10 Asian American Memoirs Everyone Should Read in 2026
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Asian American memoirs have moved, in less than a decade, from a marginal genre into something closer to the center of American literary nonfiction. Hua Hsu’s Stay True won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list. Graphic memoirs by Mira Jacob and George Takei have reached audiences that traditional prose memoirs rarely touch. And underneath these breakout hits is a deeper bench of debut work (by Qian Julie Wang, Youngmi Mayer, Bianca Mabute-Louie, and others) that is reshaping what the form can do. Below are ten of the best Asian American memoirs worth reading right now, ranging from quiet coming-of-age stories to graphic memoirs to debut manifestos. Each one earns its place on the list. Start anywhere.
Stay True by Hua Hsu
Stay True by Hua Hsu, the 2022 memoir that won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It is a coming-of-age story about the friendship between Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants making zines and haunting Bay Area record shops, and Ken, a Japanese American frat brother whose passion for Dave Matthews represented everything Hua defined himself in opposition to. Ken is killed in a carjacking in 1998. The book is what Hua, now a New Yorker staff writer, made out of the grief twenty years later. The New York Times called it one of the 100 best books of the 21st century. Buy on Bookshop.
Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner is the memoir that made the genre legible to a mainstream audience. Zauner (better known as the musician behind Japanese Breakfast) wrote the book in the aftermath of her mother’s death from cancer, organizing the chapters around food: the Korean dishes her mother cooked, the ones Zauner learned to cook after she was gone, the H Mart grocery aisles where Korean American identity gets transmitted through ingredients. It became a runaway bestseller and is now being adapted into a film. Buy on Bookshop.
Good Talk by Mira Jacob
Good Talk by Mira Jacob takes the form of conversations (between Jacob and her young son, between Jacob and her white in-laws, between Jacob and herself across decades) rendered in pen-and-ink illustrations placed against photographic backgrounds. The framing question is what to tell a six-year-old half-Indian, half-Jewish son about America in 2016. The answers are honest, funny, and devastating. Named one of the ten best books of the year by Chicago Tribune, the New York Public Library, and Publishers Weekly. Buy on Bookshop.
Beautiful Country by Qian Julie Wang
Beautiful Country by Qian Julie Wang is a memoir of growing up undocumented in New York City in the 1990s, after Wang’s family fled persecution in China. The book reconstructs childhood from the inside of a child’s worldview (the food insecurity, the sweatshop work, the constant background fear) without ever softening for an adult audience. Wang is now a civil rights attorney. The memoir was a New York Times bestseller. Buy on Bookshop.
They Called Us Enemy by George Takei
They Called Us Enemy by George Takei is the graphic memoir of Takei’s childhood in Japanese American incarceration camps during World War II. Takei was four years old when his family was forced into the camps. The book reconstructs that experience for an audience that often does not know the history happened. It won the 2020 Asian Pacific American Award for Literature and the Eisner Award. Takei published a follow-up, It Rhymes With Takei, in 2025. Buy on Bookshop.
dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss by Mimi Khúc
dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss by Mimi Khúc, published by Duke University Press in 2024, is a hybrid of memoir, critical university studies, and disability studies, framed as letters to Khúc’s daughter Elia. It develops a new approach to mental health with a specific focus on Asian American communities, and won the Association for Asian American Studies 2026 Book Award for Outstanding Contribution in the Interdisciplinary category. Essential reading on Asian American mental health beyond the typical wellness frame. Buy on Bookshop.
I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying by Youngmi Mayer
I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying by Youngmi Mayer, the 2024 debut memoir by comedian and podcaster Youngmi Mayer. Mayer grew up biracial Korean American on Saipan and became a single mother in New York City, and her memoir is exactly as funny and as devastating as that combination suggests. The book moves between comic standup energy and material that is genuinely hard to read, often in the same paragraph. Buy on Bookshop.
Biting the Hand: Growing Up Asian in Black and White America by Julia Lee
Biting the Hand: Growing Up Asian in Black and White America by Julia Lee, published in 2023. Lee grew up in Los Angeles during the 1992 LA riots and the Korean-Black community tensions of that era, and her memoir places her childhood inside the racial dualism of American life. The book draws on Lee’s mentorship by scholars Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Jamaica Kincaid to think through what it means to be Asian American outside the Black-white frame that dominates American racial discourse. Buy on Bookshop.
The Body Papers by Grace Talusan
The Body Papers by Grace Talusan, the Filipino American memoir that won the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing and was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Talusan writes about being a Filipino immigrant, a survivor of cancer, and a survivor of childhood abuse, holding all three in the same frame without flinching from any of them. Buy on Bookshop.
Unassimilable by Bianca Mabute-Louie
Unassimilable by Bianca Mabute-Louie, the 2024 debut from a scholar-activist who grew up in Los Angeles’s San Gabriel Valley. The book is part manifesto, part memoir, dismantling the myth of assimilation in Asian American identity and arguing for a vision of community rooted in anti-imperialist, cross-racial solidarity. The most explicitly political book on this list, and one of the most interesting recent debuts in the genre. Buy on Bookshop.
Asian American Memoirs: One More Thing
This list intentionally skips some of the obvious classics (Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words, Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings) not because they don’t belong on a serious Asian American memoir list, but because they belong on a different one. The ten above are starting points for a reader who wants to understand what the genre is doing right now, in 2025 and 2026, rather than what it has done historically. If you want the historical canon, that’s a different piece, and we’ll be back with it. For now: pick one, read it, then come back for the next.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best Asian American memoir to start with?
If you’ve never read an Asian American memoir before, two reasonable starting points: Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner is the most accessible, organized around food and family in a way that requires no prior context. Stay True by Hua Hsu is the more literary entry point, quieter, more philosophical, and the one that recently won the Pulitzer Prize. Both work as introductions to the genre.
Are graphic memoirs as serious as prose memoirs?
The two graphic memoirs on this list (Mira Jacob’s Good Talk and George Takei’s They Called Us Enemy) have both been recognized as among the most important Asian American memoirs of recent years. Critical consensus has moved well past the assumption that graphic memoir is a lesser form. The medium just lets writers do certain kinds of emotional and historical work that prose alone can’t.
What Asian American memoirs are coming out in 2026?
Several major Asian American memoirs are scheduled for 2026, including new work from established writers and debut memoirs from younger voices. We’ve covered some of these in our roundup of Asian American Substacks worth reading, where writers like Katie Gee Salisbury and Ellie Yang Camp regularly preview forthcoming book projects. For the freshest pipeline, follow the writers themselves.
Where should I buy these books to support Asian American writers and independent bookstores?
Bookshop.org supports independent bookstores with every purchase, and most of the books on this list are available there. Local independent bookstores (particularly Asian American-owned ones) are even better when geography allows. Yu and Me Books in New York, Eastwind Books in Berkeley, and OOMA & Company in Los Angeles are good starting points if you have access to those cities.
