you should include on your reading list, from prize-winning fiction to graphic novels, essays, and memoirs.

The Sympathizer is Viet Thanh Nguyen’s debut novel, which earned him a Pulitzer Prize as well as a place on The New York Times bestseller list. When Nguyen was 10 years old, he saw the film Apocalypse Now, an American-made drama about the Vietnam War, and realized that not many stories about the war came from the perspective of the Vietnamese people.

In The Sympathizer, the narrator is a South Vietnamese military aide working as a spy for the communist North Vietnamese. Born to a French father and Vietnamese mother, this unnamed spy was educated in America, but has returned to his home country to fight for the communist cause. After the fall of Saigon, he is among the refugees sent to the United States and tries to start a new life there, but is quickly recruited back to spy on his fellow comrades. The Washington Post called the novel “startlingly insightful and perilously candid.”

Buy it: Amazon

Pachinko is a historical novel that focuses on four generations of a Korean family that migrates to Japan. The large ensemble of characters must deal with the legal and social discrimination they face as immigrants. In order to move up in society, the family opens up pachinko parlor, a slot machine-style game popular in Japan, from which the book takes its name. Beautifully written and captivating, Pachinko was named one of the 10 best books of 2017 by The New York Times and was a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. It has since been turned into a critically acclaimed series on Apple TV+.

Buy it: Amazon

Set in the 1990s, Little Fires Everywhere tells the intertwined stories of the Richardsons, a middle-class suburban family in Shaker Heights, Ohio—where author Celeste Ng grew up—and single mother Mia Warren and her daughter Pearl. While Mia is a transient artist with a mysterious past, the Richardson household follows a strict set of rules. When the two families find themselves on opposing sides of a custody battle over the adoption of a Chinese baby, secrets are revealed and lives are changed forever. In the process, Little Fires Everywhere explores the power of privilege and the societal demands on motherhood.

Buy it: Amazon

The Pulitzer Prize-nominated novel Clay Walls tells the story of a Korean family forced to leave Japanese-occupied Korea in the 1920s to live in the United States. As Pachinko author Min Jin Lee described it to Bustle, “Clay Walls is a story about immigration and colonial trauma, and it is also a story about marriage, class, and patriarchy.”

Published in 1986, the book was the first-ever American novel to explore the social and cultural situations of Korean immigrants in the early 20th century, and had a major impact on later generations of Asian American authors. “At the time, I did not think I could be a writer, so I did not read it as a lofty literary example,” Lee told Bustle, “rather, I read it and loved it because it was a beautifully written work of American literature that was both absorbing and deeply felt.”

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Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake brings the immigrant experience and the idea of identity to light in this story of the Ganguli family leaving Calcutta for the United States. After their arranged marriage, Ashoke and Ashima move to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for Ashoke’s career in engineering. As Ashoke adapts to the American way of life, Ashima resists the lifestyle and pines to be back home with her family. The story then follows their son Gogol as he struggles between following his family’s tradition or assimilating to U.S. culture—an experience that many first-generation American children deal with.

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Set in India, Shobha Rao’s debut novel follows Poornima and Savita, friends who are born in an impoverished landscape where they endure daily abuse. They are separated after a devastating assault on Savita. Poornima becomes determined to find her friend and leaves everything behind. Her journey takes her to the dark underworld of India and then to a tiny apartment in Seattle, Washington. Girls Burn Brighter is a timely—if distressing—portrayal of human trafficking, sexual assault, misogyny, cultural patriarchy, and the power of friendship.

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In this coming-of-age story for young adults, author Sarah Kuhn explores themes of food, fashion, family, cultural differences, and love. The sweet romantic comedy follows Kimi Nakamura as she visits her estranged grandparents in Japan during spring break after getting into a fight with her mother. While there, Kimi meets Akira, a cute medical student who moonlights as a Mochi mascot, and he ends up serving as her guide in Kyoto. What begins as an escape from her problems becomes a way for Kimi to understand her mother’s past and figure out her own future.

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Told across five interconnected stories, The Woman Warrior blends autobiography and Cantonese mythology to explore Kingston’s identity as a first-generation Chinese American woman. Kingston focuses on the women who have affected her life the most—from her aunts to her mother to the Chinese folk hero Fa Mulan and finally to Kingston herself. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, The Woman Warrior has become a staple in Asian American studies classes since it was first published in 1976.

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If you want to learn about Hawaiian culture, start with Joe Balaz, a Native Hawaiian poet and visual artist best known for his writing in English and Pidgin (Hawaiian Creole English). His collection Pidgin Eye features 35 years of poetry honoring the beauty and complexity of Hawaii and its people. Balaz’s poems are funny, spiritual, and full of Hawaiian history.

