Asian and Chill: Your Cultural Cheat Sheet in Celebrating AAPI Heritage Month

By Zainab Cheema 

What’s your game plan for celebrating AAPI Heritage Month this May? I’ll tip you the right answer—toast Asian American and Pacific Islander experiences with the hottest cheat sheet of what to watch, read and listen to. I’ll be your tour guide as we plumb the cultural rabbit hole of some recent and classic Asian American and Pacific islander cultural hits illustrating the essential AAPI presence in the American mosaic.

Films and Television

If you love storytelling through visual media, here’s my list for what to watch/rewatch. Add a new experience to your streaming playlist or revisit some of the hits you love through different perspectives (pair Crazy Rich Asians with Kevin Kwan’s hilarious trilogy, for example).

1. Bridgerton, Season 2—Not to disparage our dear departed Duke (played with aplomb by Regé-Jean Page), but the latest season (adapting Julia Quinn’s The Viscount Who Loved Me) featuring Jonathan Bailey’s Anthony and Simone Ashley’s Kate Sharma is pure fire. Kate’s Indian textile inspired Regency gowns, her sassy disapproval of bland British tea, the Bollywood musical homages (yaass Kabhie Khushie Kabhi Gham!) and the haldi ceremony leading to the dramatic wedding, all are pure joy to watch.   
2. Baby Cobra & Hard Knock Wife, featuring Ali Wong—Is Ali Wong extra hilarious when she’s pregnant? Maybe so, because the raw energy and comic rage that Ali channels towards marriage, motherhood, and cultural expectations towards Asian Americans and female comics makes these two Netflix comedy specials an irresistible watch. I didn’t connect with her latest special Don Wong as much (though it had some funny bits),   
3. Always Be My Maybe—Can you tell that I love Ali Wong? Her real life friendship with Randall Park uplifts this moving romantic comedy about best fiends who are always meant to be, once they have navigated through family grief and Asian American gender norms. This movie will always be beloved for Keanu Reeves’ hilarious cameo as himself. The scene of Keanu Reeves slow walking into a restaurant to the soundtrack of AWOLNATION’s Sail is the internet content that you need in your life.
4. Minding the Gap: A Hulu Original Documentary—Bing Liu’s Oscar nominated-documentary weaves the stories of three small town Illinois teens who bond over their love skateboarding as an escape from their volatile families, as they confront the pressures of race, class and masculinity. This one is a gem—don’t miss it.
5. Crazy Rich Asians—So, full disclosure. Most Asian millennials and Gen-Zers don’t actually relate that much to the rampant consumerism in the film. We’re much more concerned about the environment and social issues. Kevin Kwan’s novels, on which the film is based, are much funnier. BUT Henry Golding and Constance Wu are so charming together, and Michelle Yeoh is so darn charismatic and scary as his disapproving mother, it’s hard not to love this Singapore jet set version of Pride and Prejudice.
6. Nightclub Comedian, featuring Aziz Ansari—This is probably my favorite Aziz Ansari Netflix special to date. Skewering social media addictions, polarized political landscapes, COVID-19 melancholia, and cancel culture, it feels not so much like a comedy special as a quietly funny fireside chat. I’m here for it.

Fiction Books

If you’re the type that has that itch that nothing can quite scratch except curling up with a good novel or short story collection, consider adding these to your Kindle or Goodreads list.

