Books like American Born Chinese
Three stories that seem unrelated, about Jin Wang, the only Chinese-American boy at his new school, the Monkey King of Chinese legend, and a white teenager shamed by visits from a cousin who is a walking stereotype, come together in a story about identity.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of American Born Chinese
Dragon Hoops
Cartoonist Gene Luen Yang follows his Oakland high school's varsity basketball team through a season and finds the national history of the sport inside it.
Interior Chinatown
A background actor in a Chinatown cop show realises his entire life has been scripted by stereotypes, and breaks the fourth wall to rewrite his story.
Dear Martin
Justyce McAllister, a Black honour student at a mostly white Atlanta prep school, is handcuffed by a police officer while trying to help his drunk ex-girlfriend, and starts writing letters to Martin Luther King Jr. to work out how to live by his teachings.
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Arnold Spirit Jr., a budding cartoonist growing up poor on the Spokane Indian Reservation, decides to transfer to the all-white farm-town high school twenty-two miles away, where the only other Indian is the school mascot.
I Am Not Sidney Poitier
A young Black man named Not Sidney Poitier, raised with a fortune and Ted Turner as guardian, stumbles through a life that keeps replaying the plots of Sidney Poitier's films.
Colored Television
Jane, a mixed-race novelist in Los Angeles, has spent ten years on a serious book about mixed-race America, and broke and house-sitting for a famous friend, she decides to try selling a television show instead.
Severance
As Shen Fever spreads, trapping its victims in endless repetitions of their old routines, Candace Chen keeps going to her job at a New York publisher, until she joins a band of survivors heading for a mysterious facility.
Ghost World
Enid Coleslaw and Rebecca Doppelmeyer, best friends who have just finished high school, kill the summer mocking the people and places of their nameless American town, while the future starts to pull them apart.
The Hate U Give
Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between the poor Black neighbourhood where she lives and the wealthy, mostly white prep school she attends, and when she sees a police officer shoot her unarmed childhood friend Khalil, everyone wants to know what she saw.
The Night Eaters: She Eats the Night
Thirty-year-old twin siblings in pandemic New York learn their Chinese-immigrant parents are not quite what their cooking-show manners suggest.
Roaming
Three college friends meet up for a spring-break week in New York and watch the triangle of their attention bend, crack, and set in a new shape.
True Biz
At the River Valley School for the Deaf, Charlie, a teenager whose cochlear implant has never worked well, arrives late in her schooling, February, the hearing headmistress, fights to keep the school open, and Austin, a student from a deaf family, faces change at home.