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This memoir by former Catapult magazine editor-in-chief (and former managing editor of The Toast) Nicole Chung is a warm and honest reflection on the author’s search for the birth parents who gave her up for adoption. After asking her adoptive mother about her birth parents, Chung is told that they could not give her the life she deserved and that “may be all you can ever know.” As Chung prepared for the birth of her first child, she sought out her birth parents and found an older sister as well as some painful family secrets. All You Can Ever Know was a finalist for the 2018 National Books Critics Circle Award and named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, NPR, TIME, and many more.

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Writer Gary Pak is considered one of the most popular and influential writers of Hawaiian heritage in the modern era. Many of his stories focus on Asian Hawaiian identity and the complexities of Hawaiian culture. Language of the Geckos and Other Stories features stories of Native Hawaiians and Asian Americans (as well as haole, or white people) dealing with unfulfilled dreams, failure, and the loss of love.

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In this young adult novel, author Randy Ribay dives deep into Filipino and American identity, drug abuse, guilt, grief, and the unjust policies of Filipino president Rodrigo Duterte. After the death of his cousin at the hands of the Duterte regime, Filipino American Jay Reguero is determined to find out what happened. Jay travels to the Philippines, where he finds out more than he bargained for.

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After her mother dies by suicide, Leigh is convinced her mother has been reincarnated as a red bird. She travels to Taiwan to meet her mother’s parents for the first time, and while there, she seeks out her mother’s past, uncovers family secrets, and builds a new relationship with her grandparents. At the same time, Leigh must come to terms with her relationship with her best friend and longtime crush, Axel, whom she kissed for the first time the day of her mother’s passing. Pan explores mental illness, grief, and love in this heartbreaking story.

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Alexander Chee’s semi-autobiographical debut novel is about a boys’ choir in Maine and the sexual abuse its members suffer at the hands of their choir director. The harrowing tale of abuse, resilience, and redemption is guaranteed to leave a powerful impact. In fact, its publication helped prompt Chee to enter therapy for the first time.

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Whenever Lara Jean has a crush on a boy, she writes a letter to him telling him how she feels, but she doesn’t send the letter. Instead, she seals and locks them away in a box under her bed. One day, Lara Jeans discovers that these letters have been mailed out, meaning all the boys she’s ever had crushes on received them, including her sister’s ex-boyfriend, Josh. In this debut novel (which has been adapted into a hit Netflix film), Jenny Han writes beautifully about the importance of sisterhood, falling in love, and finally taking some risks in life.

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In writing Marriage of a Thousand Lies, SJ Sindu wanted to explore a topic that isn’t typically talked about in South Asian American fiction—queer identity. The novel follows Lucky and her husband, who are both gay and lying to their Sri Lankan families about it. After Lucky’s grandmother suffers an accident, Lucky returns to her childhood home and reconnects with her first love, Nisha, who is preparing for an arranged marriage with a man she’s never met. Throughout the book, Sindu tackles what it means to be queer and South Asian American.

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Inspired by the uptick in anti-Muslim hate crimes and Islamaphobic rhetoric in the United States that followed the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, Samira Ahmed’s Internment imagines a not-too-distant future in which Muslim American citizens are rounded up and forced into internment camps. Layla Amin and her family are forced into one of these camps in the California desert. Layla is determined to take down the system, leading a revolution inside the camp.

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Helen Hoang’s 2018 debut novel, The Kiss Quotient, is about Stella, a math genius with Asperger’s who isn’t great at intimacy and relationships. This is why she hires an escort, Michael, to teach her a thing or two about sex. Of course, it doesn’t take long for them to realize their relationship is more than just what happens inside the bedroom.

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Where Reasons End takes the form of a painful and honest conversation between a mother and a son. Written after the death of her own son by suicide, Yiyun Lee creates a space between life and death where the narrator and her son talk about memories, grief, love, and longing. The novel is a stunning exploration of grief and loss that is likely to leave you in tears.

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Lisa Ko was inspired to write The Leavers after reading a 2009 New York Times article about an undocumented Chinese immigrant in America [PDF]. Several years after sneaking into the United States on a boat from China, this woman tried to bring her son to the U.S. to join her. But he was caught by authorities while trying to cross the border from Canada and placed into the Canadian foster care system, where he was adopted by a Canadian family. The Leavers tells the story of Polly, an undocumented Chinese immigrant who disappears, leaving her 11-year-old son Deming all alone. He is eventually adopted by a white couple and is left to wonder where his place is in the world. Ko’s powerful debut was a National Book Award finalist in 2017.

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Winner of the 2007 Eisner Award for Best Graphic Album, Gene Luen Yang’s graphic novel American Born Chinese weaves together three seemingly independent stories of Chinese folklore, self-acceptance, and cultural assimilation. Told through the eyes of Jin Wang, an all-American white teen named Danny, and the Chinese folk legend the Monkey King, Yang breaks down the insecurities of growing up Chinese American and dealing with issues of identity and self-worth. While the three stories seem unrelated, they are later revealed to be connected in a surprising twist.

