Intern Alumni Recommendations
We asked OCA intern alumni, “What are your favorite Asian American, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander artists, authors, and works of art?” These are their recommendations.
Books
“The Best We Could Do” by Thi Bui
Synopsis: This beautifully illustrated and emotional story is an evocative memoir about the search for a better future and a longing for the past. Exploring the anguish of immigration and the lasting effects that displacement has on a child and her family, Bui documents the story of her family’s daring escape after the fall of South Vietnam in the 1970s, and the difficulties they faced building new lives for themselves.
At the heart of Bui’s story is a universal struggle: While adjusting to life as a first-time mother, she ultimately discovers what it means to be a parent—the endless sacrifices, the unnoticed gestures, and the depths of unspoken love. Despite how impossible it seems to take on the simultaneous roles of both parent and child, Bui pushes through. With haunting, poetic writing and breathtaking art, she examines the strength of family, the importance of identity, and the meaning of home.
In what Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen calls “a book to break your heart and heal it,” The Best We Could Do brings to life Thi Bui’s journey of understanding.
The debut graphic memoir by Thi Bui chronicles her family’s daring escape after the fall of South Vietnam in the 1970s, and the difficulties they faced building new lives for themselves. Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen calls it “a book to break your heart and heal it.”
Recommended by Linh Truong: “With beautiful, inky illustrations, The Best We Could Do is a graphic novel that captures the complexities of the Vietnam War and how Bui’s family weathers through years of displacement, migration, and rebuilding.”
“Everything I Never Told You” by Celeste Ng
Synopsis: Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet . . .
So begins the story of this exquisite debut novel, about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee; their middle daughter, a girl who inherited her mother’s bright blue eyes and her father’s jet-black hair. Her parents are determined that Lydia will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue—in Marilyn’s case that her daughter become a doctor rather than a homemaker, in James’s case that Lydia be popular at school, a girl with a busy social life and the center of every party.
When Lydia’s body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together is destroyed, tumbling them into chaos. James, consumed by guilt, sets out on a reckless path that may destroy his marriage. Marilyn, devastated and vengeful, is determined to find a responsible party, no matter what the cost. Lydia’s older brother, Nathan, is certain that the neighborhood bad boy Jack is somehow involved. But it’s the youngest of the family—Hannah—who observes far more than anyone realizes and who may be the only one who knows the truth about what happened.
A profoundly moving story of family, history, and the meaning of home, Everything I Never Told You is both a gripping page-turner and a sensitive family portrait, exploring the divisions between cultures and the rifts within a family, and uncovering the ways in which mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and husbands and wives struggle, all their lives, to understand one another.
The debut novel by Celeste Ng is about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio whose lives are upended when their middle child, Lydia, is found drowned in a lake.
Recommended by Anthony Tran: “Celeste Ng became more well-known for her other book, Little Fires Everywhere, because there was a TV adaptation with Reese Witherspoon in it. But her first novel, Everything I Never Told You, is very good. Highly recommend.”
“Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir” by Padma Lakshmi
Synopsis: A vivid memoir of food and family, survival and triumph, Love, Loss, and What We Ate traces the arc of Padma Lakshmi’s unlikely path from an immigrant childhood to a complicated life in front of the camera—a tantalizing blend of Ruth Reichl’s Tender at the Bone and Nora Ephron’s Heartburn
Long before Padma Lakshmi ever stepped onto a television set, she learned that how we eat is an extension of how we love, how we comfort, how we forge a sense of home—and how we taste the world as we navigate our way through it. Shuttling between continents as a child, she lived a life of dislocation that would become habit as an adult, never quite at home in the world. And yet, through all her travels, her favorite food remained the simple rice she first ate sitting on the cool floor of her grandmother’s kitchen in South India.
Poignant and surprising, Love, Loss, and What We Ate is Lakshmi’s extraordinary account of her journey from that humble kitchen, ruled by ferocious and unforgettable women, to the judges’ table of Top Chef and beyond. It chronicles the fierce devotion of the remarkable people who shaped her along the way, from her headstrong mother who flouted conservative Indian convention to make a life in New York, to her Brahmin grandfather—a brilliant engineer with an irrepressible sweet tooth—to the man seemingly wrong for her in every way who proved to be her truest ally. A memoir rich with sensual prose and punctuated with evocative recipes, it is alive with the scents, tastes, and textures of a life that spans complex geographies both internal and external.
