Nicole’s Book Club: Her Favorite Books by Asian-American authors

• Learn more about the identity theft and discover the underbelly of the publishing industry in “Yellowface” by R.F. Kuang.
• Traverse the hills of China with Li-yan in “The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane” by Lisa See
• Get a glimpse into Seoul’s high-pressure beauty standards through “If I Had Your Face” by Frances Cha. 
• Journey along with Sadie and Sam inside the gaming industry in “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” by Gabrielle Zevin. 
• Explore the fascinating lives of female divers, haenyeo, in “The Mermaid from Jeju” by Sumi Hahn.

“I like to keep my reading list as diverse as possible. I will say one of the books I’m going to talk about talks about how white the publishing industry can be. And I often do find if I’m not intentional, I end up reading the popular books or the books that are being recommended, and I have to really take a step back, like, okay, who am I reading? What are the voices that I want to hear? And I feel like books are a big way that I learn about other cultures, other perspectives, other people.”

“I was never an avid video game player, but I definitely grew up playing Oregon Trail. That’s the way you say it in school, you know, like, I would go to the computer lab and do that. And so when I was listening to Gabrielle talk, she talked about how, you know, everybody who’s read the book always feels like they came from that era, like, that book was written for them. And then she said, if you did grow up playing the Oregon Trail in a computer lab, you are officially a geriatric gamer. And I was like, wow, okay, so I am officially a geriatric gamer.”

“In this book, I did want to just stick with a couple of the main characters. Like, Curie in particular was really fascinating, and it really wove them all together by the end. And I was pretty fascinated by this idea of the room salons, also the level of plastic surgery and the level of, you know, I feel like the beauty standards in Korea, which I’ve always heard about and known about. But this just gives a much deeper dive into it. And the story was really so well told. And I will say, at its heart, it’s really a story about friendship. And I do love books that talk about women and their friendship and their connection.”

NICOLE

Hello, powerful women. Welcome back to the School of Self-Worth. I’m your host, Nicole Tsong. So today for the podcast, I’m taking a little bit of a detour into the world of books. Now, if you know me, this is not an actual detour, but it’s a little bit of a detour for the podcast, but I thought I’d try something different and see how this goes for all of you.

So May is Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander Heritage Month, also known as AANHPI Heritage Month. Or you can also just call it AAPI month, and in celebration of Asian American culture and heritage, I decided I would actually go into this world that I live in all the time, which is the world of books. If you didn’t know it, I’m an avid reader and it’s really escalated. I will be sharing more about that in a bit. But like last year in 2023, my goal was to read. I think I started at 45 books, something like that, but I ended up reading 52 books last year, and that is my current goal again for 2024. So I read a lot. By the way, if you’re also on Goodreads, please come find me. I love to see what people are reading and trade ideas, and I just love that interaction and community there, so definitely come find me there. I love being with fellow reading friends, and I thought today it would be super fun to share with you some really incredible Asian American authors and books that I’ve read recently.

There’s no real container in terms of time for these books. These are just books that I’ve really enjoyed in the last year and a half or so, and I wanted to share with you what they are and why I love them as a way to celebrate these really incredible, creative minds, putting amazing work out into the world. So I’m going to be sharing that today. I’m going to share with you my Top 5. And if you’re an Asian American corporate leader who wants to learn my five hour workday system, and still be next in line for promotion, DM me five on Instagram. I’ve got something for you!

Okay, friends, let’s dig into book world.

Welcome to the School of Self-Worth, a podcast for ambitious women who know they are worthy of an astoundingly great life. Join us weekly as we get on the right side of your intuition, redefine success, and reclaim your self-worth. I’m your host, Nicole Tsong, an award-winning journalist who left it all behind to become a best-selling author of three books and work/life balance expert, helping ambitious women unlock their intuition and step into a life of fulfilment and radical joy. Every single week, I will bring you diverse and meaningful conversations with successful women from all walks of life who share insight about what it takes to be brave, joyful, and authentic every day.

Every episode is thoughtfully designed to leave you feeling empowered with tangible tips and advice that will lead you to your next breakthrough.