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Elaine Castillo examines today’s suburban Filipino migrant community in this ode to Carlos Bulosan’s 1946 tale America Is in the Heart. Castillo’s America Is Not the Heart tells the story of Hero, a former doctor from the Philippines who immigrates to the United States after joining the New People’s Army, an insurgent communist guerrilla group, and being disowned by her immediate family. Living with her uncle’s family, Hero is slowly coming to terms with what happened in her past with the help of her cousin, a potential love interest named Rosalyn, and the Filipino American community.

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Considered unlucky by her family after her mother dies giving birth to her, Adeline Yen Mah tells her Cinderella story in Falling Leaves. Her father remarries a beautiful yet cruel woman. Yen Mah and her siblings are mistreated, but Yen Mah takes the brunt of the cruelty. Determined to get away, Yen Mah works hard to be an exceptional student and is eventually allowed to study medicine in England. She later finds success and happiness in the United States, but must return to China after the death of her father and deal with her wicked stepmother once again. The Washington Post called the story of family cruelty and resilience “painful and lovely, at once heartbreaking and heartening,” leaving the reviewer to wonder how Yen Mah survived to tell the tale.

Buy it: Amazon

A contemporary take on the 1953 romantic comedy Roman Holiday, Somewhere Only We Know tells the story of Lucky, a popular Korean pop star who, after playing a big concert in Hong Kong, escapes her handlers in search of a hamburger. High on anti-anxiety medication and sleeping pills, she encounters Jack, a tabloid reporter looking for his next story. Together, they travel around Hong Kong and begin to fall for each other, but both are keeping their own secrets. Goo immerses the readers into the world of K-pop and life in Hong Kong and captivates us with her witty banter and charming story.

Buy it: Amazon

In this YA romance, teenager Sana Kiyohara is dealing with a lot—her mother’s subtle racism, her father’s infidelity, and her crush on a friend who happens to be a girl. The coming-of-age story tackles the intersections of identity, racism, cultural expectations, and coming out, and author Misa Sugiura doesn’t hold back.

Buy it: Amazon

This article was originally published in 2019; it has been updated for 2023.

Memorial Day—May 29 in 2023—is much more than just a three-day weekend and a chance to get the year’s first sunburn. It’s a time to remember the people who sacrificed their lives for their country. Here are some facts to gain a new perspective on what this holiday really represents.

Memorial Day was a response to the unprecedented carnage of the Civil War. The tremendous loss of life and its effect on communities led to several spontaneous commemorations of the dead.

In 1864, women from Boalsburg, Pennsylvania, put flowers on the graves of their fallen soldiers from the just-fought Battle of Gettysburg. The next year, a group of women decorated the graves of soldiers buried in a Vicksburg, Mississippi, cemetery.

Two years later, women from Columbus, Mississippi, laid flowers on the graves of both Union and Confederate soldiers. In the same month, in Carbondale, Illinois, 219 Civil War veterans marched through town to Woodlawn Cemetery in memory of the fallen, where Union hero Major General John A. Logan delivered the principal address. The ceremony gave Carbondale its claim to the first organized, community-wide Memorial Day observance.

Waterloo, New York, began holding an annual community service on May 5, 1866. Although many towns claimed the title, it was Waterloo that won congressional recognition as the “Birthplace of Memorial Day.”

General Logan, the speaker at the Carbondale gathering, was also commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization of Union veterans. On May 5, 1868, he issued General Order No. 11, which set aside May 30, 1868, “for the purpose of strewing with flowers, or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion.”

The orders expressed hope that the observance would be “kept up from year to year while a survivor of the war remains to honor the memory of his departed comrades.”

The holiday was long known as Decoration Day thanks to the practice of decorating graves with flowers, wreaths, and flags. The name “Memorial Day” goes back to 1882, but the older name didn’t completely disappear until after World War II. It wasn’t until 1967 that federal law declared “Memorial Day” the official name.

Calling Memorial Day a “national holiday” is a bit of a misnomer. While there have been 11 federal holidays created by Congress—including Memorial Day and Juneteenth—they apply only to federal employees and the District of Columbia. Federal Memorial Day, established in 1888, allowed Civil War veterans, many of whom were drawing a government paycheck, to honor their fallen comrades without being docked a day’s pay.

For the rest of us, our holidays were enacted state by state. New York was the first state to designate Memorial Day a legal holiday, in 1873. Most northern states had followed suit by the 1890s. The states of the former Confederacy were unenthusiastic about a holiday memorializing those who, in General Logan’s words, “united to suppress the late rebellion.” The South didn’t adopt the May 30 Memorial Day until after World War I, by which time its purpose had been broadened to include those who died in all the country’s wars.

In 1971, the Uniform Monday Holiday Act shifted Memorial Day from May 30 to the last Monday in May.

