Asian and Pacific American Heritage Month 2024 Overview

I have written before about the difficulty with titles, so for now I am calling it this and I will have the post titles show APAHM 2024, but they will not start with that.

I did a little blogging in 2023 specific to children's books and books that related to the death of Vincent Chin, but I have not done a full post on May reading since 2021. 

Most of the books to write about were read after that last post, but there is one book from 2019 that relates to the complication.

The Magical Language of Others by E.J. Koh

I am not going to write a lot about it at this time, but there was an issue where I kept remembering it by the name of another book that I intended to read, but had not yet at that time.

The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui

I realized (and this was taking shape more in 2022, due to some other books) that on my Asian-American heritage reading list, I had a lot of books about complicated relationships with parents. I had in mind that I would get the others read and see what I thought about those.

Then (still in 2022), I read some other books where people without Asian heritage also had complicated relationships with their parents.

I mean, the ratio of books that I intended to read on that topic still seemed to skew to more with Asian-American protagonists, but maybe families and growing up are just hard.

The other thing that's interesting there is that The Best We Could Do is a graphic novel. It fits the first category, but graphic novels are another category.

Most of the categories get blurred.

I have read a surprising amount of young adult books that relate to Asian American heritage, and there have been a few movies, but there are also three movies that are also young adult (and all from a book series, which is why I watched all three of them). 

At the end of the writing, I want to do a spotlight on George Takei, because he seems like a good bridge from Asian American heritage to Pride month reading. His work will include a children's book, a graphic novel, and at least one movie, fitting three other categories. However, his work also focuses on internment, which comes up in other children's and YA books.

There is a graphic novel as well as regular prose books about the refugee experience.

All of which is to say that this section of blogging may not be well organized. Or, maybe it will be well-organized, but the organization method may not be apparent.

Regardless, over the next few weeks you may find references to 11 children's books, 6 young adult books, 15 graphic novels, 17 movies, 6 books about refugees, 4 books about internment, at least 5 books about complicated parental relationships, and 13 books that don't fit any of those categories.

Maybe.

I am not positive on those numbers.

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