Love, Loss, and What We Ate is an intimate and unexpected story of food and family—both the ones we are born to and the ones we create—and their enduring legacies.
Recommended by Jaslin Kaur: “I love Padma so much. I grew up watching her on Top Chef and recently read her autobiography. It made me cry on my flight.”
“The Covenant of Water” by Abraham Verghese
Synopsis: An instant New York Times and indie bestseller and an Oprah Book Club Pick, The Covenant of Water has sold more than two million copies worldwide and was widely named as a best book of the year. Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, Abraham Verghese’s long-awaited, masterful novel follows three generations of a Christian family in Kerala, South India, that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning. As the novel opens, a twelve-year-old girl is sent by boat to her wedding, where she meets her husband for the first time. She joins a prosperous household and becomes known as Big Ammachi, the matriarch of an extraordinary family that will endure hardship, celebrate triumph, and witness unthinkable changes over the coming decades. An exquisite modern classic finally available in paperback, The Covenant of Water is an unforgettable and stunning epic of love, faith, and medicine.
Recommended by Alekhya Chaparala: “I thought it was just amazing storytelling.”
“Trick Mirror” by Jia Tolentino
Synopsis: Jia Tolentino is a peerless voice of her generation, tackling the conflicts, contradictions, and sea changes that define us and our time. Now, in this dazzling collection of nine entirely original essays, written with a rare combination of give and sharpness, wit and fearlessness, she delves into the forces that warp our vision, demonstrating an unparalleled stylistic potency and critical dexterity.
Trick Mirror is an enlightening, unforgettable trip through the river of self-delusion that surges just beneath the surface of our lives. This is a book about the incentives that shape us, and about how hard it is to see ourselves clearly through a culture that revolves around the self. In each essay, Tolentino writes about a cultural prism: the rise of the nightmare social internet; the advent of scamming as the definitive millennial ethos; the literary heroine’s journey from brave to blank to bitter; the punitive dream of optimization, which insists that everything, including our bodies, should become more efficient and beautiful until we die. Gleaming with Tolentino’s sense of humor and capacity to elucidate the impossibly complex in an instant, and marked by her desire to treat the reader with profound honesty, Trick Mirror is an instant classic of the worst decade yet.
Recommended by Samantha Ng.
“Everything We Never Had” by Randy Ribay
Synopsis: Watsonville, 1930. Francisco Maghabol barely ekes out a living in the fields of California. As he spends what little money he earns at dance halls and faces increasing violence from white men in town, Francisco wonders if he should’ve never left the Philippines.
Stockton, 1965. Between school days full of prejudice from white students and teachers and night shifts working at his aunt’s restaurant, Emil refuses to follow in the footsteps of his labor organizer father, Francisco. He’s going to make it in this country no matter what or who he has to leave behind.
Denver, 1983. Chris is determined to prove that his overbearing father, Emil, can’t control him. However, when a missed assignment on “ancestral history” sends Chris off the football team and into the library, he discovers a desire to know more about Filipino history―even if his father dismisses his interest as un-American and unimportant.
Philadelphia, 2020. Enzo struggles to keep his anxiety in check as a global pandemic breaks out and his abrasive grandfather moves in. While tensions are high between his dad and his lolo, Enzo’s daily walks with Lolo Emil have him wondering if maybe he can help bridge their decades-long rift.
Told in multiple perspectives, Everything We Never Had unfolds like a beautifully crafted nesting doll, where each Maghabol boy forges his own path amid heavy family and societal expectations, passing down his flaws, values, and virtues to the next generation, until it’s up to Enzo to see how he can braid all these strands and men together.
Recommended by Maria Manalac: “It gave me the feels . . . As someone who’s a 1.5-generation Filipino American who’s had similar generational differences.”
