Special Collections
National Education Association's Asian American Booklist
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Vatsana's Lucky New Year
by Sara GogolTorn between Laotian and American cultures, twelve-year-old Vatsana faces prejudice from a boy at school as she helps her newly arrived Laotian cousin adjust to life in Portland, Oregon.
When the Circus Came to Town
by Laurence YepAn Asian cook and a Chinese New Year celebration help a ten-year-old girl at a Montana stage coach station to regain her confidence after smallpox scars her face.
When the Emperor Was Divine
by Julie OtsukaThe debut novel from the PEN/Faulkner Award Winning Author of The Buddha in the AtticOn a sunny day in Berkeley, California, in 1942, a woman sees a sign in a post office window, returns to her home, and matter-of-factly begins to pack her family's possessions. Like thousands of other Japanese Americans they have been reclassified, virtually overnight, as enemy aliens and are about to be uprooted from their home and sent to a dusty internment camp in the Utah desert. In this lean and devastatingly evocative first novel, Julie Otsuka tells their story from five flawlessly realized points of view and conveys the exact emotional texture of their experience: the thin-walled barracks and barbed-wire fences, the omnipresent fear and loneliness, the unheralded feats of heroism. When the Emperor Was Divine is a work of enormous power that makes a shameful episode of our history as immediate as today's headlines.
Willie Wins
by Almira Astudillo GillesWillie's father tells him there is something special in an old coconut bank brought from the Philippines, but Willie is embarrassed to take it to school for a contest, especially since he knows that one of his classmates will make fun of him.
Year of Impossible Goodbyes
by Sook Nyul ChoiA young Korean girl survives the oppressive Japanese and Russian occupation of North Korea during the 1940s, to later escape to freedom in South Korea.
Yell-Oh Girls! Emerging Voices Explore Culture, Identity, and Growing Up Asian American
by Vickie NamThe collection includes 80 brief selections (most are under three pages) by budding writers between 15 and 22 years of age, from all over the country.