Asian American Writers Are Finally Breaking Out on Their Own Terms

These writers have always been doing the work. It’s the publishing industry that’s finally caught up with them.

Alexander Chee during an interview on ‘Late Night with Seth Meyers.’ Photo: NBCUniversal via Getty Images

In the summer of 2000, Alexander Chee, then a burgeoning writer struggling to get his first book published, boarded a train to the Upper West Side of Manhattan. On the ride, he pulled out the manuscript that would eventually become his debut novel, Edinburgh, and decided to make an unflinching assessment.

“I’m just going to read it, and if I really think I should stop trying to find a publisher, I will stop,” he says, recalling that day now, 20 years later. Chee, a gay Korean American writer, was being persistently rejected by publishers at a time when the very concept of diverse voices was largely superficial in the industry. “But I was reading it and I was like, I’m my favorite debut author.”

It was a moment of hubris that still makes Chee bowl over in laughter, but his conviction was a crucial matter of self-assertion. “I wrote a book I wanted to read,” he says. “I wrote a book that I wanted to see in the world.” Yet it was a book — a shattering novel about wading through the trauma of sexual abuse — that much of the industry failed to appreciate. “They couldn’t figure out if it was an Asian American novel or what they call a gay novel,” Chee says. His protagonist was a gay Korean American, but “there wasn’t a coming out story, it wasn’t about immigrant struggles per se.”

Two decades later, the literary landscape looks vastly different and more Asian American than ever. In the eyes of the literary mainstream, the last few years have witnessed a swell of Asian American voices that has generally moved with a great creative freedom — one Chee was fighting to carve out for himself — and in turn produced some of the most exciting and beloved work in recent memory. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer took home the Pulitzer in 2016; Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise won last year’s National Book Award; Min Jin Lee, Lisa Ko, Karan Mahajan, and Hanya Yanagihara became finalists for the National Book Award in recent years; and Celeste Ng and Kevin Kwan have redefined the bounds of the literary blockbuster.

And yet, to identify this moment as unprecedented is to diminish those who came before. A tricky aspect of identifying an Asian American wave through the lens of establishment recognition — marquee awards and publication under the major publishing houses — is arguably to embolden the claim that the insular and myopic publishing industry constitutes the sole validating force for communities and work that have always existed. Decades earlier, the controversial, sharp-toothed, and yet necessary work of a band of Asian American writers argued — privately among their peers and publicly in the influential anthology Aiiieeeee! — for rejection of this very notion. “Our work matters,” they insisted defiantly, no matter the ignorance of the mainstream gaze.

Those who found success were often entangled in the rule of the one — publishers’ habit of touting one or two writers every few years as the sole representatives of a culture.

“It’s never been a question of are there Asian Americans writing,” says Mira Jacob, the author of the graphic memoir Good Talk (which is nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award and is being adapted into a TV show). “We have always been doing the work. There is no shortage of us.” Still, to be anointed by big publishing is to largely ensure a readership, to reach other Asian Americans and in turn inspire more writers. I spoke with a number of contemporary authors for this piece who often cited similar works from earlier generations of Asian American writers — Amy Tan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Arundhati Roy, John Okada, Carlos Bulosan, Chang-Rae Lee, Jhumpa Lahiri — who were instrumental in awakening their imagination as writers, as individuals. But most discovered these literary gems later, often in their twenties; their forebears, the few who broke through, were not readily taught and had to be unearthed.

“I am sometimes haunted by the thought of the books we didn’t get and the great writers whose stories we didn’t get to read,” says Nicole Chung, author of the memoir All You Can Ever Know.

Those who found success were often entangled in the rule of the one — publishers’ habit of touting one or two writers every few years as the sole representatives of a culture. By virtue of there being so few writers with visibility, the work of these individuals was often saddled by expectations from Asians and non-Asians and read through an almost sociological framing: “Explain your land, your world, your people.”

“There wasn’t any landscape to look at,” says Tan, whose 1989 debut novel, The Joy Luck Club, shot her into literary superstardom. She was one of the only Asian American writers read in the mainstream, a reality that brought with it suffocating burdens. “People thought I carried the responsibility to do it right,” Tan says. “I had people say, ‘That’s not how my mother was. My mother doesn’t speak broken English. How dare she write a story with a character like that?’ I don’t think that is the case anymore and in part because there are so many more (Asian American) writers out there.”

Amy Tan attends a 25th-anniversary event for the 1993 film “The Joy Luck Club.” Photo: Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images

The last few years, in particular, have heralded a robust new class of young Asian American authors. Two of last year’s most celebrated books came from Ocean Vuong’s debut novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Jia Tolentino’s debut essay collection Trick Mirror. This year, we’ve already received remarkable works from Meng Jin, E.J. Koh, and Paul Yoon, with more to come from the likes of Cathy Park Hong, Kevin Nguyen, Alexandra Chang, Souvankham Thammavongsa, and Megha Majumdar.

The reasons for this Asian American rush might be impossible to trace, but the timing here cannot be ignored. What we’re witnessing has occurred largely in the last few years, when the writings of people of color — who have always understood the political nature of their voices and their stories — became understood widely as a vital political necessity. “I think what happened is a pretty complex reaction between the election and white guilt and the gatekeepers in publishing taking it upon themselves to do the work,” says Jacob, author of Good Talk.