Movies & TV
Michelle Sugihara: “Ah, so, so many. Please watch everything when it comes out. Ticket sales and viewership numbers are incredibly important indicators for getting more films and shows greenlit.”
Who Killed Vincent Chin? (dir. Christine Choy & Renee Tajima-Peña)
Synopsis: Vincent Chin, a successful engineer living out his dream of designing automobiles in Detroit, meets an unexpected and violent end when he is assaulted and killed by two men in the summer of 1982, following an altercation at a bar. Despite their bloody crime, the assailants initially receive lenient sentences due to a plea bargain. The troubling outcome of the case outrages civil rights advocates, who fight for justice and struggle to prove that Chin's attackers had racist motivations.
Recommended by Meloddy Gao
Better Luck tomorrow (dir. Justin Lin)
Synopsis: An accomplished high school student, Ben (Parry Shen) seems to excel at almost everything except winning over his dream girl, Stephanie (Karin Anna Cheung). When he begins an unlikely friendship with trouble-seeking tough guy Daric (Roger Fan), Ben becomes involved in petty crime that gets increasingly dangerous, with his various illegal ventures extending to include Stephanie and her wealthy beau, Steve (John Cho). Can these restless teens curb their criminal activities before it's too late?
Recommended by Matthew Noerper: “While it was a bit over the top, it conveyed pressures faced by Asian American students within the context of a very American narrative. It did a good job at conveying a certain angst within a certain overachieving demographic and their lack of healthy coping mechanisms to dealing with it. At the same time, it avoided an inessant degree of ‘naval gazing,’ and really focused on pressures that could be faced by any community—only to perhaps a magnified degree. It was dark, to be sure, but also entertaining in the way that a movie should be.”
Everything Everywhere All at Once (dir. The Daniels)
Synopsis: Directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, collectively known as Daniels, the film is a hilarious and big-hearted sci-fi action adventure about an exhausted Chinese American woman (Michelle Yeoh) who can't seem to finish her taxes.
Andrew Peng: “I remember going to an advanced A24 screening of the film, provided through OCA, and didn’t know what to make of it from the promotional graphics. Once I actually watched it, I knew I had to rewatch and cried after I truly understood its central message.”
Minding the Gap (dir. Bing Liu)
Synopsis: Three young men bond together to escape volatile families in their Rust Belt hometown. As they face adult responsibilities, unexpected revelations threaten their decade-long friendship.
Amelia Lagna: “It’s one of my favorite movies of all time; it’s in my top four. I saw it in an empty theatre in Chicago—they were doing a re-release—and I was literally the only person there. But I cried, I enjoyed it, it was great.”
Beef (created by Lee Sung Jin)
Synopsis: Two strangers get into a road rage incident that brings chaos into their lives.
Shawn Jain: “It’s phenomenal, just so cool. I’m not Korean American but it transcends that.”
Music
Thuy (Singer)
Recommended by Caroline Buaron and Linh Truong
Raveena (Singer)
Recommended by Christian Phomsouvanh: “She’s a pretty amazing artist. Her visuals, sounds, sonically.”
Ruby Ibarra (Rapper)
Recommended by Daniel Hoddinott: “She’s a Filipina spoken word hip-hop artist in California. She’s one of the top artists on my gym playlist that I listen to every day.”
“Dear Billy” (Song by Spawnbreezie)
Recommended by Marina Aina: “[This] was the first Pacific Islander reggae song I distinctly remember hearing and going, Oh, I really like this song, let me find out the name of it.”
Misc.
Center for Asian American Media (Nonprofit)
Muttika Chaturabul: “They host a film festival every year [CAAMFest] for small films, not ones in Hollywood, from Asian American artists. It’s one of my favorites because it gives exposure for smaller Asian American artists.”
Gold House (Nonprofit)
Crystal Chiu: “They put out a newsletter that’s called ‘Renegade.’ And I would highly recommend anyone to subscribe to that. They have their finger on the pulse of what, who in any industry of art and culture and business are doing.”
Terisa Siagatonu (Poet)
Fine Tuitupou: “She writes a lot of poetry that brings to light a lot of issues in the PI community. She has this one piece about being scared that she’s not able to come back to Samoa because of climate change.”