Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month 2025 Reading List
Published May 20, 2025
Inside OME
Honor and celebrate Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month and beyond by enjoying these books recommended by the osteopathic medical education community!
Fiction
In the Country: Stories
From teachers to housemaids, and mothers to sons, Mia Alvar explores the universal experiences of loss, displacement and the longing to connect across borders both real and imagined. The short stories in In the Country, focused on Filipino experiences, speak to the heart of everyone who has ever searched for a place to call home—and mark the arrival of a formidable new voice in literature.
Cold Enough for Snow
A mother and daughter travel from abroad to meet in Tokyo. All the while, they talk: about the weather, horoscopes, clothes and objects, family, distance and memory. But uncertainties abound. Who is really speaking here—is it only the daughter? And what is the real reason behind this elliptical, perhaps even spectral journey? At once a careful reckoning and an elegy, Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow questions whether any of us speak a common language, which dimensions can contain love and what claim we have to truly know another's inner world.
Carolyn Huynh’s novel follows a family of estranged Vietnamese women—cursed to never know love or happiness—as they reunite when a psychic makes a startling prediction. A multi-narrative novel brimming with levity and candor, The Fortunes of Jaded Women pulls off the magic trick of being a heartfelt, multi-generational epic as well as a fast-paced, hilarious romp.
The Thorn Puller
The first novel to appear in English by award-winning author Hiromi Ito explores the absurdities, complexities and challenges experienced by a woman caring for her two families: her husband and daughters in California and her aging parents in Japan. As the narrator shuttles back and forth between these two starkly different cultures, she creates a powerful and entertaining narrative about what it means to live and die in a globalized society.
As strangers and seatmates Maryam Aziz and Anna Gibson fly to Toronto over the holidays in Uzma Jalaluddin and Marissa Stapley’s festive novel—Maryam to her sister’s impromptu wedding, and Anna to meet her boyfriend’s wealthy family for the first time—neither expect that severe turbulence will scare them into confessing their deepest hopes and fears to one another. At least they’ll never see each other again. And the love of Maryam’s life, Saif, wasn’t sitting two rows behind them hearing it all. Oops. An emergency landing finds Anna, Saif, Maryam and her sister’s entire bridal party snowbound at the quirky Snow Falls Inn in a picture-perfect town, where fate has Anna’s actor-crush filming a holiday romance. As Maryam finds the courage to open her heart to Saif, and Anna feels the magic of being snowbound with an unexpected new love—both women soon realize there’s no place they’d rather be for the holidays.
Pahua and the Soul Stealer
Best-selling author Rick Riordan (of the Percy Jackson series) presents Lori M. Lee's debut, an adventure fantasy inspired by Southeast Asian mythology. Winner of the 2022 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children's Literature, Pahua and the Soul Stealer, based on Hmong oral tradition and with unforgettable characters, unique nature-based magic system, breathtaking twists and reveals and climactic boss battle, offers everything a fantasy lover could want.
Our Missing Hearts
Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his loving father, a former linguist who now shelves books in a university library. His mother, Margaret, a Chinese American poet, left without a trace when he was nine years old. He doesn’t know what happened to her—only that her books have been banned—and he resents that she cared more about her work than about him. Then one day Bird receives a mysterious letter containing only a cryptic drawing, and soon he is pulled into a quest to find her. Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng is an old story made new, of the ways supposedly civilized communities can ignore the most searing injustice. It’s about the lessons and legacies we pass on to our children and the power of art to create change.
In Sara Nisha Adams’ The Reading List, Widower Mukesh lives a quiet life in Wembley, in West London after losing his beloved wife. He shops every Wednesday, goes to Temple, and worries about his granddaughter, Priya, who hides in her room reading while he spends his evenings watching nature documentaries. Aleisha is a bright but anxious teenager working at the local library for the summer when she discovers a crumpled-up piece of paper in the back of To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s a list of novels that she’s never heard of before. Intrigued, and a little bored with her slow job at the checkout desk, she impulsively decides to read every book on the list, one after the other. As each story gives up its magic, the books transport Aleisha from the painful realities she’s facing at home. When Mukesh arrives at the library, desperate to forge a connection with his bookworm granddaughter, Aleisha passes along the reading list…hoping that it will be a lifeline for him too. Slowly, the shared books create a connection between two lonely souls, as fiction helps them escape their grief and everyday troubles and find joy again.
Eric Nguyen’s debut begins when Huong arrives in New Orleans with her two young sons. She is jobless, homeless and worried about her husband, Cong, who remains in Vietnam. As she and her boys begin to settle in to life in America, she continues to send letters and tapes back to Cong, hopeful that they will be reunited and her children will grow up with a father. Their search for identity—as individuals and as a family—threatens to tear them apart, until disaster strikes the city they now call home and they are suddenly forced to find a new way to come together and honor the ties that bind them.
The Sympathizer
The winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen is a sweeping epic of love and betrayal. The narrator, a communist double agent, is a "man of two minds," a half-French, half-Vietnamese army captain who arranges to come to America after the Fall of Saigon. While building a new life with other Vietnamese refugees in Los Angeles, he secretly reports back to his communist superiors in Vietnam. The Sympathizer, also adapted into an HBO miniseries, is a blistering exploration of identity and America, a gripping espionage novel and a powerful story of love and friendship.
Joan Is Okay
Deceptively spare yet quietly powerful, laced with sharp humor, Weike Wang’s fictional account of a Chinese American ICU doctor navigating the pandemic touches on matters that feel deeply resonant: being Chinese American right now, working in medicine at a high-stakes time, finding one’s voice within a dominant culture, being a woman in a male-dominated workplace and staying independent within a tight-knit family. But above all, it’s a portrait of one remarkable woman so surprising that you can’t get her out of your head.
