As a biracial Taiwanese American who grew up in Central Illinois, my relationship to the Midwest is contradictory—it’s a place of belonging and not-belonging, alienation and nostalgia. My feelings of otherness are grounded in statistics: according to 2020 US Census data, people of Asian descent make up just 3% of the American Midwest population. Yet as Thomas Xavier Sarmiento explores in his essay “Literary perspectives on Asian Americans in the Midwest,” the diverse literary tradition of Asian diaspora writers in the Midwest spans at least eight decades. Sarmiento notes how these texts often explicitly engage with the “strangeness of being of Asian descent in America’s heartland” and “explore affinity and place: what it means to dream of elsewhere or to rework the realities of ‘here’ from the lens of so-called nowheres.”
My debut novel Blob features Denny’s, Blink-182, underground gay bars, and an unassuming white teenager asking my narrator, “What are you?” I felt myself dreaming of elsewhere quite a bit when I began writing the book. It was spring 2020 during the COVID-19 lockdown and I was stuck in my basement apartment in Cincinnati, Ohio. It’s easy to romanticize the lone writer but my isolated writing experience was more akin to Jack Torrence in The Shining. What kept me from taking an axe to my door was books, particularly Asian American texts. Most canonized AAPI literature is set on either the East or West coast, so for this reading list I wanted to celebrate the brilliant Asian diaspora authors writing from or about the American Midwest. This is by no means an exhaustive list although I do find the novels, poetry, short story, and essay collections to be varied and wide-ranging, held together only loosely by place and identities which are too often conflated. The purpose of this list is to forefront and celebrate those erased differences. These books inspire me not because they reflect back my own experience (although they often do) but because their complex representations of Asians in the American Midwest reassert that we exist here and our stories deserve to be told.
Leaving Biddle City by Marianne Chan
“Everything is a rectangle in Biddle City,” Chan writes before drawing the reader’s attention to the fact that the prose poem they’re reading is also a rectangle. Leaving Biddle City is a collection filled with boundaries in both form and content as the speaker grapples with her relationship to her hometown, Biddle City or Lansing, Michigan. Weaving together the speaker’s family history with Biddle City Filipina stories and the town’s faux mythology, Chan creates a portrait of Biddle City both complex and contradictory, a web of memory and story. In “Autobiography of Revision,” the speaker provides a metacommentary on her own rendering of the city. “I was trying to repeat the same old lines / until I arrived somewhere else. Instead, / I pedaled so hard that I dug a hole / in the middle of Biddle City.” By delving into the process of poetry and place-making itself, Chan speaks to the power of revision and offers a method of making peace with the imaginary.
The Symmetry of Fish by Su Cho
Like fish scales, this lyrical poetry collection glistens and shifts as it moves the reader through time and space: from the speaker’s childhood to young adulthood, Door County to Queens, outlet malls to church parking lots. Cho’s poems create a mosaic of memory, myth, and language. In “Abecedarian for ESL in West Lafayette, Indiana,” the poem’s singsong alphabetic form contrasts the harsher lesson beneath the surface—how to be a Korean American child in a Midwestern ESL class. “X was for xylophones, X-rays, and now xenophobia. / Yes, that’s too on the nose, but things on your nose are hardest to see.” In the collection, an ode to putting in a window AC unit in Milwaukee can be read alongside a poem about Cheonyeo Gwishin, the spirit of an unmarried virgin in Korean folklore. By juxtaposing seemingly disparate elements, Cho creates new stories and gives us new language for living in liminal spaces.
Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
Set in small-town Ohio in 1977, Ng’s first novel centers on the Lee family: James, a Chinese American college professor who teaches a class on “The Cowboy in American Culture”; his white wife Marilyn who gave up her dream of being a doctor to raise their family; and their three kids—Nash, Lydia, and Hannah. The novel begins with the unforgettable first line: “Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.” Ng uses an omniscient narrator voice to slip seamlessly between characters tracing the origin and aftermath of the family’s “perfect” daughter’s death. It provides a thoughtful examination of the external forces and misunderstandings that fracture a family as each character individually navigates isolation in the Midwest and the burden of familial expectation.
No One Can Pronounce My Name by Rakesh Satyal
This big-hearted novel set in the suburbs of Cleveland follows the lives of two lonely middle-aged Indian immigrants. After his sister Swati’s death, Harit spends each night dressing up as her to comfort both his grief-stricken, ailing mother and himself. When her only child goes to college, Ranjana worries that her husband is cheating and escapes by writing paranormal romances. Their intersecting storylines result in a deeply compassionate and unique narrative of friendship, growth, and the first-generation immigrant experience. Satyal writes, “It wasn’t just pen to paper or fingers on a keyboard. It was through your own generosity of imagination you made yourself good.”
Dearborn by Ghassan Zeineddine
A census worker plans to drive an undocumented aspiring action star to LA, a father who dreams of returning to Lebanon hides illegal earnings in frozen chickens, and a struggling fantasy writer finds fame as a reader of Qur’an audiobooks. These wickedly sharp short stories set in Dearborn, Michigan, the first Arab-majority city in the United States, show a community existing in a precarious in-between space. Zeineddine writes, “[Dearborn] reminded them of home while having the conveniences of America. But an imitation of home was inferior. We wanted the real thing.” Through humor and deft characterization, Dearborn navigates the conflicts both quotidian and existential at the heart of the community.
The Boat by Nam Le
While The Boat is not grounded in a singular place—the stories move from Tehran to New York City, Australia to the South China Sea—Le begins his collection in Iowa City. His brilliant opening story, “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice” follows an Iowa Writer’s Workshop MFA who, succumbing to the pressure of his classmates, uses his father’s experiences in Vietnam during the war to write an “ethnic” story. When his father reads it, his first reaction to his son’s retelling is “Why do you want to write this story?” Layered on top of the father’s painful history is a story about storytelling and the commodification of generational trauma. Le asks the question: who are Asian diasporic writers writing for and why?
Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy by Ira Sukrungruang
Born to Thai immigrants in Chicago eleven days before the Bicentennial, Ira Sukrungruang’s coming-of-age memoir examines the conflicts that arise between his Thai and American identities. At home, his mother insists that he speaks Thai. At school, a well-meaning teacher helps him read in English and teaches him Midwestern customs. Sukrungruang writes, “I began to distinguish what was appropriate and when. With white people I do this. With Thais that.” The speaker’s contradictory feelings regarding the split in his life are shown in situations that range from comedic to traumatic. After watching a white character on the sitcom Silver Spoons, he writes, “I craved Ricky’s life, even while part of me wanted to punch him square in the face.” Using humor, Talk Thai delves into the absurdity as well as the potential for superpowers that might come from growing up between two worlds.