Hua Mulan is a legendary Chinese folk heroine from the Northern and Southern dynasties era of Chinese history. Scholars generally consider Mulan to be a fictional character. Hua Mulan is depicted in the Wu Shuang Pu by Jin Guliang.
Maxine Hong Kingston is an American novelist. She is a Professor Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, where she graduated with a BA in English in 1962. Kingston has written three novels and several works of non-fiction about the experiences of Chinese Americans.
Jade Snow Wong was a Chinese American ceramic artist and author of two memoirs. She was given the English name of Constance, also being known as Connie Wong Ong.
Winnifred Eaton was a Canadian author and screenwriter of Chinese-British ancestry. Publishing prolifically under a number of names, most predominantly, the pseudonym Onoto Watanna, she was one of the first North American writers of Asian descent to publish fiction in English.
Lois-Ann Yamanaka is an American poet and novelist from Hawaiʻi. Many of her literary works are written in Hawaiian Pidgin, and some of her writing has dealt with controversial ethnic issues. In particular, her works confront themes of Asian American families and the local culture of Hawaiʻi.
Frank Chin is an American author and playwright. He is considered to be one of the pioneers of Asian-American theatre.
Tsai Chin is a Chinese-British actress, singer, director, and teacher. Her career spans more than six decades and three continents.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim is an American writer of poetry, fiction, and criticism. She was both the first woman and the first Asian person to be awarded Commonwealth Poetry Prize for her first poetry collection, Crossing The Peninsula, which she published in 1980. In 1997, she received the American Book Award for her memoir, Among the White Moon Faces.
Ronyoung Kim, aka Kim Ronyoung, was the pen name of Gloria Hahn, a Korean American writer. She was born and raised to Korean immigrants in Los Angeles's Koreatown and died not long after finishing Clay Walls (1987), a Pulitzer Prize-nominated novel about a Korean family that leaves Japanese-occupied Korea in the 1920s to live in the United States that was "the first major novel to illustrate the experiences of Korean immigrants and Korean Americans in the United States".
Hisaye Yamamoto was an American author known for the short story collection Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories, first published in 1988. Her work confronts issues of the Japanese immigrant experience in America, the disconnect between first and second-generation immigrants, as well as the difficult role of women in society.
Marilyn Chin (陈美玲) is a prominent Chinese American poet, writer, activist, and feminist, as well as an editor and Professor of English. She is well-represented in major canonical anthologies and textbooks and her work is taught all over the world. Marilyn Chin's work is a frequent subject of academic research and literary criticism. Marilyn Chin has read her poetry at the Library of Congress.
Diana Chang was a Chinese American novelist and poet. She is best known for her novel The Frontiers of Love, one of the earliest novels by an Asian American woman. She is considered to be the first American-born Chinese to publish a novel in the United States.
Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book is the third book written by Maxine Hong Kingston, and was published in 1989. The story follows Wittman Ah Sing, an American graduate of University of California, Berkeley of Chinese ancestry in his adventures about San Francisco during the 1960s. Heavily influenced by the Beat movement, and exhibiting many prototypical features of postmodernism, the book retains numerous themes, such as ethnicity and prejudice, addressed in Kingston's other works. The novel is rampant with allusions to pop-culture and literature, especially the 16th century Chinese novel Journey to the West.
Chinese American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of Chinese descent. The genre began in the 19th century and flowered in the 20th with such authors as Sui Sin Far, Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Amy Tan.
Asian American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of Asian descent.
Nora Okja Keller is a Korean American author. Her 1997 breakthrough work of fiction, Comfort Woman, and her second book (2002), Fox Girl, focus on multigenerational trauma resulting from Korean women's experiences as sex slaves, euphemistically called comfort women, for Japanese and American troops during World War II and the ongoing Korean War.
Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers is a 1974 anthology by Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong, members of the Combined Asian American Resources Project (C.A.R.P.). It helped establish East Asian American literature as a field by recovering and collecting representative selections from Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino Americans from the past fifty years—many of whom had been mostly forgotten. This anthology included selections from Carlos Bulosan, Diana Chang, Louis Chu, Momoko Iko, Wallace Lin, Toshio Mori, John Okada, Oscar Peñaranda, Sam Tagatac, Hisaye Yamamoto, Wakako Yamauchi, many of whom are now staples in East Asian American literature courses. Because of this anthology and the work of C.A.R.P., many of these authors have been republished. At that time, however, they received little attention from publishers and critics because they did not subscribe to popular stereotypes but depicted what Elaine H. Kim calls the "unstereotyped aspects of Asian American experience". The "aiiieeeee!" of the title comes from a stereotypical expression used by East Asian characters in old movies, radio and television shows, comic books, etc. These same stereotypes affected the anthology itself: when the editors tried to find a publisher, they had to turn to a historically African-American press because, as Chin states:
The blacks were the first to take us seriously and sustained the spirit of many Asian American writers.... [I]t wasn't surprising to us that Howard University Press understood us and set out to publish our book with their first list. They liked our English we spoke [sic] and didn't accuse us of unwholesome literary devices.
The Chinaman Pacific and Frisco R.R. Co. is a 1988 short-story collection by Frank Chin that collects many of the short stories he had published in the 1970s. It won the American Book Award. The collection deals with Chinese-American history by recalling the work of early Chinese immigrants in such jobs as "coolie, railworker and launderer".
China Men is a 1980 collection of "stories" by Maxine Hong Kingston. It is a sequel to The Woman Warrior with a focus on the history of the men in Kingston's family. It won the 1981 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
Donald Duk is a coming-of-age novel written by Frank Chin, first published in February 1991. It is about an eleven-year-old boy turning twelve, completing a cycle of the Chinese zodiac, in San Francisco, and his struggles juggling cultures and growing into his name.