Hey, everybody. So I want to share a couple of things before I get into my top five books about me and reading, just to introduce you a little bit into this world of reading. So I used to be somebody who would read like, inconsistently is what I’d say. As a kid, I was like a crazy reader, and then when I had to read for college, I was a comparative literature major. I got really tired of reading, and so I actually had a long pause, I’d say for more than a decade, where I really didn’t read that much. But a vacation, I think about seven or eight years ago, really sparked the reading bug again for me, and I got into Goodreads challenges where I was reading books. I was averaging probably 25 books a year for a few years, and felt like I was reading quite a bit, and during that time, I was really mixing it up between nonfiction and fiction.

What I discovered over time, especially considering the work that I do, which is all about personal development and growth, I have found this works best for me, which is to mainly read fiction. It just gives me the spaciousness in my mind. I love being immersed in other people’s worlds. It’s so, so much fun for me. And if I want to read a self-development book, which I am often interested in, I do those on audio. But I am an old school paperback or hardback reader.

I don’t have a kindle, which means my luggage can be pretty heavy on vacation, when I’m carrying a few books. I’m a little old fashioned that way, but I just love reading a book in bed before I go to sleep. So those are things to know about my book reading habits. The other thing to know is that I actually mostly just get books from the library. I made a challenge for myself several years ago to only read from the library, instead of buying books. I think it probably happened after I had, like, purged a million books, and I just didn’t know what to do with all of them. Since then, that’s been my main MO. I just get books from the library.

Whenever I hear of a good book, I just pop it into my holds list and when that book shows up, I’m like, sweet, I’ve got a new book. So that’s one of the ways I keep getting new ideas for books, is whenever I hear one, as soon as someone recommends something, I put it into my library list. I also put it into Goodreads. I have a little bit harder time tracking on Goodreads, so I mostly track through my library reading holds list, and then I pretty much am constantly being blessed with huge mountains of books for the library.

If you’ve ever done this, you’ll know that it’s pretty inconsistent when those books actually come in, and then sometimes I’m just forced to read a little bit faster, and I have no guilt if I don’t read all the books I get from the library. I just return them. It’s not a big deal. So I don’t hang on to books. It’s the reason I’m not going to have any covers to really show you today. I’m just going to share with you what those books are. And lastly, actually, two more things. First, I’m not in any book clubs. Well, I will say this, I’m in a book club of one. I’m in a book club of my own making. It’s just me. I’m not in any book clubs. I know lots of you probably are in book clubs, but I’ve just never been in one or found one that feels like that’s worked for me, so I just read for myself. I read for fun and for pleasure. I have many friends who are big readers, and we talk a lot about books.

I’m in Seattle, and we are really lucky to have an incredible series called Seattle Arts and Lectures, which brings incredible authors from around the world to Seattle. So I love to go to those events with some of my friends, and that’s really the way I sort of sustain my book reading culture. I will also say, too, for today’s books, I also very intentionally look for AAPI and other BIPOC authors. I like to keep my reading list as diverse as possible. One of the books I’m going to talk about revolves around how white the publishing industry can be. And I often do find, if I’m not intentional, I end up reading the popular books or the books that are being recommended, and I have to really take a step back, like, okay, who am I reading? What are the voices that I want to hear? I feel like books are a big way that I learn about other cultures, other perspectives, other people.

I’m always so amazed by the worlds that authors create. I really recommend, if you are wanting to learn, I find fiction to be such a powerful place for learning. And you’ll see in the books that I share that you can really learn so much about other cultures through that. So without further ado, this book is in. This list is in no particular order. These are just the books I’ve read recently, ones that have resonated with me, and I highly recommend all of them for various reasons. Okay, so let’s get started. My first book on this list I’m going to share, is the one I most recently finished reading, and it’s ‘Yellow Face’ by RF Kwong.

So this book came out, I believe it was last year, and it was on all of the top lists for the year, and there is definitely a reason for that. This book is about a writer, a white woman, who steals the work of another author, who is Asian American, and it’s about this era in World War I where there were Chinese laborers in the war. So this Asian American author wrote it, and then she dies in a freak accident. Then Juniper, the narrator, steals the manuscript and then publishes it as if it’s her own. So this one is very uncomfortable. I was very uncomfortable. I actually really didn’t want to read this book, even though I saw it at the library all the time, and friends of mine were reading it.