1. “Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian American Writers,” edited by Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, Shawn Wong. You can thank me for swapping out the ubiquitous The Joy Luck Club for this treasured anthology. Aiiieeeee! was published in 1974 but the essays are groundbreaking in the way they address core Asian American experiences, even before some of the terminology to address them was invented. Showcasing fourteen groundbreaking short stories, this anthology is a beloved classic that carved out a foothold for Asian Americans in the American literary canon.
2. The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, by Ken Liu. This luminous short story collection named for Ken Liu’s groundbreaking short story, “The Paper Menagerie,” uses magic realism and rich animal symbolism to explore the themes of memory, connection, family, love, prejudice, and identity. Through the lens of a mother son relationship, Liu creates a textured, imaginative canvas for the broader themes of shifting between cultures in coming to accept one’s multicultural identity. Other award-winning stories in this collection include “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary,” “Mono No Aware,” and “The Waves.”  
3. The Beasts of a Little Land, by Juhea Kim—This is BTS’ world and we’re all just living in it. Don’t believe me? Check out the latest cover of Time Magazine, blessed by the presence of the smooth, candy-haired crooners from South Korea. Korea’s presence in global culture makes me especially appreciate Juhea Kim’s recently published epic novel about the cultures and history of the Korean peninsula from its annexation by Japan in 1910 to the Korean American war. This novel weaves together the stories of Korean courtesans (think the K-version of geisha) with street adventurers as they navigate the ideas, political trends and wars that fashioned North and South Korea.
4. She Who Became the Sun, by Shelley Parker-Chan. This recently published novel has the magic It factor. It just does. This gender-bending historical fiction epic reimagines Zhu Chongba, the founder of China’s Ming dynasty, as biological woman who assumes the name, gender, and destiny of her brother to grasp greatness. Parker-Chan’s powerful characterization, lyrical writing, and centering of gender fluid personas in rich, fast-moving narrative tapestry makes this novel a must-read. It’s not so much “The Song of Achilles meets Mulan,” as it’s been frequently described, as Game of Thrones rolled with Qin Dynasty Epic.
5. Homeland Elegies, by Ayad Akhtar. Pulitzer Prize winner Ayad Akhtar’s hybrid novel-memoir captures the complexities of navigating South Asian diasporic culture and his Pakistani roots in the post-9/11 landscape. The moving story of his relationship with his father weaves through his powerful explorations of family, memory, and belonging. Akhtar’s meticulous wordsmithing channels Whitman for a Muslim American take on the American Dream.

Non-Fiction Books

If you love combing through nonfiction books that give you historical knowledge and cultural edge in dinner party and water cooler conversations, here are some books that you need to add to your actual (or virtual) bookshelf.

1. The Making of Asian America: A History, by Erika Lee. Historical storytelling at its finest, Erika Lee’s book sketches the story of how Asian Americans came to be through the waves of diaspora on North American shores and the struggles they faced in forging survival, identity, and community in an America that was shaping its own identity alongside them. Lee’s book shows rather than tells how heart-rending the experience of confronting xenophobia in America can be for Asian communities that carved out their stories of arrival and belonging in their hyphenated identities through America’s historical tapestry.   
2. The Intimacies of Four Continents, by Lisa Lowe. When talking about prolific Asian American intellectuals, you can’t get bigger than Lisa Lowe. While she has written many landmark books, this one is a must-read because it places the Asian American experience in context to the broader patterns of trade, movement and settlement. Connecting the historical flows that shaped the Asian American experience with the slave trade and indigenous experiences in the overseas British colonies, Lowe creates an epic global canvas showing that Asian Americans are not a “minority” but rather shaped by the same major forces that defined our modern history.
3. Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad, by Manu Karuka. Like Lowe’s, Manu Karuku’s book is academic. But the rich, transnational history-scape that she draws delivers enormous payoffs. The book tracks the modern history of railroads through the communities that built them and/or whose economic lives were drastically altered by these engines of progress. This allows Karuku to weave together the American stories of Chinese immigrants with those of the Cheyenne, Lakota, and Pawnee Native American tribes. Karaku shows us how quintessentially American technologies of progress have been intertwined with the lives of Asians, Native Americans and other “minorities.”
4. Unsustainable Empire: Alternative Histories of Hawai’i Statehood, by Dean Saranillio—Saranillo tracks the historical and ethical questions behind Hawai’I’s admission as a U.S. state. The book spotlights the complex multiplicity of voices and discourses on Hawaiian independence, including Native Hawaiian opposition to statehood. Saranillio sketches the colliding futures of a Hawaii that continues to negotiate its complicated relationship to the mainland.
5. The Karma of Brown Folk, by Vijay Prashad. Oftentimes, the prejudice suffered by South Asian Americans can be traced to one pervasive myth—the model minority myth. Namely, the idea that South Asians are uniquely predisposed to success in the American system—as hardworking but also favored “newcomers,” they get good grades in school and are fast-tracked to well-paying jobs on the treadmill of the American Dream, at the expense of other American groups. Prasad interrogates the roots of this myth, breaking down the long durée of American intellectuals’ (from Cotton Mather! to Thoreau) engagement with South Asia. Ultimately, he reveals that the model minority myth stems from the traditions of U.S. Orientalism.

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