Memoir
Love Thy Neighbor: A Muslim Doctor's Struggle for Home in Rural America
In 2013, Ayaz Virji left a comfortable job at an East Coast hospital and moved to a town of 1,400 in Minnesota, feeling called to address the shortage of doctors in rural America. But in 2016, this decision was tested when the reliably blue, working-class county swung for Donald Trump. Virji watched in horror as his children faced anti-Muslim remarks at school and some of his most loyal patients began questioning whether he belonged in the community. Virji wanted out. But in 2017, just as he was lining up a job in Dubai, a local pastor invited him to speak at her church and address misconceptions about what Muslims practice and believe. That invitation has grown into a well-attended lecture series that has changed hearts and minds across the state, while giving Virji a new vocation that he never would have expected. In Love Thy Neighbor, Virji relates this story in a gripping, unforgettable narrative that shows the human consequences of our toxic politics, the power of faith and personal conviction and the potential for a renewal of understanding in America's heartland.
Historical Nonfiction and Classic Novels
Kitne Ghazi Aaye, Kitne Ghazi Gaye
From the fascinating tales and the toughest challenges Kanwal Jeet Singh Dhillon has encountered in his career, including those from his multiple tenures in Jammu & Kashmir since 1988 to the responsibility of maintaining a balance between counter-infiltration and counter-terrorist operations on one hand and the use of military soft power on the other, Dhillon unfolds his journeys from a young boy to the Commander of Chinar Corps.
Nectar in a Sieve
The acclaimed million-copy bestselling novel by Kamala Markandaya portrays a woman’s struggle to find happiness in a changing India. Married as a child bride to a tenant farmer she had never met, Rukmani works side by side in the field with her husband to wrest a living from a land ravaged by droughts, monsoons and insects. With remarkable fortitude and courage, she meets changing times and fights poverty and disaster. This beautiful and eloquent story tells of a simple peasant woman in a rural village in India during British colonization whose whole life is a gallant and persistent battle to care for those she loves.
Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War
All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory. From Viet Thanh Nguyen, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer, comes a searching exploration of the conflict Americans call the Vietnam War and Vietnamese call the American War—a conflict that lives on in the collective memory of both nations.
From Mountains to Skyscrapers: The Journey of the Iu Mien
In this captivating exploration, David Saechao explores the rich history and vibrant culture of the Iu Mien people, who migrated from China to various countries around the world to escape ongoing persecution. The book delves into the historical roots of the Iu Mien, exploring their traditions, customs and challenges they faced throughout their journey, highlighting their experiences with assimilation and cultural preservation.
Train to Pakistan
Mano Majra is a place, Khushwant Singh tells us at the beginning of this classic novel, where Sikhs and Muslims have lived together in peace for hundreds of years. Then one day, at the end of the summer, the "ghost train" arrives, a silent, incredible funeral train loaded with the bodies of thousands of refugees, bringing the village its first taste of the horrors of the civil war. Train to Pakistan is the story of this isolated village that is plunged into the abyss of religious hate. It is also the story of a Sikh boy and a Muslim girl whose love endured and transcended the ravages of war.
First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers
One of seven children of a high-ranking government official, Loung Ung lived a privileged life in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh until the age of five. Then, in April 1975, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge army stormed into the city, forcing Ung's family to flee and, eventually, disperse. Loung was trained as a child soldier in a work camp for orphans, her siblings were sent to labor camps and those who survived the horrors would not be reunited until the Khmer Rouge was destroyed. Harrowing yet hopeful, Loung's powerful story is an unforgettable account of a family shaken and shattered yet miraculously sustained by courage and love in the face of unspeakable brutality.
Essays and Poetry
Eileen Chang is one of the most celebrated modern Chinese novelists and essayists of the twentieth century. First published in 1944, Written on Water collects Chang’s reflections on art, literature, war, urban culture and her life as a writer and woman in wartime Shanghai and Hong Kong. With her vibrant yet meditative style and her sly, sophisticated humor, Chang writes of friends, colleagues and teachers turned soldiers or wartime volunteers and of her own experiences as a part-time nurse. She paints the self-portrait of a daring and cosmopolitan woman bent on questioning pieties and enjoying the pleasures of modernity, even as the world convulses in war and a revolution looms.
The third book in the bestselling Mindfulness Essentials series, a back-to-basics collection from world-renowned Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, introduces everyone to the essentials of mindfulness practice. Nhat Hanh brings his signature clarity, compassion and humor to the thorny question of how to love, distilling one of our strongest emotions down to four essentials: 1) you can only love another when you feel true love for yourself, 2) love is understanding, 3) understanding brings compassion and 4) deep listening and loving speech are key ways of showing our love. How to Love shows that when we feel closer to our loved ones, we are also more connected to the world as a whole.
In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of personal and social loss, embodying the paradox of sitting in grief while being determined to survive beyond it. Shifting through memory, and in concert with the themes of his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong contends with the meaning of family and the cost of being the product of an American war in America. At once vivid, brave and propulsive, these poems circle fragmented lives to find both restoration as well as the epicenter of the break.
AACOM thanks Thad Yang, Joshua Wu, Nhu Duong and Harnoor Bhatti, California Health Sciences University College of Osteopathic Medicine Asian Pacific American Medical Student Association board members, Maaida Kirmani, University of the Incarnate Word School of Osteopathic Medicine medical student, and Christine DeCarlo, senior manager of media and public affairs, AACOM, for sharing these recommendations. If you’d like to add more to your reading list, visit our diversity in medicine books collection.
Anything we missed? Share what you’re reading this year by tagging us on Twitter/X at @AACOMmunities.