AAPI Heritage Month - SHS Learning Commons: Historical Fiction

Pachinko (National Book Award Finalist) by Min Jin Lee In the early 1900s, Sunja was the beloved daughter of a poor yet proud Korean family. When she becomes pregnant by her wealthy lover who betrays her, her family's honor is at stake. But a kind minister offers to marry her and bring her to Japan with him. Through the generations, this family she created by accident must endure great hardship, discrimination, and heartbreak as they struggle toward triumph and a celebration of their family roots.

We Are Not Free by Traci Chee Fourteen teens who have grown up together in Japantown, San Francisco. Fourteen teens who form a community and a family, as interconnected as they are conflicted. Fourteen teens whose lives are turned upside down when over 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry are removed from their homes and forced into desolate incarceration camps. In a world that seems determined to hate them, these young Nisei must rally together as racism and injustice threaten to pull them apart.

Alma Presses Play by Tina Cane Half-Chinese, half-Jewish teenager Alma feels her life is split in half everywhere--from her parents who are fighting half the time and the other half silent to her body being halfway grown to adulthood. Feeling lost in a year of seeming constant change and loss--friends moving away, go-nowhere romances, divorces--Alma finds herself depending on her Walkman and favorite music to begin building her life whole.

This Light Between Us: a Novel of World War II by Andrew Fukuda In 1935, ten-year-old Alex Maki of Bainbridge Island, Washington, is horrified to discover that his new pen pal, Charlie Lévy of Paris, France, is a girl, but in spite of his initial reluctance, their letters continue over the years and they fight for their friendship even as Charlie endures the Nazi occupation and Alex leaves his family in an internment camp and joins the army.

The Mountains Sing by Que Mai Phan Nguyen Follows the Tran family as Tran Dieu Lan tries to protect her granddaughter Huong during the Vietnam War while Huong's parents and uncles head off down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to fight in the Vietnam War which will not only divide her homeland, but also tear apart her family.

The Downstairs Girl by Stacey Lee By day, seventeen-year-old Jo Kuan works as a lady's maid for the cruel daughter of one of the wealthiest men in Atlanta. But by night, Jo moonlights as the pseudonymous author of a newspaper advice column for the genteel Southern lady, \"Dear Miss Sweetie.\" When her column becomes wildly popular, she uses the power of the pen to address some of society's ills, but she's not prepared for the backlash that follows when her column challenges fixed ideas about race and gender. While her opponents clamor to uncover the secret identity of Miss Sweetie, a mysterious letter sets Jo off on a search for her own past and the parents who abandoned her as a baby. But when her efforts put her in the crosshairs of Atlanta's most notorious criminal, Jo must decide whether she, a girl used to living in the shadows, is ready to step into the light. With prose that is witty, insightful, and at times heartbreaking, Stacey Lee masterfully crafts an extraordinary social drama set in the New South.

Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo Seventeen-year-old Lily Hu is living in Chinatown, in 1950s era San Francisco when she meets and befriends her first white friend, Kathleen Miller through a mutual interest in aerospace. When the pair express their desire to see a performer at a well-known lesbian bar, they sneak out and it's there that they explore their sexuality and begin a relationship with each other in secret. However, with Lily's conservative Chinese family at her heels and McCarthyism threatening her family, Lily will need to make tough choices about her relationship with Kathy and who she wants to be.

Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhhà Lai When her homeland, Saigon, falls during the Vietnam War, young Ha flees from the courntry with her mother and three older brothers. Through a series of free-verse poems, Ha chronicles her life-changing journey in 1975 from Guam to America, resettling in Alabama. Ha struggles to assimilate to American culture; the different food and language, the odd landscape, the mean kids, and she still misses her father, who's been missing in action for 9 years.

Butterfly Yellow by Thanhhà Lai At the end of the Vietnam War, hundreds of children were airlifted out and taken to America as refugees. Hang and her three-year-old brother Linh were to be two of those children, but Hang was deemed too old and denied a spot on the helicopter. Linh, however, was torn away from her and taken to family in Texas. Now eighteen, Hang travels to Texas to find her brother but is devastated to learn that he does not remember her or Vietnam, and has no interest in either. Along with an aspiring cowboy named LeeRoy, Hang gets a job at a ranch and tries to reconnect with her brother with LeeRoy's help.

An Emotion of Great Delight by Tahereh Mafi In 2003, Muslim American teen Shadi is crumbling from sadness and stress, very little of which is related to the hatred she's feeling from peers at school due to the recent 9/11 attacks. Shadi's brother was killed in a car accident and the resulting stress on her family likely led to her father's heart attack and her mother's deep depression. Feeling alone and floundering, Shadi's only lifeline is her former friend's brother Ali, who becomes a source of support--and maybe something more--during this time of family and political turmoil.

When My Name Was Keoko by Linda Sue Park With national pride and occasional fear, a brother and sister face the increasingly oppressive occupation of Korea by Japan during World War II, which threatens to suppress Korean culture entirely.

Deep As the Sky, Red As the Sea by Rita Chang-Eppig After her pirate husband dies, Shek Yeung doesn't want to lose the ships she commands and quickly convinces her husband's heir, Cheung Po to marry her, promising a son. Protecting her fleet and her power may not be enough to save her though, when the Chinese government hires a ruthless noble to eradicate pirates in the South China Sea.

The Weight of Our Sky by Hanna Alkaf During the Chinese-Malay conflict in Kuala Lumpur in 1969, sixteen-year-old Melati must overcome violence, her own OCD, and prejudices in order to find her way home to her mom.

Like a Love Story by Abdi Nazemian Iranian-born New Yorker, Reza, is terrified of his own homosexuality amid the 1980s AIDS crisis, equating being gay with dead men. He meets aspiring fashion designer Judy and her best friend Art, an openly gay photographer, who are united in AIDS activism because of their mutual love of Judy's uncle Stephen, who is gay and has AIDS. Both Art and Judy find they are attracted to Reza, and believing he should be with a woman, Reza and Judy begin dating despite the undeniable feelings Reza and Art have for each other.

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen A South Vietnamese army general, the son of a Vietnamese mother and an absent French father, leaves Saigon in 1975 to start a new life at an American university, but ultimately returns home to fight for the Communists.