But at the heart of this celebration is an underlying tension: Does binding these writers simply by virtue of their being Asian American also flatten them? The term “Asian American” is, after all, an arbitrary one, clumping together a vast swath of peoples, cultures, and places. Does a first-generation Sri Lankan American writer have all that much in common with a second-generation Vietnamese American writer?

“I am haunted by the thought of the books we didn’t get and the great writers whose stories we didn’t get to read.”

“Sometimes I’m like yeah, it’s a really useful moniker, and other times, I’m like, I don’t know,” Nayomi Munaweera, author of What Lies Between Us, says. “We’re just not at that place where we can drop it. Because here’s the other thing: We can drop it, but it doesn’t mean the world around us will.”

These writers hail from a range of backgrounds that have shaped and complicated their relationships to something as broad and nebulous as the Asian American designation. Jia Tolentino, for example, grew up in Texas identifying more strongly “as a nonwhite person or as a brown person than as an Asian American person,” she tells me, and considers herself more largely with brown writers. On the other hand, Ling Ma, who grew up in predominantly white Utah and Kansas, yearned for more of those who looked like her. “I like the idea of being part of an [Asian American literary] tradition, even if I’m not sure what that means,” she writes via email.

“My experience of who I am as a person has been so shaped by being an Asian American, by being a Chinese American, by being a woman, that to pretend like I can divorce those things from my writing is a little bit naive,” says Celeste Ng, whose latest novel, Little Fires Everywhere, has been adapted into a Hulu show. For a writer like Ng, especially at her level of success, the balancing act of writing what interests her and what also matters to her community is acutely present. It’s a feeling, she says, that is empowering and also potentially burdensome. “I feel like we’re not at the point yet, if we’re ever going to be, where pointing out the Asian Americanness of this is going to do more harm than good,” Ng says.

But what is “Asian Americanness,” and what does it look like? Of course, in an important sense, it is whatever an Asian American determines it to be. Yet, in some of these books, we might see its contours in the act of excavating silence, that of the generation before in the secrets they have buried and that which has been foisted upon Asian Americans as a whole. It might be recognized as a more abstract undercurrent of in-betweenness, a kind of quiet grappling with their place in a country that has rendered Asian Americans invisible, often by way of their being purportedly “white-adjacent.”

We see these realities implicitly in the tales of pained yet tender Chinese immigrant experiences in Jenny Zhang’s connected story collection Sour Heart and in the internalized resentments of a Thai American techie in Tony Tulathimutte’s Private Citizens. This sensibility is more directly addressed in Jacob’s memoir on being brown in America; in Chung’s reckoning with her place in the world as a transracial adoptee; in Charles Yu’s new book Interior Chinatown, an experimental satire playing with Hollywood tropes of Asian characters.

The Asian American literary voice, if there is such a thing, is also one that has evolved. Ng speculates about the evolution in the time since her generational forebears: “There was a sense of, you have to choose [between an Asian identity and an American one]. And what I’m seeing now in literature by Asian Americans is this idea of, can you be both? How can you coexist in both of those worlds rather than feeling maybe torn trying to carve out a space for yourself?”

But what is most striking about this grouping of writers is in their difference, how separate the writings are in form, content, and style. Their work is not beholden to any singular expectation of what “should” be written. What most tangibly binds these writers together is beyond the writing itself; it is a sense of solidarity in fighting for and maintaining their place in this breakthrough period. The Asian American label is one that was created out of political necessity, and unifying a literary tradition under this umbrella can be of a similar practical purpose.

“You are literally quite consciously and correctly locating an entire group of people where no matter how we’ve been connected have been ignored until quite recently,” Jacob says. “It’s almost like, okay, so everybody that just got in the door, can we talk about how this happened? And I get that. There’s something really valuable about that.”

A word for this might be community — a palpable, inherent connection and sensibility between these writers. Most of the writers I spoke with echoed back each other’s names, unprompted, as companions of support; they read and blurb each other’s work, offer essential advice, and, in the words of R.O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries, let down the ladder and make it wider.

It’s a village Tan largely never had. She found support among a few writers of color out there at the time like Kingston, Louise Erdrich, and Alice Walker. “There was a notion that we were different and we would band together,” Tan says.

Whether or not this period lasts is an open-ended question, likely hinging on the historically entrenched problem of a homogenous publishing industry and gatekeepers that innately see “minority” works as separate from American ones. Some writers are actively preparing for this downswing. But many see the horizon shifting more permanently and our conception of Asian American literature expanding. Munaweera references a need for perspectives from writers from, say, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, or Hmong enclaves. No matter the longer arc, “we’re going to be doing our work,” she says. “And our work is good.”

Along the way, these writers — the ones we get to read now and those still to come — may reshape, and redefine, the American canon. “I was waiting for it back then,” Tan says. “I said, it’ll happen, and then people will take up the mantle. I’m so glad I can hand the mantle to them and say, ‘You do it now.’”