In college, I studied English, because I like to read and get lost in stories. It was not until I took a class called "Asian American Literature" with Dr. Roberta Wolfson in the winter of my sophomore year that I learned I could be represented in the stories I read in class curricula. Growing up in the American public school system, the books I read were rarely written by Asian-Americans. This trend also presented itself in my major classes, but I had no idea that there was more to reading and being educated in literature than just reading “the classics.” Cathy Park Hong sums up this feeling to a tee in her book Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning: 

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“That meant that not only must I cathect myself to the entitled white protagonist but then  mourn for the loss of his precious childhood as if it were my own in overrated classics like  Catcher in the Rye. My ninth-grade teacher told us that we would all fall in love with Catcher in  the Rye. I kept waiting to fall in love with Salinger’s cramped, desultory writing until I was  annoyed” (Hong 69). 

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Expecting students of color to read books like Catcher in the Rye, and then not giving them anything to relate to is unfair. In my Asian-American Literature class, I read plays, novels, poems, and short stories by Asian-Americans who looked like me, struggled like me, and simply wanted to be seen, like me. I made this website to amplify these works that opened me to a whole new world. My hope is that other Asian-Americans can find books that speak to their experiences, and maybe even encourage them to fall in love with these stories as much as I did.

As I continued to work on this project over the course of 2020 and 2021, I found that I wanted to make an accessible and useful resource for anyone who also wants to learn about the genre of Asian American Literature. Through my research, I found that there is not a shortage of Asian American literature, but rather it's just not given the proper platforms to be discussed and shared widely. I plan to commit to making sure Asian-American literature, as well as other BIPOC literature, has a space on every shelf and syllabus.