Asian-American writers

Who would you recommend in the canon? South Asian? Chinese? Japanese? Filipino? Too many years have gone by without spotlighting Asian-American writers.

Correction: ALL OF ASIA. MIDDLE EAST and INDIAN SUBCONTIENT and others above.

Can't say that I have a LOT of Asian-American writers in my collection (my bad), but of the ones I DO have, more than a few probably don't meet the "age criteria" that David once mentioned (I put that in quotes, because it is obviously malleable, depending on the whim of the board members, and perhaps copyright issues -- I've seen authors in LOA who fell outside the "parameters" being kept to at one time or another -- more than a few of the writers _I_ would include likely fall outside the current age limit. Also, keep in mind, that "Asian" covers a lot more than listed above, since it refers to the continent:

Jhumpa Lahiri: author of THE NAMESAKE, INTERPRETER OF MALADIES, and quite a few others (and recipient of just a LOT of literary awards).

Amy Tan: THE JOY LUCK CLUB, SAVING FISH FROM DROWNING (yeah, she's mostly known because of popular success, but she's a good writer, too)

Ai Ogawa -- she was a poet: THE KILLING FLOOR, THE COLLECTED POEMS OF AI;. "Only" half Japanese, but the rest of her lineage includes Native American and African-American, so they probably wouldn't judge her too harshly.

Ted Chiang: He's a slow, deliberate writer who has only published two collections STORIES OF YOUR LIFE & OTHERS, and EXHALATION. But, damn! Like Ursula K. Le Guin, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison and a very others, he's one of the few "genre" writers who has had a tale or two included in either the O.Henry Awards collections or the Best American Short Stories Anthologies.

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The rest, like Chiang, seem to fall into the genre category, but...they are
VERY good writers:

Aliette de Bodard: She's "categorized" as being of American and French descent, but her ancestors include Vietnamese. And her Xuya Universe novellas and stories not only win genre awards with regularity (Nebula, Hugo, etc.) they are VERY enjoyable to read! :)

William F. Wu -- although he has done plenty of "work for hire" (gotta earn a buck), Wu's Jack Hong short stories (and even a YA novel, HONG ON THE RANGE) are not only terrific comedic fiction, they are quite revealing when dealing with the lives of Chinese men and women in the old west. (He's also written more than a few other genre stories with an "Asian viewpoint").

Ha Jin: Waiting among other works

Meng Jin: Little Gods

Gish Jen: primarily short stories including the collection Who's Irish?

Kevin Kwan: Crazy Rich Asians et al

What about a volume collecting the novels, poems and plays by Asian-American writer H.T. Tisang?
He was part of the Greenwich Village scene.
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/ht-tsiang-hanging-on-union-square-revi....

What a volume for early Arab-American writer Ameen Rihani? Arab world is part of Asia, so I will include him here. He's include in the Bloom volume on relgious poems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ameen_Rihani
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ameen_Rihani_bibliography

Came across this writer, Yu Lihua, in New York Times. Don't know anything about her writing. "She wrote primarily in Chinese, drawing on her experience as a Chinese émigré in postwar America." -- I don't know what work has been translated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yu_Lihua#Death

Definitely novelist Bharati Mukherjee.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bharati_Mukherjee

Maxine Hong Kingston, already in Everyman's Library. Frank Chinn.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. Anita Desai and Kiran Desai (I'm not sure if their connection with the US is sufficiently strong to be considered, although it is surely as strong as that of Lafcadio Hearn, who is already in the LOA main series).

Too bad that LOA does not extend its coverage to Canada (I've often wished that some outstanding Canadian writers could have been included, such as Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, and Farley Mowat, among others). In that case, Michael Ondaatje (Ceylanese) and Rohinton Mistry (Indian) would have been strong contenders as Asian-American writers.

euphorb -- If you're gonna lobby for outstanding Canadian writers' inclusion into the LOA, you HAVE to include John Irving. :)

Hisei Yamamoto. Memoirs of Japanese American incarceration could be a volume, including Sone’s Nisei Daughter, Houston’s Farewell to Manzanar, and Uchida’s Desert Exile. Perhaps with Okada’s novel No No Boy.

>10 bsc20:
A volume about the Japanese-American incarceration would be a great idea, perhaps coupled with photographs by Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange (both of whom published books of photographs documenting this sad event).

>12 euphorb:
And Toyo Miyatake, who photographed while incarcerated.

Amazon just listed the publication date of the first main series volume by an Asian-American writer:

Amazon is now showing a publication date for Maxine Hong Kingston: The Woman Warrior, China Men, Tripmaster Monkey, Other Writings (LOA #355). March 29, 2022. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1598537245/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=library+of....

Here's the writeup:

In one volume for the first time, three books that together form a bold, groundbreaking retelling of our national story by a great American writer, starting from her experience as the daughter of Chinese immigrants

The child of Chinese immigrants, Maxine Hong Kingston grew up in California and was an unknown writer living in Hawaii when she made her stunning entrance on the American literary scene with The Woman Warrior (1976). Her “memoirs of a childhood among ghosts” was not only an account of growing up poor and Chinese American in the San Joaquin Valley but also an audacious feat of imaginative transformation, drawing on ancient myths and the family stories her mother brought over from China.

A companion to The Woman Warrior, which she called her “mother-book,” Kingston’s “father-book” China Men (1980) spreads out across a large geographical and historical canvas to envision the lives of her male relatives who immigrated to America. Taken together, The Woman Warrior and China Men offer a profound, kaleidoscopic, genre-defying narrative of the American experience.

Kingston's third book, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1990), is the wildly inventive story of Wittman Ah Sing, a Berkeley graduate student whose experience of the San Francisco Beat scene transforms his understanding of his own Chinese heritage.

Rounding out the volume are a series of essays from 1978 reflecting on her life in Hawaii, later collected as Hawai‘i One Summer, personal musings whose subjects range from the contentions of a conference of Asian American writers to home-buying, surfing, and the work of the Beat poet Lew Welch. Also included are hard-to-find essays about the creative process and Kingston’s exasperated, insightful account of how most of the reviewers of The Woman Warrior fell prey to lazy stereotypes about the “exotic” and “inscrutable” East.