Where writers find hope and inspiration
To kick off May’s Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, I asked Bay Area writers about the books that inspired them. Some of their choices are already among my favorites, and others are ones I’m eager to add to the stack on my bedside table.
Fiction writer Jenny Xie recommended Adrian Tomine’s graphic novel “Shortcomings,” which is set in the East Bay, with “a cast of smart, creative, queer Asians that might have been my own friends.”
Xie called it a “master class in pacing, scene building and dialogue.” What impresses and inspires her most is the honesty and vulnerability with which Tomine writes. “In exposing his characters, he exposes himself, and ultimately, he exposes the reader. It’s a reminder of what happens when a writer raises uncomfortable questions, including about themselves: how impactful that bravery is.”
Though she read avidly as a child, it never occurred to Sunisa Manning that she could write, too, because she didn’t read stories about people like her. “Literature happened elsewhere, on bigger stages,” said Manning, a fiction writer born and raised in Thailand.
But reading Yiyun Li’s “Gold Boy, Emerald Girl” and Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” showed her a humanity entirely familiar to her.
“I knew their characters because their characters were me, my family and my friends,” she said. Li’s prose “has the feel of incantation. It seems snatched from the innermost being of a character, as if we were able to recite what is graven on a person’s heart.”
Li rereads the Russian epic often enough to keep it in the current of her consciousness, Manning later learned. “This helped me realize that a lineage of writers isn’t bound by nationality or time. That we live in common, in our private griefs.”
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s “Dictee” was the first book by an Asian American poet and essayist that Jennifer Cheng ever read.
“It made my heart beat faster — a book that defied boundaries and perimeters, mixing image with text, poetry with essay, weaving examinations of Korean ancestorship with Greek mythology,” said Cheng, then 20 years old, and now a lyric essayist and author of two books of poetry, “Moon” and “House A.” “This haunted, dislocated voice has a right to exist and claim space.”
Heavily fragmented, the book’s “complexity is never suppressed or hidden away but permitted to infuse in sometimes seemingly dissonant textures and interactions of language,” Cheng said. “It gave me permission to inhabit my own inner language and fragmented articulation.”
Likewise, Melissa R. Sipin’s pick — Arundhati Roy’s “The God of Small Things” — helped make space for her own story.
“Its powerful lyricism, its breaking of emotive walls through the language of repetition that reflected how trauma often feels like magic — it not only made me want to write, it helped remind me why I wanted to still live,” said Sipin, an incest survivor who is working on a novel about her greatgrandmother’s rape and capture in World War II in the Philippines, and the fallout of that trauma in the generations that followed.
“This is not a sentimental thing for a survivor to say: how books, how words, remind us of our wills to live,” Sipin said. “It was a book that gave me the story of incest that I had not yet read before and desperately needed. It validated to me how incest in my family was an act done out of the deepest despair, and nothing more. As I continue to write down my own family’s stories — and my own journey of healing — I go back to this book often. I remind myself that words can heal. For me, that is nothing short of a miracle.”
Celeste Chan recommended Lê Thı Diê m Thúy’s “The Gangster We Are All Looking For,” a novel “brimming with beauty and heartbreak,” which begins when six refugees are pulled from the sea in San Diego. “We see through the young daughter’s eyes — marvel at aisles of microwave popcorn, throw brown butterfly paperweights, recall a brother’s drowning — as images link across time,” said Chan, a writer of fiction, nonfiction and prose poetry. “There is hope, because she saves herself.”
As a teaching artist and editor for the Queer Ancestors Project, Chan is fostering diverse new voices with an anthology, “Flower of Ancestry,” funded by the San Francisco Arts Commission. The launch celebration is on May 11 at Strut in San Francisco’s Castro District.
May these stories give rise to even more.
“Its powerful lyricism ... not only made me want to write, it helped remind me why I wanted to still live.” Melissa R. Sipin on Arundhati Roy’s “The God of Small Things”