What We Are Reading in December and January

In Diana Xin’s debut short story collection, a ghost is passed across three generations of women as they navigate unspoken regrets and unfulfilled desires. Teen girls grapple with grief as they face the end of childhood and other losses. Young lovers confront the future while old lovers excavate the past. Mothers and daughters perceive each other in new ways as time reshapes their relationship.  

Across different stages of life, women strain against the expectations that rule their lives with quiet rebellion. Together, their voices resist erasure, tracing how women hold themselves and each other intact. When the characters step off the page, they do so with defiance, laughing and raging as they slip beyond reach.

Mainstream American Buddhism is often portrayed through a narrow, problematic, white-centric lens. This is Buddhism made passive and patriarchal, scrubbed of the rich complexities, myriad expressions, historical nuances, and creative ways of being that embody feminist Asian American Buddhism.

In this book, editor Sharon A. Suh, Ph.D., presents the writings of 11 Asian American women who are reclaiming a vibrant feminist dharma against whitewashing, patriarchy, and model-minority stereotypes. Each essay questions dominant narratives, wrestles with ambivalence and authenticity, or explores creative expressions of Buddhist spirituality. Together, writers offer an invitation into the anxieties, joys, struggles, disavowals, and desires that shape their relationship to the dharma — and they expand the category of Buddhist life and practice in a timely, necessary reclamation.

In 1952, Toy Len Goon, a Chinese immigrant widow who raised eight children while running their family laundry, was selected as U.S. Mother of the Year by the American Mother’s Committee of the Golden Rule Foundation. Author Andrea Louie argues that Goon was chosen because she was a Chinese American woman who could exemplify both the virtues of mothering and of American upward mobility — a perception that can only be understood within the context of shifting representations of Chinese Americans during the Cold War era. 

Drawing upon immigration records, interviews, and secondary sources, as well as her positionality as Toy Len Goon’s granddaughter, Louie tells an expanded version of Goon’s life story. Ultimately, this book addresses themes of migration, gender, racialization, Americanization, and “success” through the evolving lens of the model minority myth.

The year is 1843. Ishmaelle is born in a small village where she grows up swimming with dolphins. After her parents and infant sister die, her brother, Joseph, leaves to find work as a sailor. Abandoned and desperate for a life at sea, Ishmaelle disguises herself as a cabin boy and travels to New York.

Years later, as the American Civil War breaks out, Ishmaelle boards the Nimrod, a whaling ship led by Captain Seneca, a free Black man haunted by a tragic past. Here, she finds protectors amidst the bloody violence of whaling and discovers a mysterious bond between herself and the white whale who claimed Seneca’s leg.

Built on the bones of Melville’s classic, “Call Me Ishmaelle” is imbued with a diverse, swashbuckling crew — from a Polynesian harpooner to a Taoist Monk — and a powerful exploration of human nature, gender, man’s place among animals, and the nature of home.

During a time when Tibet is closed to Europeans, Britain begins training Indians — permitted to cross borders that white men may not — to undertake illicit, dangerous surveying expeditions into Tibet. Balram is one such surveyor-spy who has worked for the British. Sadly, his friend Gyan went missing on his last expedition and is rumored to be imprisoned within Tibet. 

Desperate to rescue his friend, Balram agrees to guide an English captain on a mission of disguising himself as a monk and charting a river. Their path will cross Katherine, disguised as a man, who aims to be the first European woman to reach Lhasa.

As they make their way into Tibet, they will face storms and bandits, snow leopards and soldiers, fevers and frostbite. What’s more, they will have to battle their own doubts, ambitions, grief, and pasts in order to survive the treacherous landscape.

Orphaned as a little boy and fending for himself in the streets, Yazid rises to a place of responsibility and respect in the household of Colonel Atar, a powerful industrialist and politician. There, he finds that position threatened by conflicting loyalties and misplaced trust. 

Born on Colonel Atar’s country estate to a poor gardener, Saqib is managing a pioneering business, but he overreaches and finds himself an outlaw, confronting the violence of the corrupt Punjab Police. Meanwhile, the colonel’s son competes with his cherished brother for the love of a woman and discovers that her choice colors his life with unexpected darkness as well as light.

The Creel sisters, Georgie Ayyar and Agatha Krishna, welcome their aunt, uncle and young cousin — newly arrived from India — into their house in rural Wyoming where they’ll all live together. Because this is what families do. That is, until the sisters decide that it’s time for their uncle to die.

Through the lens of a cheeky, unflinching teen, Georgie details the violence in their home, her once-unshakeable bond with Agatha Krishna, and her understanding of herself as an Indian American in the heart of the West. As a result, the book presents an unexpected powerful meditation on history and language, trauma and healing, and the meaning of independence, through the guise of a murder mystery and playful ode to the ’80s.

Qianze has not seen her father in 11 years, but then she gets a call — there is a man on the porch of her childhood home asking for her. This man isn’t the Ba Qianze remembers: This man is much older, more fragile, and worst of all, haunted by a half-forgotten prophecy.

While Qianze wrestles with what she owes this near-stranger, Ba begins telling stories of his past. Qianze has always longed to know more about her family history, but as Ba reveals a past far darker than she could have imagined, she is plagued by strange visions — fox spirits trail her on her evening commute, a terrifying jackalope stalks her nightmares, and a looming prophecy slinks ever closer.Spanning decades and continents, the novel employs a combination of stunningly rendered folklore and atmospheric prose to examine the legacy of colonialism through the eyes of three generations.