I saw it on all the top recommended lists, and I was like, I just don’t know that I can do this, and it was the name ‘Yellowface’. It was the idea of reading about somebody who steals work from an Asian American author. It all made me highly uncomfortable. But one of my friends was like, no, it’s really, really worth it. You’ll read it so fast, it’s going to be worth it. When I was reading it, I was uncomfortable. This is not one of those books you’re going to read and feel relaxed and get swept up into the narrative. It’s highly uncomfortable. Although I feel like with most of the best books, there’s a constant narrative tension. This is just a different level of tension. The tension is, like, this person is kind of despicable. She’s making pretty horrible choices. She’s doing things that are pretty racist, and the publishing industry embraces this book from her, and she shoots to the top of all the bestseller lists, and she becomes the celebrity author that she’s always wanted to be, and you’re just like, at what cost to herself and to other people?

So Kwong does an incredible job drawing out sympathy for her, because there were times I actually felt sympathy for Juniper, and I was like, how can I feel sympathy for this person? She is crazy. She’s doing all these insane things, and yet it’s just really so well written and everybody else also around her is very morally ambiguous. I think it does a really remarkable job commenting on the state of the publishing industry, really skewering the industry for a lot of the things it’s doing in terms of representation. Also it just has richness and depth and commentary that is super powerful. I learned a lot about the publishing industry, and it was a really fascinating look into that side of the business. So it’s also really good if you’re interested in that, but it’s just that there is a lot of uncomfortableness. The kind of uncomfortable that I think is actually very powerful, so I really recommend ‘Yellowface’. What I’ll say is I didn’t like it, because I didn’t like the narrator, but I liked it because I thought it was a really remarkable book. So go read ‘Yellowface’ by RF Kwong!

The second book on my list, is ‘The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane’ by Lisa Si. Oh, this book is such a delight. I really love this book. It’s about the protagonist, Li Yan. She’s an Akka, which is an indigenous minority in China, and the Akka are the originators. They’ve always grown pu-erh tea, if you’ve heard of that. So this is really her story about basically growing up in the mountains in southwest China, which grows this kind of tea. Her life is really defined and immersed by the culture of tea and her family, and it’s really a coming of age tale that talks about this. She has a child out of wedlock, which becomes a key part of the story, and it’s all about her giving up the child because of many factors, the one-child policy in China, and also cultural morals at that time in the Akka culture.

It becomes a tale of both her and then her daughter, who was raised in California. and it’s really incredible. I learned so much about the Akka. I didn’t know much about that indigenous minority, and so I learned a lot about them. I learned so much about pu-erh tea and the development and rise of that whole business, then I learned so much about this person, this protagonist, Li Yan. She’s just so sympathetic, and you learn so much about her, and how she starts to make her way out of this tiny village, through education, to go live in other places. There’s this throughline of the maternal line and how powerful the maternal line is with her, her mother and her child. It’s just a really, truly, remarkable book. At the end, I was just like, wow, it’s incredible. So I could not recommend this one more either, in all the most beautiful ways.

Okay. I would be remiss if I did not put this book on the list. So here is number three. ‘Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow’ by Gabrielle Zevin. This book was a smash hit, so you may already have read this.

It came out in 2022, and I really love this book, so I wanted to put it back on the list. ‘Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow’ is about two protagonists, Sam and Sadie, who meet when they’re children, playing video games in a hospital, then they come together again much later in life. It’s really around the development of their relationship and their coming of age, while also about the development of the video game industry, because they track their age in the eighties, all the way through to the current day.

I was never an avid video game player, but I definitely grew up playing Oregon Trail. That’s the way you say it in school, you know, I would go to the computer lab and do that, so when I was listening to Gabrielle talk, she talked about how everybody who’s read the book always feel like the book, especially if they came from that era, was written for them. Then she said, if you did grow up playing the Oregon Trail in a computer lab, you are officially a geriatric gamer. And I was like, wow, okay, so I am officially a geriatric gamer. But, I mean, I love Sadie and Sam. The characters are so richly drawn, and Gabrielle shared about how she wrote this book during the pandemic, it was her 10th book, and she’d had some bestsellers and some flops. And then in this book, she really wrote it for herself, and I loved hearing her talk about that, because it just made her be like, “I don’t know if anyone’s going to be interested in this book?” And then she wrote such a remarkable book. It’s full of twists and unexpected turns. It takes you on the journey through the world of video game development. You get so attached to the characters, and it’s funny, I never thought I would care about video game development because I don’t really play video games anymore. But this is it. She just got me. I was so fascinated by every step of this book.

I remember reading his through the holidays when I was with family, and everyone else was watching movies and doing other things, but I would just read this book because I was so wrapped up in it. And she does such a beautiful job illustrating the depth of relationship that is possible between two friends. I just seriously love this book. So if you have not read it, hands down, this still remains one of my top recommendations for people if they have not read a fiction book lately. Go read “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow’ by Gabrielle Zevin.