On May 30, 1868, President Ulysses S. Grant presided over the first Memorial Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery—which, until 1864, was on Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s plantation.

Some 5000 people attended on a spring day which, The New York Times reported, was “somewhat too warm for comfort.” The principal speaker was James A. Garfield, a Civil War general, Republican congressman from Ohio, and future president.

“I am oppressed with a sense of the impropriety of uttering words on this occasion,” Garfield began, and then continued to utter them. “If silence is ever golden, it must be beside the graves of fifteen-thousand men, whose lives were more significant than speech, and whose death was a poem the music of which can never be sung.” It went on like that for pages and pages, lasting almost two hours.

As the songs, speeches, and sermons ended, the participants helped to decorate the graves of the Union and Confederate soldiers buried in the cemetery.

“Here rests in honored glory an American soldier known but to God.” That is the inscription on the Tomb of the Unknowns, established at Arlington National Cemetery to inter the remains of the first Unknown Soldier, a World War I fighter, on November 11, 1921. Unknown soldiers from World War II and the Korean War were subsequently interred in the tomb on Memorial Day 1958.

An emotional President Ronald Reagan presided over the interment of six bones, the remains of an unidentified Vietnam War soldier, on May 28, 1984, a.k.a. Memorial Day. Fourteen years later, spurred by an investigation by CBS News, the Defense Department removed the remains from the Tomb of the Unknowns for DNA testing.

The once-unknown fighter was identified as Air Force pilot Lieutenant Michael Joseph Blassie, whose jet crashed in South Vietnam in 1972. “The CBS investigation suggested that the military review board that had changed the designation on Lt. Blassie’s remains to ‘unknown’ did so under pressure from veterans’ groups to honor a casualty from the Vietnam War,” The New York Times reported in 1998.

Lieutenant Blassie was reburied near his hometown of St. Louis. His crypt at Arlington remains permanently empty.

On Memorial Day weekend in 1988, 2500 motorcyclists rode into Washington, D.C. for the first Rolling Thunder rally to draw attention to Vietnam War soldiers still missing in action and prisoners of war. By 2002, the ride had swelled to 300,000 bikers, many of them veterans, and in 2018, the numbers were likely closer to half a million.

Though it was reported that 2019 would be the group’s last Memorial Day ride, the organization American Veterans (AMVETS) continued the tradition in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to WUSA9. Known as Rolling to Remember, 2020’s ride was a bit different—instead of hundreds of thousands of riders going through Washington, D.C., organizers asked participants to ride 22 miles through their own community for a virtual Memorial Day demonstration on Sunday, May 24. Riders could track and share their progress using the REVER app.

Traveling 22 miles is significant, because, in addition to raising awareness for soldiers missing in action and prisoners of war, AMVETS wanted to bring attention to the average of 22 veterans who die by suicide every day.

In 2023, the Ride for Freedom will occur throughout the U.S.

General Order No. 11 stated that “in this observance no form of ceremony is prescribed,” but over time, several customs and symbols became associated with the holiday. Most notably, it is customary on Memorial Day to fly the flag at half-staff until noon, and then raise it to the top of the staff until sunset [PDF].

The World War I poem “In Flanders Fields,” by John McCrae, inspired the Memorial Day custom of wearing red artificial poppies. In 1915, a Georgia teacher and volunteer war worker named Moina Michael began a campaign to make the poppy a symbol of tribute to veterans and for “keeping the faith with all who died.” The sale of poppies has supported the work of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

Several Southern states continue to set aside a day for honoring the Confederate dead, which is usually called Confederate Memorial Day. It’s on the fourth Monday in April in Alabama and the last Monday in April in Mississippi. States like Texas and Tennessee observe Confederate Heroes Day on January 19 and Confederate Decoration Day on June 3, respectively, but they don’t outright declare them state holidays.

There’s no question that Memorial Day is a solemn event. Still, don’t feel too guilty about doing something frivolous (like hosting a barbecue) over the weekend. After all, you weren’t the one who instituted the Indianapolis 500 on May 30, 1911. That credit goes to Indianapolis businessman Carl Fisher. The winning driver that day was Ray Harroun, who averaged 74.6 mph and completed the race in six hours and 42 minutes.

Gravitas returned on May 30, 1922, when the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated. Supreme Court chief justice (and former president) William Howard Taft dedicated the monument before a crowd of 50,000 people, segregated by race, and which included a row of Union and Confederate veterans. Lincoln’s surviving son, Robert Todd Lincoln, also attended.

In 2000, Congress established a National Moment of Remembrance, which asks Americans to pause for one minute at 3 p.m. in an act of national unity. The time was chosen because 3 p.m. “is the time when most Americans are enjoying their freedoms on the national holiday.”

A version of this story originally ran in 2019; it has been updated for 2023.