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In her 2016 memoir, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa travels to Tibet after a lifetime away. As a refugee, Dhompa has lived in Nepal, India, and San Francisco, but it is her return that leads her to consider what home means to an exile—it is the center of loss, rediscovery, and reclamation.
Qiu was daring enough to be the first to portray queer relationships in Asian literature, and her first novel has become something of a cult classic due to its transgressive nature. Its literary merit does not, however, merely rest on its ground-breaking laurels.
Questions about “ethnic literature,” its place, and its limits permeate Nam Le’s 2008 short story collection. As he interrogates the term as a sweeping generalization for many kinds of writing, he also explores the conflict around what it means to be Vietnamese and a writer but not necessarily a Vietnamese writer.
Eileen Chang’s stories portray love as having a dual nature, often experienced as hot or cold, and they reveal what can happen as people navigate these opposing forces
The stories of ZZ Packer’s 2003 collection often feature characters in new environments, struggling to navigate their changed surroundings; travel pervades the book, but its pieces refute fantasies in favor of more complex realities of what can happen on a journey.
In 2010, Wes Moore published his memoir, a unique take on the genre that recounts his history with another Wes Moore. In it, he offers a truthful portrait of his life and the “other” Moore’s, showing as he does so the impact that role models and support can have on a person’s path.
The problematic nature of evictions has come to greater prominence in recent weeks. Such attention is gratifying and long overdue, and in this context, Matthew Desmond’s 2016 book offers an important example of how writing can speak on complex social problems while being respectful of the subject matter and never losing sight of what matters.
When telling stories of his patients, Oliver Sacks is clinical while also remaining deeply compassionate in his approach. His dual perspective allows him to see both patient and person, and treatment is never the end of the story.
I am inevitably an outsider to the worlds McPherson wrote about and can only understand them as such, but for me his writing cut across race, culture, age, and geography to reach the most ignorant of audiences, and to show me what a real “masterpiece” looked like.
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