I’ll also throw in a little plug for ‘The Storied Life of A J Fikry’, which is another one of her books, about a bookseller on a tiny island in New England. Just throwing that in if you’re looking for another Gabrielle Zevon read. It’s very charming.

Number four on the list is, ‘If I Had Your Face’ by Francis Cha. This one is about four women in Seoul, Korea, trying to make their way in the world in a place that is really dominated by discussions, judgements about looks, and this world where there are salons that are catering to wealthy men. Also, there’s a lot about K-pop, which I’m also a big fan of.  So Curie is one of the main characters, and she’s someone who’s had a lot of plastic surgery, and has a job at a room salon where she entertains businessmen while they drink. So you learn a lot about that room salon business, and there are also three other women who are connected to her in various ways.

In this book, I want to just stick with a couple of the main characters. Curie, in particular, was really fascinating, and it really wove them all together by the end. I was pretty fascinated by this idea of the room salons, also the level of plastic surgery and the level of the beauty standards in Korea, which I’ve always heard about and known about. But this just gives a much deeper dive into it. And the story was really so well told. At its heart, it’s really a story about friendship, and I do love books that talk about women and their friendship and their connection. This book ultimately does a great job showing and depicting that. So, ‘If I Had Your Face’  by Frances Cha is also a really, really great book to read.

So the fifth book on my list that I’ll share is, ‘The Mermaid from Jeju’, by Sumi Hahn. I didn’t know anything about this, but it’s one of those really fun books about women divers in South Korea. Since I read this book, I feel like I’ve heard a lot more about them. But this book was the first time I really learned or understood anything about them, and this is about their story. So Junja, the main character, is a deep sea diver known as haenyeo. If I’m pronouncing that correctly, probably not. And so haenyeo are actually women deep sea divers based on Jeju island, outside of South Korea. It’s incredible. They are deep sea divers that collect and sell things from the sea, for people to eat, so this is really a story about a bit of the history of the haenyeo. It’s something that’s handed down generationally with the women. Junja learned from her mother, so this is really her story about her family. She actually loses her mother to the waves while she’s diving, and then it’s really about her evolution, her relationship with her grandmother, and then what she goes through when war comes to the island, and the US troops arrive.

The timeline in this one is interesting. There’s some storytelling in the current day and from the perspective of her husband, so obviously things happened and worked out, because she’s much older in some of those narrative flashbacks, but you also get a rich, deep dive into history. And then I also felt the really compelling development of character. I cared about Junja. I wanted to know what was going to happen to her. She was really strong in so many different ways. I loved that physical strength of hers from being a diver, and the internal strength that she shows as she navigates relationships, marriages, war, and all of those pieces. So if you’re interested in learning a little bit more about that culture and just love a really strong narrative tale, ‘The Mermaid from Jeju’,  was a super great read.

Those are my five recommendations from Asian American Pacific Islander authors that I’ve really enjoyed. What I would love to hear from all of you, is if you have any additional recommendations, or if you’ve actually read any of these books and really enjoyed them? If you have, I want you to just DM me on Instagram @ NicoleTsong. I would love to feel like I’m in a little bit of a mini book club with all of you, hearing about your recommendations, the books that you’ve really enjoyed, and what you’ve enjoyed about those stories. Send them to me. I am literally always looking for book recommendations, so send those to me in my DM’s.

Also, if you enjoyed this, I would love to pop in and share some more about books, at any time. I literally am reading all the time. I love talking about books. It’s one of my favorite topics. Just ask anyone in my life week, I can talk about books literally, endlessly, forever. So if you want to chat with me about books, DM me on Instagram @ Let’s talk about books, and thank you all so much for listening today. I’m so grateful that you are sticking with me all the way through to the end.

Alright, I will see you all next time. Thank you so much for tuning into today’s episode. Before you go, don’t forget, if you are a high-achieving woman who wants to uncover your biggest blind spots preventing fast intuitive decisions, I’ve got a 72-second assessment for you, so make sure to DM me QUIZ @ nicoletsong on Instagram, and thank you for being here and for listening. We read every note that we get from you about how the podcast is making a difference in your life. Please know how much we appreciate each and every one of you.

Until next time. I’m Nicole Tsong, and this is the School of Self-Worth.